Monte Cristo Road

The trip started June 14, 2008 Saturday. Like always we had a very late start…. oh say we left home at 4:00 P.M and it took half an hour or so for me to pack up my gear while my mom did all the stuff she usually does. While I was packing, without me noticing my cat Athena jumps into the trunk of our car thinking its some kind of bed. And I close the trunk without knowing my cat was in there. As we are driving to the Mountain Loop Highway, my mom plays some music, and we hear a cat. I thought perhaps it was part of the music because it was a crazy song. We listen to another band about half way there, and hear more meowing in the back…. “hang on a sec” I say to myself. I have mom turn down the music and we hear it again. So we pull over and turns out my cat had come with us to the mountains… just our luck. So I have to get my cat in the main part of the car, and she scratches me out of fear and is whining the whole way there because she rarly ever goes in a car and is freaked out.

Once we finally got to the place, we let her have a moment outside, and my brother was watching her, and I was having fun taking photos. I look a moment later and she is gone…… my brother let his gaurd down… so I have to run along the mountain Loop Highway looping for her. But thank goodness my brother found her walking a little bit up the mountain throught the snow. So we had to create a cat little box and a bottle for her to drink out of and becasue she was there it limited our hiking time. So we cracked the window and went on hiking. Its amazing how many trees were fallen over, it was insane…. landslides all over.

There were lots of warning signs, but little danger, exept fallen trees. After walking over fallen over trees, and places of the road that have huge piles of trees and snow, we finally make it to the river. But by this point, the river is above some of the logs we need to cross before getting to Monte Cristo which is a ghost town, so we though Weden Creek trail would be nice except logs of fallen over trees and the creek would be way to difficult for my mom to cross.

So we had a nice picnic down by the river, and turned back which I got separated as usual because I was taking lots of photos as usual. And later was worried about lighting because I might have saw a flash in the sky, which worried me because in the slide zone there was little trees and only me as the highest point with a metal camera in my pack and a metal ice axe in my hand, and I saw a tree that was once apon a time struck by lightning. But think goodness there was’nt any. So I made it to the car just in time before dark and took a few photos on the way home and held down my cat of coarse. It was still a good time.

I could’nt quite decide which Pilchuck photo I liked best which is why there is three. Each was taken with a 25 or so second exposure so that it would show up and is the reason for the blurred clouds.