A Summer Recap

Social media is funny, and in truth, quite toxic. It’s easy to watch everyone out there look like they’re having fun all the time, living their best lives. Some of it is truth, some of it is projection, but more than anything, it’s a selective editing of what outsiders see about one’s life. Everybody on social media is sharing what they want the world to see.

I have grown quite tired of social media in general, and I think it is now an anchor around our necks, pulling our society down to the lowest common denominator, or far lower than that. At least, that’s how it feels to me. I tried out Twitter many years ago and hated it, and I’ve been on Facebook twice and deleted my account both times. TikTok feels foreign to me, and I have zero desire to watch people act like fools on video for attention.

And yet, I’m still on Instagram, and as much as it pains me sometimes, I still mostly enjoy it. What you see of me on Instagram is mostly hiking photos, and I am sure that most of you are here to see more of my adventures. So with that in mind, let me share a few with you!

When we last spoke, I shared a long post (broken into two parts) about our vacation to California at the end of June into July. Here’s a photo from that trip, of a series of glacial lakes below Mount Conness, just outside the eastern boundary of Yosemite National Park:

When we got back from our trip, I started training to hike around Glacier Peak with the Mazamas in August. It was going to be the longest and hardest backpacking trip I’d ever done, and I was looking forward to it. I started my training after our vacation with a long hike to Buck Peak from Lolo Pass, which ended up being almost 17 miles round-trip. I followed that with a long day hike to Jefferson Park via the newly-reopened Whitewater Trail. This was a long, hot day, but I really enjoyed it:

Way back in 1996, when I was a long-haired teenager, I took a photo of my stepdad at this very spot:

Sometime during the hike to Jefferson Park, I decided that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my first summer off of my adult life training myself past the point of exhaustion to do the Glacier Peak hike, and I decided that I’d rather spend more time relaxing. I know the whole social media thing about “getting it”, which is training to go do something epic, but let me be honest about this: I’ve already done plenty of epic things in my life. I began to feel like I was boxing myself in for the entirety of my summer. The planned loop around the mountain was to be done in 5 days, which meant covering 16-20 miles per day with 2,500 to 7,000 feet of elevation gain every single day. Ultimately, I decided that this was too much for me, and I let the dream go for another year.

Not long after, Wendy and I went up to the Mount Rainier area for a short but very fulfilling weekend of hiking. Our first hike was to Tatoosh Ridge, a legendary hike we’d never been able to do before. It was absolutely incredible:

This was a tough one! We gained 3,300 feet in only 3.6 miles to the top of the ridge, and much of this hike was very steep. But we made it. The view at the summit was absolutely incredible:

The next day we did the famous loop through Snowgrass Flats and Goat Lake in the Goat Rocks Wilderness. This is a long hike but a very beautiful one. It was Wendy’s first time in this area, and only my second. I’ll let the photos do the talking here:

All in all, that was an excellent trip, capped off with some delicious ice cream at the Ice Cream Airstream in Packwood.

The next week, I met up with Gene to hike to Paradise Park on Mount Hood. We set up a car shuttle so we could do the hike mostly downhill, and it was cool. There isn’t much to report about the hike that I haven’t talked about before (and in fact, I just did the hike again this past weekend as part of the Timberline Trail), but there was one cool thing:

How cool is that?

Later that week, Wendy and I visited Bird Creek Meadows on the east side of Mount Adams. This is one of my favorite hikes in the world and I am very grateful that the Yakama Nation open up their land for a few weeks in the summer so that the rest of us can visit. As of right now Bird Creek Meadows is open only until next weekend. The cost to visit is $20 per car, cash only.

We hiked through Bird Creek Meadows and then followed a steep user trail up to a viewpoint overlooking Iceberg Lake high on the slopes of Mount Adams. Again, I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

I always love going to Bird Creek Meadows. Let me know if you want to go next year!

We returned to Mount Adams a week later for a backpack to Foggy Flat on the north side of the mountain. You might have noticed already that I really love Mount Adams. I love this particular hike so much that I used it for the cover of my book PDX Hiking 365, which you can purchase directly from me if you would like to do so, at this link.

So anyway, it was fun to do this one again with friends. Once more, I’ll let the pictures do the talking:

I did a few more hikes in August but nothing on par with what I’d done the month before. At the end of August, I joined up with the Mazamas to help lead their annual Round The Mountain trek around Mount Hood. I’ll talk about this in a separate post soon, but here’s a selfie from this past weekend:

It’s the end of the summer now and I’m pretty tired, but I’m happy to have gone on so many adventures. Most of the time in between was spent reading, writing, drinking coffee, and taking a break from work. With summer almost over (I have under three weeks until Fall term starts), I’m heading off for one more adventure tomorrow to close out the summer. I don’t have any FOMO right now - it has mostly been an excellent summer. It wasn’t perfect, for sure, but it was pretty good. I’m glad that I had it off. I’ve needed it.

Summer is dead, long live summer - but bring on fall after this weekend!

Happy trails, until next time.