amanda

Amanda and I have known each other for seven years—since she was 12 and I was 11. It seems so weird to think that we’re now parting ways; she’s planning to attend a university to get her bachelor’s degree, and I’m moving to Florida to go to Bible school. So we got together one last time, for one last portrait fling. :)


It had been way too long since our last shoot! Here are a couple of the ones Amanda took of me, for those of you who like to see them…

mt. adams

 

I accomplished something major last week.

On August 7, 2012, I crossed the first item off my bucket list: I summited my beautiful Mt. Adams!

This was my first attempt at climbing any volcano as well as my first time backpacking. We backpacked up to camp at about 8,000 feet elevation, slept (or tried to sleep) from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., and then got up, put on our crampons, and began our ascent shortly after 3 a.m.

Our climb to the 12,300-foot summit took about six and a half hours. Two things were running through my head as I slowly, methodically dug my crampons into the steep snowfields:
 
(1) Remember when Christy Huddleston hikes from the El Pano train station all the way to Cutter Gap with Ben Pentland in the Christy pilot episode? Climbing Mt. Adams gave me a whole new appreciation for Mr. Pentland’s statement that “it’s so up-tilted you could stand up straight and bite the ground.”

(2) About halfway up the never-ending, steepest-of-the-steep slopes leading to the False Summit, I had a different movie quote running through my brain—this one from the BBC version of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South. Margaret Hale is speaking of the cotton mills, but I found her statement easy to apply to mountain climbing: “I believe I have seen Hell… and it’s white. It’s snow white.”

But other than the sheer monotony of climbing the same snow-and-ice terrain, with every conquered ridge leading to a higher and steeper one, it wasn’t quite as bad as I expected it to be. I was planning on total physical exhaustion, but ended up more surprised by the mental exhaustion of going forward even when the end was nowhere in sight. The knowledge that it would be permanently wiped off my bucket list once I got there (and the fact that I was too stubborn to quit) kept me going.

It was worth it: the views from the top were amazing (despite a lot of haze) and we got to glissade nearly all the way down. Six and a half hours of climbing were undone in less than two hours thanks to that. :)

Congratulations to my dad on his fourth summit, Sam on his first, Tim on his fifth, and Stephen on his first!!!

oneonta

Two days after hiking Eagle Creek, I joined a completely different group for a hike up the shorter (but slightly steeper) Oneonta Trail past Horsetail and Ponytail falls to Triple Falls. This was another incredibly beautiful hike. Who knew so many stunning places were hidden in the forest just off the freeway?!

Ponytail Falls—another waterfall you can go behind!

There was a second trail into the Oneonta gorge that led over a precarious log jam to a waterfall (if you were willing to swim a little). It was absolutely beautiful back there, but I couldn’t bring myself to carry my camera across the log jam… partly for the sake of my own balance, and partly because if I’d fallen, my camera would have been fully submerged! So I had to make do with my own eyes and memory (not the easiest thing for a camera addict to do). It was pretty incredible.