Olympics Adventure, Day 1

After more than a month of planning, our Olympics Adventure finally began on Friday, Aug. 26, 2005.

The crew was David Hale, Billy Stauffer, and yours truly, Dave Stewart.

After a long drive from Seattle, with stops to get lunch (Dairy Queen) and camping permits (at which time we saw what might have been the largest cold sore in recorded history), we set out on Day 1 around 2 p.m.

It was our shortest day, although we had quite a bit of uphill climbing in the 3.25 miles that we traveled to our first campsite at Deer Lake.

Weather for the day was perfect, clear skies and not too hot.

At night, we looked at the incredible star field -- you can see so much more without the city lights getting in the way. We saw several satellites fly by, but the most interesting (and disconcerting) sight was a very bright flash on the horizon that lit up the skies in what we thought was the direction of Seattle (although I think maybe it was more like Olympia at this point).

It was so bright and unexpected that we actually thought Seattle might have been struck by a nuclear blast. Thankfully, it was not, of course, but we had no way to know, with no radio and no other human contact.

Not only was it eventually good news to find out that Seattle was OK, given that our loved ones are here, but it was also a relief given that our plan for repopulating the Earth (after a suitable mourning period) was seriously flawed in many crucial ways that I hesitate to mention on a family blog such as this.

At this point, I was regretting my decision to keep costs low by using as much camping gear as I had on hand, rather than spending money to reduce pack weight -- I was at about 50 pounds of gear, which was far too heavy. Little did I know how much worse day 2 was going to be.