justin matthews, gorden long, and myself set out to climb mt index. we hiked up mt persis on friday night which took about 3 hours. the climb up mt persis is steep but there is a climbers trail all the way up. we then camped on mt persis and the next morning headed out on our attempt to get to the top of mt index.
here is the view of mt index from mt persis, our campsite, and our route over mt index. we had to climb down mt persis, across the low ground, up through the gap, then ridge walk over to mt. index. THEN we could start our climb up.
at this point i should probably tell you that both justin and gorden have attempted this climb before but not made it. the reason why they have never made it is because they underestimated how long the difficult climb would take. well apparently they are committed to being consist because they once again underestimated how long it would take.
they believed that if we camped on mt persis, it would only take us a few hours to run over and climb mt index, then we could head back to mt persis and down the truck in one day. ha.. more on that later. but first, back to our friday evening climb up mt persis.
here we are at the trail head starting out on friday evening. it's a later start so we have to hurry to make it the camp site before nightfall.
the climb up mt persis was steep.
not even close to the top.
making it to the top of mt persis as the sun sets.
justin and gorden at the top of mt persis on friday night.
we took a moment to view our destination before setting up camp. this is when i saw for the first time where we were going. i think my exact words were, "we are going all the way over there?" both justin and gorden have much more hiking experience then me but i knew that it would take much longer then a couple of hours to get all the way mt index.
unfortunately i was right.
we set up base camp and hunkered down for the night.
the view back down to civilization and the puget sound.