Mount Adams: South Climb (2017)

There’s an indescribable euphoria that comes with summiting a mountain. You’re standing on top of the world and the feeling is an intense mixture of awe, joy, pride, and a bit of exhilarating exhaustion.

After backpacking the Enchantments during the week, I headed to Mount Adams with a great group of people for my second attempt at a summit.

We got a late start, but with Weston’s excellent driving skills over the insanely awful road up to the trailhead, we were able to finally head up to Lunch Counter from the trailhead around 4pm.

We were a motley crew, three skiers and three hikers. Veronika, one of the skiers, had never climbed a mountain before or been on backcountry skis. Will is a beast and somehow made it a good portion of the way up in just trail runners and microspikes.

We made a concerted effort to keep encouraging each other all the way up and finally arrived and set up camp at Lunch Counter around 9pm, made some food and stared in awe at the brilliance of all the stars in the sky (it was a new moon). Weston even got in some excellent night photography and magically caught a shooting star!

The next morning we started to make our way to the summit from Lunch Counter around 6:30am. The most difficult section was getting up to Piker’s Peak (the false summit). We trudged up that section and finally reached Piker’s and settled down for a few minutes to fuel up before the final summit push.

The push to the summit from Piker’s required a small dip down before gaining the final bit of elevation. We arrived at the summit around noon, with clear skies and views of mountain peaks everywhere! We were able to spot St. Helens, Ranier, Mt. Hood, and Jefferson easily from the summit.

We made our descent, half of our party via skis, the other half hiking back down. It was a slushy and frustrating descent but after a few hours, we finally met back up at the cars 5 hours later.