Mt. St. Helena

It was a beautiful Sunday morning today and Justin and I made plans to hike Mount Saint Helena. Since I've been doing Adventure Bootcamp I felt I was in good enough shape to keep up with Justin. Armed with only the information I got from the Robert Louis Stevenson State Park website and the determination to make it to the top, we loaded up our backpacks with waters and a sweatshirt each. As always, my backpack included the essential sunscreen and first aid kit because inevitably on of us would need one of them, but more about that later.

Waking up a 8:00, we dressed in layers, grabbed our backpacks and off we went. We stopped at Ranch Market in Napa and got some sandwiches (with condiments on the side to prevent soggy bread, of course) then we were on our way.

We got about a mile into the hike and realized we'd bitten off more than we could chew. We decided that even if we did make it the 5 miles to the top, neither of us were in good enough shape to make it back down. So we continued on for a while more until we came to an outcropping of rocks over a cliff that had some benches. We sat down and broke out the sandwiches. Neither of us a big fans of mayonnaise so I grabbed some packets of mustard from the deli along with a bio-degradable knife. As we ate I explained to Justin the novelty of biodegradable plastics. I'm not sure he was entirely convinced that a plastic knife has the ability to be composted but we will find out the results to that in another post.

Once we finished our sandwiches we turned around and started back down the mountain. I'd have to say that the hike down was much more enjoyable than the hike up. It took us about 2 hours to make it half way up and about 50 minutes to make it back down. Perhaps the accelerated speed down contributed to the slalom ski Justin did on his butt about 30 feet down until ultimately coming to a rest amongst some young saplings. As a good wife I called down to make sure he was alight before bursting into uncontrollable laughter.

Ultimately we made it back in one piece. Even though we didn't make it to the summit I am very proud of our accomplishment. We will add making it to the summit to our list of 101 things to do in 1001 days.