This weekend Kim planned a trip to Breitenbush Hot Springs. We did a native american sweat lodge on Thursday. That was an intense experience. I thought it would be more like a sauna, but I didn’t expect it to be so physically uncomfortable. I was uncomfortable because there were so many people crammed into such a small, dark, hot place for around 3 hours. The physical discomfort wasn’t all bad. In fact, I think that’s a large part of the experience since being uncomfortable forces you to be very present and in the moment.

We camped a few miles from the hot springs in the national forest since that was free, then returned Friday for a day of soaking in the hot waters. We soaked all morning, and then went for a hike to look for mushrooms in the afternoon. We had dinner at the lodge both nights, and the food is very good. It’s buffet style, so we ate a very light lunch so that we could eat more at dinner and because being stuffed while you’re in the hot pools wouldn’t be very goo.

All in all it was a very relaxing couple of days and a great birthday week. We should celebrate birthdays for a week more often :-)

Where did August and September go? I know where a lot of it went – marathon training. And now I’m done with that for a while and will get a big chunk of time in my life back. As of yesterday I’ve run a marathon. And boy do I hurt today. In training the farthest I ran was 20 miles. Turns out the last few miles of a marathon are the hardest. Who’d have thought? Seriously, after mile 23 I had to really focus just to keep my legs moving. I did it though, and it feels pretty good to have done it.

My parents and my brother came to Portland for the weekend, Kim took the day off work, and I saw them cheering me on a few times while I was running. Fortunately they only saw me when I was doing pretty well, which was around mile 20 and at the very end when only the adrenaline from the crowd and knowing I’d soon be done kept me going. I started out strong, got a little worried when I had to stop and tape some blisters around mile 6, picked up the pace from there all the way through mile 20 or so, and then started to hurt around mile 22.

The white stuff on my face is salt from sweat

I really don’t think I’ve felt quite like I felt past mile 23 before. Fortunately I had learned from my training runs how not to get too dehydrated or starving, but my muscles just wanted to shut down after a while despite being hydrated and eating enough liquid gold (honey and molasses). Every mile felt much longer than the one before, and I did in fact slow down quite a bit, but I persevered and crossed the finish line running. Once there I ate everything in site. Oh yeah, my time was 4 hours and 31 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes faster than I though I was going to do it, so I’m pretty pleased.

Everyone asks if I’ll do it again, and I’m definitely holding off on answering that for now. Certainly not anytime in the next few months. I’ll be glad to have such large chunks of time back for other stuff for a while.

Time to ask the obligatory question: has it been 10 years already? Fortunately for our class, our senior class president Carey Sauer was totally on top of the organization, so we had an awesome time and a great turnout. We even had some people who weren’t there to graduate with us, but were in our grade for so long I couldn’t believe they weren’t technically part of our class. The best part about the whole weekend was how welcoming and accepting everyone was. Everyone I talked to was genuinely interested in how their classmates were doing, and nobody had a bad attitude. Even the kids at the picnic behaved great.

Friday night was an informal gathering at Kelly’s. Way more people showed up for this than I expected, including the class of 1989, who we didn’t socialize with, but it was interesting they were there just the same. It took me at least a couple hours to get across the bar and even say hi to most people. By the end of the night I didn’t even have time to catch up with everyone who was there. Fortunately, there was time at the picnic at the mudhole (yes it’s actually called that) near Priest River the next day. Carey even enlisted her

Outside the bowling alley at closing time

family to help with all the preparations, which was awesome. Kim and I spent a bit of time trying to teach Ubuntu to swim in the river. That went okay… It was fun to see everybody’s kids.

Dinner was at the Riverbank, and we even got vegetarian dishes which were, of course, big plates of pasta. After dinner everybody went next door to the bar for more drinking and the slideshow that I put together. I was surprised that when I put it on everybody mostly stopped talking and just watched. I kinda messed up and started the slideshow half way through and didn’t put it on repeat, so a bunch of people didn’t see the whole thing since they thought it was over and didn’t pay attention while it looped through later. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun, and ended the night at the bowling alley bar, with a pretty large group hanging on until closing time.

Rather than the usual 4th of July with fireworks and crowds of people, we got away from it all this weekend on a camping trip to Pamelia Lake in the Mt Jefferson Wilderness. We went with our friends Travis and Lucy, and it was Lucy’s 30th birthday on the 4th. This was her first ever backpacking trip, and the longest hike she’s done too, so pretty badass stuff for a divisible by 10 birth year if you ask me…

From the trailhead to the lake is a little over two miles. This was a good distance to go with a pack for people who haven’t backpacked much, and I made it harder than it had to be by carrying in a pack weighing over 40 pounds with all sorts of luxury items like camp chairs and alcohol that I
would not normally carry backpacking. One of the nicest things about this wilderness area is that there’s a limited number of people allowed. You have to get a free permit, and they only give out so many. Of course, this doesn’t stop everyone from entering without a permit, but in general you’ll have fewer neighbors and trail traffic than you would otherwise. We got into the lake camping area late afternoon on Friday, so most of dozen or so sites were taken, but we still got a really nice one right near the water.

We spent the evenings eating and drinking a lot while playing cards and hanging out. We taught Lucy to play Euchre, a game which Travis had just learned the week before at Jacob’s bachelor party camping trip. We mixed 99 Bananas and Peppermint Schnapps with hot chocolate for our desert :-)

Waterfall on the way up to the lakes

Saturday we did a day hike to Hanks and Hunts Lake. This was probably about 8 miles of roundtrip hiking. The hardest part was that we couldn’t find the trail after doing a stream crossing. It looks like the water changes which stream bed it flows down fairly frequently, sometimes choosing the ‘trail’ as it’s path. Kim and I hiked in our sandals, so we would ferry Travis and Lucy across stream crossings so as not to get their feet wet. The hike had lots of views of waterfalls and snow-capped Mt. Jefferson. We got to the first lake and we ate lunch. Ubuntu went exploring the icy lake and fell through the ice into shallow water. Boy was she surprised. After lunch Travis and Lucy relaxed in the hammock we carried up, while Kim and I hiked a bit farther to the next lake for a cold swim.

We were all pretty tired after a hike back, especially after a big dinner and some more hot chocolate and mixers. Lucy brought some sparklers, so we lit those off on the lake shore. The next day we hiked out, had lunch at a Mexican restaurant and drove home to shower and enjoy our comfortable beds again.

This was my first time being a best man, and I think I might have gone a little overboard on the bachelor party – I almost lost the groom. I’m reminded of camping trips we used to take in college with Thien-An where he would always say that he only had to bring 80% of the participants back. In this case it was a rafting trip, and I managed to bring everyone back, but there were a few moments where I think that was in doubt in a lot of the participants minds, myself included. Rather than the usual bachelor party shenanigans, I thought I’d treat Jacob to some rafting and a class V rapid. I didn’t expect that we’d do the class V rapid outside of the raft.

The trip started out as usual, with Jacob showing up late, yes, even for his own bachelor party. Once we rounded Jacob up we headed out for the rafting trip. We first found a pretty sweet, isolated campsite next to the river a couple miles from the Skykomish ranger station. Once camp was setup we went back to Gold Bar to Alpine Adventures to begin the rafting trip. After suiting up in wetsuits (the water was around 42 degrees), jackets, helmets, etc we all got on a bus to go to the rafts. We ended up with a guide named Rena who hadn’t had a lot of experience guiding rafts on the Skykomish. This proved to make the rest of the trip fairly interesting, as we’d go through the rapids in what seemed a most unconventional manner compared to the rest of the rafts.

Helmet popped off… That’s not good

This became a really big deal once we got to the most interesting part of the trip: the class V, boulder drop rapid. They had everyone get out, walk down the river, and look at the rapid to make sure they were willing to give it a try. The guides gave a talk and pointed out lots of really big rocks that they had funny names for and said where the rafts would go while we nodded like we had a clue what they talked about. Since our guide hadn’t had a lot of experience we stayed at the observation point to watch most of the other groups go through. It definitely looked exciting, but nobody made it look terribly difficult. One group even bounced off the gigantic rock with the raft, and kept going like it was all part of the plan. Things didn’t go according to plan once we tried to take the rapid.

Immediately, without even any excitement to preceed, the raft flipped in the very first drop of the rapid. I was on the left front corner of the raft, which was what went under first. Somehow our guide was flung out of the raft ahead of everyone else. Once I came up for air I saw her fairly easily since she was wearing yellow, and tried to follow her through the rest of the rapid.

The raft is there, it’s just in a big hole

Adrenaline and tunnel vision definitely took over, and it was hours of time spent corroborating stories with everyone before we really had any kind of picture of what had happened, even to ourselves. One especially strong memory for me was going over a large drop and realizing that my helmet had popped off. Turned out the buckle was defective. Other memories include finding out the wrong way when you’re supposed to breath (at the troughs of the waves, not the crest as would seem intuitive), realizing that I might as well just hold my breath for a while because the current had decided that I wasn’t coming to the surface for a bit, turning around to see a raft falling on top of me and pushing me under water (I thought it was someone else’s raft at the time and just thought they were assholes for not waiting until we were through), and FINALLY seeing other rafts with people who would get us out of the water.

Oh sweet, sweet air

I’m sure everyone involved has some pretty strong memories. Fortunately there were a lot of photos for us to view once we got back. Some of us spent more time in or near the raft than others, some more time under water. Jacob and his cousin Steve suffered exhaustion and minor shock after the event, and it was decided by anyone with any medical knowledge that they were done for the day. So they went back to headquarters and sat in the hot tub while the rest of us finished up in the rafts. The adrenaline wore off and we all realized that we were a tad hungry and that the water was cold.

Thankfully, Steve and Jacob were much better off when we met them back at headquarters. We looked at the photos, which they gave us for free in light of all the trouble we went through, ate dinner and swapped stories. Luckily Steve and Jacob were recovered enough that we decided no hospital visit was in order, and we all even felt good enough to go back to the campsite and spend the night outside. We built a fire and spent most of the rest of the night swapping stories about the rapid. I think in hindsight we’re all pretty psyched having done the rapid, but I don’t think anyone has any desire to repeat the experience.