and so it goes…

Starting out, this was the goal… tackle the north face of the beautiful Mt Olympus with a few friends from the Executive MBA Program up at the University of Utah. It was raining when we got out of class, and despite all the naysayers, we decided to push forward, and after about 30 minutes the skies cleared and this was the view. Gorgeous!

The hike up wasn’t too bad when we could find the trail… but when we needed to bushwhack over to a gully to get a more direct route it was like hacking, squeezing, and snapping our way through a jungle of scrub oak, wild raspberry bushes, and sweat and rain-drenched leaves.

We had a few misdirections on the way up and as the sun fell, with visibility limited, we retreated to a small semi-flat area to re-group, eat and sleep before waking up early to hit the summit for sunrise. 

We started a fire to try and dry out socks and boots that were wet from our romp through the jungle…

Mike was making the most of the Raspberry Crumble dessert…

Not sure what Pete was doing… 

We sat around and chatted, talked about class, work, and life. If was great.

At one point I was worried about Tom because he went over and started yelling at the cliff wall – I thought he was succumbing to the high altitude, but then realizing we were just on Mt Olympus, I figured it was just a tourettes outburst.

Then the rain hit… and it pissed.

And Pissed.

And we started getting pissed. 

Mike was cozy and snug in his little jungle hammock thingy – and even though we had plenty of tarps, we didn’t make it up to our original camping spot (with trees) so with nothing but the rock walls to use as supports, the tarps weren’t as effective at keeping us dry as we would have liked. Luckily we got a little break in the storm and the beautiful Blue Moon came out.

As the rain paused… we got a great view of the city below (actually I can’t remember if I took this before or after one of many rain storms, but it was still a great view)

And then it started raining again… and with that came the lightening… and I would have taken some pictures of the lightening but I was too busy huddling under the tarp with Chris and Tom, to worry about taking pictures. 

We decided enough was enough and so we packed up and slipped and tumbled back down the mountain.

A great little trip – and even having to retreat from the mountain because of the weather it was a great experience, with a great bunch of guys.