Let Me Tell You About My Very First Backpacking Adventure

Walk back in time with me, back to 1971.

My best friend Frank and I, spitballing ideas for something new to do, some new adventure, and somehow we settled upon backpacking into the Cascade Mountains.  Mind you, neither of us had ever backpacked prior to that, but that little detail certainly wasn’t enough to derail our grand plan.

We talked two other friends into joining us, we all borrowed backpacks from our circle of friends, jumped into my car on a Saturday morning, and headed east towards Mt. Rainier.  As I recall, we each carried a pack, a sleeping bag (the old cloth ones which weighed like twenty pounds and should never get wet), a variety of snacks and processed meats, a change of clothes, and a tarp with rope and knife.  Since the temperature in Tacoma, the day of departure, was in the nineties, we decided there was no need to worry about colder weather.  How cold could it possibly get up on the mountain?

We had read some hiking books and we settled on a hike which would take us alongside a glacier, into a lovely alpine meadow, and finally to the shores of Mystic Lake.  As I recall, I seem to remember something about an elevation gain of three-thousand feet, and Mystic Lake being at an elevation of seven-thousand feet, but those details were terribly unimportant as I parked the car at the trailhead and we all set out on this exciting new memory in the making.

We were all in  our early twenties, all in reasonably good physical shape, but we were not in mountain backpacking shape, and it became obvious, very quickly, that we were in for a buttkicking. The trail itself was stunningly beautiful, the glacier as glorious as we had been told, the views of Mt. Rainier everything we hoped they would be, but by the time we finally reached the lake, ten hours had elapsed and nightfall was rapidly approaching . . . and oh, in answer to an earlier question, how cold can it get on Mt. Rainier in August?  Turns out it can dip below freezing.

We were ready to collapse by the time we reached the campground. We barely had the strength to tie the tarp between trees, throw our sleeping bags on the ground, pray to whatever god would listen to us, eat whatever horrible snacks we had brought, and watch as all signs of light completely disappeared.

No, we had not brought a flashlight.

By midnight we were all huddle together for warmth, our eyes darting into the darkness, trying to discern what huge animals were making all of those strange sounds, and were those sounds getting closer to us, and how big do those black bears get, and are there cougars in the Cascades, and I seriously doubt if any of us slept at all that night.

And it was glorious!

I remember thinking, sometime in the middle of the night, that I had never felt so alive as I did at that moment, in complete blackness, the sound of my heart pounding in my chest, alone in a wilderness setting and in love with it all.

Heading back down the mountain the following morning, one of my friends swore he would never go backpacking again, and to my knowledge he never did.

Me? I summited that mountain, twice, in the ensuing years. I hiked the Wonderland Trail, a 95-mile stroll through some of the most beautiful scenery you will ever see. All told I have probably backpacked close to a thousand miles of the Cascades over the years.

And it was all because I had a voice inside of me urging me on to see the wonders of this world while I still could.

I still hear that voice.