May the rain fall where you want

I saw a sticker that said, "May the rain fall where you want." There's some wisdom in that. The rain could be a metaphor for some other difficulty in life, but in the case of my last trip to the mountains, rain was no metaphor at a all. Neither was lightning or thunder.

Ben psyched about being soaked and headed home

Ben Mitchell and I went to climb Eldorado Peak to prepare for our AMGA alpine exam. There is a lot of time, experience, opportunity, and money at stake in the exam so we thought we'd train a lot in order to do well. Of course, that training paid off greatly when the two of us were packing for the trip in the parking lot and I casually tossed the neon yellow rain tarp in the "stay at home" pile. And what did Mother Nature do? She pissed on us, and shook her thunder and lightning stick relentlessly. So what did we learn? Always take something for the rain in the Cascades, even if the forecast is for 100 degrees in Seattle.

Columns of rain over the North Cascades National Park

On the positive side, we did learn the approach to Eldorado quite well and saw a beautiful storm roll through the mountains. Our little bivy site on the shoulder of the peak was somehow protected from lightning strikes, which seemed to be happening all around us. Only once did I feel the buzz of electricity.

Here is a time lapse of lightning during the night. Its a bunch of photographs put together and played at high-speed, which means there was three times as many strikes as what the camera captured.

We woke up the next morning cursing the fact that between us, we had zero waterproof items, and our sleeping bags and all our clothes were soaked. I slept mainly underneath my sleeping pad, and not on it, to protect from the downpour.

The lesson for me is that things will happen that don't fit with the plan. Maybe we didn't climb the mountain, but we did see an amazing show and had a good hike none-the-less.