Johnny Bartlett's Pre-Bairn Hike

Johnny Bartlett's Pre-Bairn Hike

Jonny Bartlett is having a baby and I don't know how it ended up that the thing we should do with him is go on a 20 mile overnight hike but that's what happened. Bairn is Scottish and Northern English for child.

borrowed jill's modern awesome pack and also this pack from the 80s and the father to be got to use jills pack so I had to use this one and it was quite a doozy.

Mt Wittenberg summit is 10.2 miles from this parking area. We hiked to it and camped overnight and backtracked back. Here we are all fresh and hopeful. 10 miles, heavy packs, and rain would knocks us all down a peg by nightfall.

who?

was it a woodpecker the size of a turkey?

the peak of mt Wittenberg is in that fog and this is maybe halfway to looping around to it.

at a certain elevation we started seeing snow and ice. It's April 12th, 2019.

and then it turned into ice climbing. We were drunk on getting to the top and beating our chests so we soldiered on with no crampons grasping whatever small patch of rock or feeble branch we could to use our forward inertia to get up the ice slide. Afterwards I was like that was actually really dangerous.

the photos don't really do justice to how sketchy the whole situation was. Now look at that and imagine coming back down it for like 45 min.

Mt Wittenberg Ice Climbing by accident from Jason Raish on Vimeo.

At a certain point Bartlett said you guys we can't keep doing this and we are gonna be camping on ice and Steven and I still drunk on getting to the top said ok. Steven has actually done this hike before and he said we were super close but we slowly went back down the ice slide to find a suitable campsite. To be fair father to be Bartlett has no business doing anything dangerous and reckless. Going down was much more dangerous that going up, at least going up you're leaning forward, going down everyone slipped and ate it. and there was lots of sliding and grabbing a tree and swinging around it like a pole dancer. I had a cartoon like fall with both feet in the air and falling directly on my wrists and bottom.

I was already at my limit as we were climbing up the ice so having to climb back down which was even more dangerous really completely depleted me.

dinner was 2 cans of SPAM btwn 3 people which is a gross amount of spam but welcome after a grueling day. Also had some uncle ben's rice and beers

we also ended up drinking all the whiskey we brought when it started raining all night long. Thanks to Bartlett who said hey there's another bottle here lets drink it and then we started tuckin' into it and looked over and he was asleep. Thanks a lot bro

The next day we made coffee, skipped breakfast and just ate bars, trail mix etc. Steven made a fatal error in not bringing a sleeping pad slept on near freezing ground in his thin sleeping bag that's supposed to be 3 season but it was thin looking to me. I had a fine time on Jill's sleeping pad and thick yet light sleeping bag. So Steven said he barely slept at all.

The hike was pretty grueling the next day as well. Started getting hot and the miles keep plodding on and on. By the end we were super ready for it to be done. Lots of philosophizing and life convos this weekend.