July 12 - Mt St. Helen, Washington

Although we had nowhere nearly exhausted the possibilities for walking in Portland since there are over 20 Volksmarches in the city and the surrounding area, we felt it was time to move northward. Our immediate goal was to walk the state capital walk in Olympia, Washington, but I also wanted to revisit the scene of our first visit to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington about 25 years ago. Nostalgia in strong doses can be a fatal character flaw or else, in milder cases, just a blamed nuisance, but I have it all the same.

After a quick breakfast of cold cereal we hitched the trailer in about 15 minutes. That is certainly much faster than when we first traveled with it last year (see Wanderung 4), and probably faster than we could ever tear down and pack one of our tents plus stowing all our equipment. Of course, we paid for this convenience with every mile we towed the Tin Blimp. The drive up Interstate 5 was, in fact, distinctly unpleasant because I felt forced to keep the speed up at 65 miles per hour, at which speed the truck felt like it was straining a bit. I was also fighting gusty headwinds that made the whole rig feel unstable, so I was watching it like a hawk, sometimes at the expense of watching the traffic flowing around me. Much to my embarrassment I started to ease out into the passing lane at one point and only after I heard an indignant honk did I see the SUV back beside the trailer. It was black and blended in with the black asphalt pavement, but I still should have caught it with a careful mirror check before I made the lane change. I also didn't seem to be estimating closing velocities and clearances as accurately as usual, so I had to be extra cautious and leave more of a margin.

As we had been routinely awaking at 6 a.m. every morning and not taking many naps, it's possible I was suffering from a cumulative sleep deprivation, but it was hard to tell exactly. Interestingly enough, back when I was doing aviation research we pondered the problem of how to help pilots evaluate their own mental functioning on a day-to-day basis so that they could compensate with appropriate teamwork adjustments or other measures. And here I was in exactly the same situation of not knowing exactly how tired I was or how that was affecting critical cognitive judgments. Unfortunately we never had the chance to do the research to find that answer, so I just had to make seat-of-the-pants adjustments.

We stopped off about 50 miles south of Olympia at a Mt. Saint Helen's information center run by the state. The explosion of Mt. Saint Helen's in 1980 was something I remember quite clearly seeing on the evening news (back when I had the time to watch the evening news!), so I was interested in getting the full story. This information center was really a museum dedicated to that event and the displays had a lot of information. They also showed two films that were just under a half an hour each, one focused on the eruption of Mt. Saint Helen's and one more generally covering the seven major volcanoes in the Cascade mountain chain. A ranger presentation lasted an additional half an hour, so all told we didn't leave the center until about 3 hours later! But it was a lot of fun and certainly gave me a nice break from the driving.

The camping spot we had selected was Millersylvania State Park about 10 miles south of Olympia, and I was relieved to finally get the rig parked. Our campsite was right among some extremely tall evergreen trees that grow out here. Some were cedar, some were probably spruce or Douglas Fir, and some might have been redwoods, but they were all remarkably tall. I didn't use any trigonometry to get a precise measure but I estimated they were a minimum of 100 feet high and really more like 150 feet high, and straight as an arrow. Very majestic! Also very frustrating photographically because you can't really take a picture that gives the impact of the cathedral-like effect of these trees. The smell of the needles and woods in the campground was also very pleasant; the fragrance reminded me of the pine smell in some of the Virginia coastal forests except that the scent was more a light hint of fir and cedar rather than the sharp tang of pine.

We had a big lunch and that was the downfall of all our plans for the afternoon. We had planned to drive in to Olympia and do the walk there, but instead we fell into bed for a Super Nap. We did wake up for dinner (but of course we don't miss meals!) and then wandered down to the small swimming lake just to stretch our legs a bit, but the best part of the evening was that we finally had a campfire! We had missed having one over the first 5 weeks of the trip and were even carting along the lumber to make a few fires in the bed of the truck, but we never seemed to have the energy to make one when the conditions were otherwise OK. For most of Wisconsin and Minnesota, the mosquitoes were so ferocious that we just didn't feel like dousing ourselves with DEET to sit outside for a campfire. The mosquitoes stopped rather suddenly around Fargo, North Dakota, but after that we always seemed to be in too much of a hurry or at one of the many private campgrounds that just don't allow fires.

But finally we were able to chop up some sections of old 2 x 4s and have a nice fire. Curiously, the wood seemed extremely dry and the handle of the ax appeared to have shrunk a bit because I noticed the head was loose, which was either my imagination playing tricks on me, a pure coincidence of some kind, or maybe the effects of several weeks of the wood being baked by the sun in the dry desert conditions of Montana, Utah, and Idaho. I rather thought the latter was the true reason, but in any case that wood burned in an almost totally smoke free fire, which was fun. We enjoyed the fire about an hour before dousing it and retiring to the trailer for the night where Monika crocheted some potholders and I worked on the journal before we turned in for the night.