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I Climbed a Volcano!

posted @9:00am ET on May 24, 2012

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Hey Diet.commers!

Today I wanted to share some pictures from an exciting adventure I went on recently. As some of you may recall, I moved to Oregon (from Massachusetts) at the end of January, and I've been seeing and doing all sorts of great things since I've been here on the West Coast. There are beautiful landscapes all over the place, like this waterfall:

waterfall, Multnomah Falls

And gorgeous flowers everywhere:

flowers

And from Portland, I can see both Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens in the distance. They tower over everything!

mt hood

^ Mt. Hood ^
So on to the exciting part - my boyfriend David and I CLIMBED Mt. St. Helens a few weeks ago! It was 8200' to the "top" (or what's left of the top, after the 1980 eruption)! It was much more grueling than we'd expected, b/c we were the first ones up the mountain that day and so we didn't have anyone else's footsteps to walk in, and had to kick in all of our own. That made it much more challenging than it would have been, had we had footprints to follow.

We camped out in our car in the parking lot the night before, and woke up at 3am to begin getting ready for the climb:

We left the parking lot at 4:30am... and climbed and climbed and climbed....

climbing mt. st. helens

^ That's me! ^
...and didn't reach the summit until 11:30am! There were plenty of times that we questioned whether or not we could/should keep going... but we pressed onwards, and it was extremely gratifying... even though it was foggy and snowing, with completely whiteout conditions most of the way, so once we finally reached the summit we couldn't see a view!

mt. st. helens summit

^ David and I at the summit ^ Check out our "view" behind us ;)
We were absolutely exhausted... but then had to turn around and head back down! That took us another 4 hours, and I pretty much collapsed onto the ground in the parking lot when we got back to the car! I can't even imagine how many calories I burned during this adventure!!! Is "Climbing Mt. St. Helens for 11 hours" in our Exercise Tracker??

The next day, we decided to be tourists and drove up alongside Mt. St. Helens, stopping at a few gorgeous lookout points along the way to take pictures:

^ Yup, I climbed that! ^
All in all, this was one of the most challenging things I've ever done, both mentally and physically. The feeling of accomplishment after completing it though... that has been priceless!

I hope you've enjoyed reading about my adventure - and that it's inspired you to "climb" (hehe) out of your own comfort zones to do something that you might not have thought you were able to do.

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rales12

@ 3:58pm ET on May 24, 2012 Wow! That's awesome, Bailey! If you can do that, I bet you can do just about anything! Any other volcano-climbing goals in your future?

CSL-Bailey

@ 4:07pm ET on May 24, 2012 I may attempt Mt. Hood as well! David has done it twice since we've been in Oregon, so I figure I ought to try it too! :)

arcticmom

@ 7:27pm ET on May 25, 2012 OH EM GEE!!! Look at you guys! Stunning, I'm very inspired I wanna go climb a volcano now. Sad my mountain right now is walking all the way to the "bridge" with my daughter and that's 1 1/2 miles each way. Thanks for sharing the photos Bailey they are unreal. =^.^=

Spike99

@ 9:39pm ET on May 29, 2012 Way to GO!!!!

Wish I had the physical strength (and will) to climb hills like yours. Your new home looks amazing as well. Definate great post. Posts like this gives me more desire to raise the bar on my own personal goals (fitness improvement goals) as well. Thanks for sharing... And, way to go!!!