Dry the Rain: Disaster Prepardness
The rain has finally settled in here. For as long as weather.com can inaccurately predict it will be here. I have been mentally preparing myself for this reality for months now. With this preparation, I've also been working on embracing the inevitable. And I'm glad to say that it has mostly worked. One of my favorite things about Oregon is the smell of the rain. Not to mention, the rain here actually doesn't really make you wet. Contrary to logic and all my experience with rain, it seems to mist or spray here rather than rain.
There are times, mainly along the trail, where wet is wet. As the Scandinavian saying goes: "There is no bad weather only bad gear." This has become my mantra. But I will admit, at least half the reason I like being in the mountains or climbing them are the views. The rain and fog obscures pretty much everything in the distance and all you can see is what lay a few feet in any direction. The main benefit of such weather is that I don't have to share the mountains and forests with other people.
This weekend I climbed Dog Mountain in the Washington Cascades. It was a lot of heavy breathing at 6.8 miles and 2,828 feet of elevation and with no views of Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Defiance to provide the usual pay-off. But in the course of climbing, the act of walking up the mountain become sort of rewarding in a way that a sunny day often takes away from me because I'm so focused on how wonderful it will be at the top. In this particular case, the top didn't matter all that much because it wasn't going to be much different from the bottom. I was climbing to learn different things about mountains than all the sunny days at the top could teach me.
I think it is a labor of love and for the first time I actually loved the labor. And as a result, I think what I learned was love. It was mystical and musical in the rain with lots of little muted percussive sounds coming off vegetation and rocks. I've always hated climbing in the rain. The enjoyment I got in the clim was solely in how unhappy I was about being wet and cold and not getting to see anything. It was mostly a matter of being hardcore rather than a matter of having a good time. In fact, the worse the time was the more I enjoyed it in retrospect. I still thing part of me clings to this, but I firmly believe the more I learn about mountains in different weather the less I will feel this way.
Lewis and Clark climbed and explored in the rain. The Scandinavians make no excuses for bad weather. I think I might be starting to understand.
There are times, mainly along the trail, where wet is wet. As the Scandinavian saying goes: "There is no bad weather only bad gear." This has become my mantra. But I will admit, at least half the reason I like being in the mountains or climbing them are the views. The rain and fog obscures pretty much everything in the distance and all you can see is what lay a few feet in any direction. The main benefit of such weather is that I don't have to share the mountains and forests with other people.
This weekend I climbed Dog Mountain in the Washington Cascades. It was a lot of heavy breathing at 6.8 miles and 2,828 feet of elevation and with no views of Mt. Hood, Mt. Saint Helens, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Defiance to provide the usual pay-off. But in the course of climbing, the act of walking up the mountain become sort of rewarding in a way that a sunny day often takes away from me because I'm so focused on how wonderful it will be at the top. In this particular case, the top didn't matter all that much because it wasn't going to be much different from the bottom. I was climbing to learn different things about mountains than all the sunny days at the top could teach me.
I think it is a labor of love and for the first time I actually loved the labor. And as a result, I think what I learned was love. It was mystical and musical in the rain with lots of little muted percussive sounds coming off vegetation and rocks. I've always hated climbing in the rain. The enjoyment I got in the clim was solely in how unhappy I was about being wet and cold and not getting to see anything. It was mostly a matter of being hardcore rather than a matter of having a good time. In fact, the worse the time was the more I enjoyed it in retrospect. I still thing part of me clings to this, but I firmly believe the more I learn about mountains in different weather the less I will feel this way.
Lewis and Clark climbed and explored in the rain. The Scandinavians make no excuses for bad weather. I think I might be starting to understand.
posted by Debasaurus Wex at 7:54 PM
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