Saturday, July 1

Well, I'm back in Illinois (sadly) and back at work (even more sadly), but feel refreshed and excited about the weekend I had out west. Since there is so much to say, I'm going to blog each day on its own and then post it under that day to make things a little less confusing. So here we go....

I arrived in Seattle at 10pm on Friday night. Of course, the airport was madness, but Blom found me and we took off for Oregon. We drove for about three hours until we reached our campsite near Mt. Hood. It was 2am by the time we arrived (4am Chicago-time), so we quickly set up our tent near some giant trees and a rippling stream. The smell was one of the first things I noticed. We were nicely in the woods, and after spending the day in an office and then an airport and airplane, the fresh Oregon air was heaven to my nostrils. We quickly went to sleep, excited about the days ahead.

We woke around 6:30 on Saturday, had a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs and yogurt and then packed our bags for a day of skiing. We drove about half an hour up the side of Mt. Hood until we got to Timberline Lodge. The day was positively beautiful (this will be a theme throughout each of my days out west) with blue skies, no clouds, and views that pretty much made me wonder why it is people live in the Midwest. We rented skis and then headed for the snow. It really was quite an experience to be so warm while skiing. The bunnies were in spaghetti-strap tops, guys were skiing without their shirts, and shorts and t-shirts were commonplace. Most of Timberline in the summer is devoted to camps for skiers and snowboarders, but we still had great fun. I've said it before and I'll say it again now: skiing is my favorite athletic activity. It's physically challenging and most definitely a sport, but it is also very much an art and it appeals to the artistic side of me. I love the motion of skiing, gliding in half moons down the hill, and when I'm skiing, I also love the sound, the rhythmic pulsing of snow and ski. Of course, I had many good falls, and instead of watching for trees as one would expect, when you ski in the summer, you watch out for piles of dirt and rock that have lost their cover. And yes, I did meet with one of these dirt piles. Did it hurt? Yep. Was it worth it? Absolutely. You see, I'm not an expert skier, and the snow was more akin to, well, a long steep sheet of ice. Needless to say, it took me a while to adjust, and there were plenty of falls. As the day warmed up even more, it felt like we were skiing in a giant snowcone. For our one final run down the mountain, Blom and I decided we wanted to be as cool as everyone around us and took off our shirts. I was afraid I'd have one last wipe-out, but I made it down without a fall. Ah...it was fantastic, and not even the least bit chilly.

We then got rid of our skis, jumped in the car, went back to our campsite to pack up the tent, and then drove south for a few hours. We went through the forests, went through some desert (Oregon has just about everything when it comes to geology), and saw some marvelolus views of the mountain we were going to attempt to climb the next day. We finally entered the Three Sisters Wilderness in the Willamette National Forest and found a campsite right next to a little lake. We set up camp, built a fire, and had a nice little campers dinner. We were then exhausted from an evening of little sleep the night before and a day of skiing and knew we would be up early the next day, so I'm pretty sure we went to sleep around 8:30. No one said being rugged meant staying up past bedtime.