Never mind there are 20 of them and I'd only climbed six. Never mind the remaining climbs were all outside the state making them multiple-day trips. Never mind a bunch of them required skills I didn't possess. Never mind!

So that's why, 10 years later, I haven't yet climbed them all. I'm making progress, though. Slowly. And now that I'm a wise old man I've developed some perspective on my project.

I don't need to stand on the summit. After all, the summit moment is literally just a moment or two. It's the journey and adventure that makes it all worth while. So what if I didn't actually stand atop the volcano. I still climbed it.

With all this in mind: Mt. Washington. Oddly, Mt. Washington is in Oregon. Central Oregon, to be specific. Thankfully, I had (a) a work obligation in Bend and (b) friends that had recently relocated to Bend and (c) Bend is in Central Oregon. (In case you didn't know.) So after driving much of Thursday afternoon; doing a short TNAB-style, sunset hike; working (I had to); and going paddleboarding for the first time (that's a whole other story) Scott and I got up early and drove to the trailhead.

Given it was July and forecast to be warm, we high tailed it down the PCT to get to the real climb as early as possible. Once off the relatively mellow PCT we started up the climber's trail. As is usually the case with unofficial trails, it went pretty much straight up. We lost the trail a couple of times, but found it again quickly. When we broke out of the trees I had one thought.

lol

As in, no. We're not going to summit that. Not that I thought we would. Scott and I had discussed that this was a climb that had some class 5 climbing and neither he nor I were climbers. Glaciers: yes. Rocks: not so much. Regardless, we pushed up the ridge.

It got rocky. The trees got smaller. The sun got hotter. Eventually, the hikeable terrain ended and we did a bit of scrambling to get higher, but knowing we weren't going to summit anyway made it easy to call it when the rocks were a little too unstable.

I took full advantage of the few remaining snow patches to cool off a little and load my hat a lot. All too soon we were back on the PCT and cruising north. The forest there had burned so there was little shade. And it was hot. When we got back to the cars it was almost 100F.

I did a quick change, said goodbye and thanks to Scott (and Jo) for their amazing hospitality, and headed home.

📍On the lands of the Molalla people.