Greg, John and I went on a trip to climb/ski Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens. We had to pack a ton of gear. It was hard to fit everything into the Geo. It handled the 2,000 mile trip no problem, but we did average 27 mpg instead of 36 with all the stuff on the roof.
We stopped in Twin Falls for dinner. What a beautiful place. The Perrine Bridge is the only place in the US where BASE jumping is allowed year round.
We spent the night in Boise and then hit the road again. At some point along the way I realized we were getting pretty low on gas. I figured we would just stop at the next gas station I saw. We watched the needle slowly go down until it was below empty before we finally saw a gas station. We pulled off only to see that the gas station's pumps were out of service. The gas station attendant said the closest place we could get gas was in Durkee, OR, about 17 miles away. We held our breath, switched off the air conditioning, and took off for a scary drive. When we finally made it, the needle was quite a ways below empty. I was surprised we actually made it.
The gas station was simply called "Eat Gas". The cute old lady that owned the gas station just couldn't figure out why people didn't stop at her gas station and diner. Would you want to eat at a place called "Eat Gas"?
It took 10.6 gallons of fuel. I am not sure if this is true, but answers.com says the Geo only has a 10 gallon tank.
Our first view of Mt. Hood through the bug splattered windshield.
We met up with Scott and Katy at the Bonneville dam fish hatchery. The sturgeon are awesome. 
Sturgeon can live for over 100 years and grow to be over 4400 lbs!
We drove to REI in Portland to get some last minute stuff and then headed to my grandparents to get everything finalized.
It took us almost two hours just to get everything ready and packed in our bags. So much for a nap before we started.
When we got to the Timberline lodge it was pretty windy.
We started up at around 1:00 AM on Saturday morning. It was cold, windy, and cloudy. I wasn't really sure if the weather would be good enough for us to make it to the top.
We made it up to the top of the Palmer glacier lift and took an hour break. I was lucky and slept for about an hour on one of the lift chairs.
When we got up it was getting beautiful outside. John wasn't feeling well and unfortunately decided to head back down.
Here is Greg hiking up to where we stashed our skis.
Scott and Katy
We stashed our skis and put on our crampons, got out our ice axes, and roped up.
Here we are on the Hogsback around 1,000 vertical from the top. We went up the old chute to the left in the picture below.
Some guys were trying to climb up this face!
We ended up taking a short steep chute to the summit ridge.
Looking to the West and North
Looking to the North and East
It was pretty steep!
We got back to the car exhausted and then headed to Scott's Brother Dan's house in BattleGround, WA. We spent a nice relaxing Sunday with them and then headed for Mt. Saint Helens on Monday. We went up the Worm Flows route. It was raining quite a bit when we started up.
Scott and Katy had already done Helens earlier in the year and decided to do just make out instead of going up to the top with us.
The view from the ridge at the top.
It was pretty cloudy the whole time. At times we couldn't really see anything in front of us and we just had to stop in our tracks and wait for it to clear. Luckily, when we started down from the top it cleared out a little bit. We had close to 6,000 vertical feet of skiing, by far the longest single run of my life.
We took off Monday night to head home. The clouds cleared out as we were driving and gave us one more amazing view of Mt. Hood.
