Day 201: The Big B (Barometer)

 Phew, this is a big one guys!

Barometer is the jerk mountain that taunts me out the kitchen window and the front porch every (clear) day. It builds it's own weather (or so we say, because clouds will literally form at the top of the peak and just sit there for hours), and then it disappears for weeks at a time when the cloud ceiling is super low, only to reappear on a sunny day like someone had magicked there or something. 

The problem with climbing Barometer is that the trail is straight. Up. There are no switchbacks or gradual slopes, that trail is the actual, literal ridgeline straight up the mountain. 

No mercy from this mountain. 

Barometer yesterday from my dining room window. You can see the trail going straight up the middle on the ridgeline

A friend of mine had texted me the other day and asked if I wanted to climb Barometer today, and of course I said yes, because it's still on my 7 summit challenge for the summer. This year Cam is doing the challenge with me, so we got up this morning ready to go. 

And of course, instead of it being a clear and glorious sunny morning like it was yesterday, it looked like this.

Where's the mountain?!

Well, normally I'd scrub the mission, but we had friends that were going, so Cam and I (Calen and Brad resolutely refused to climb Barometer this year) packed up and headed to the trailhead, not 90 seconds away by car. 

The good news about it being stupidly cloudy was that it was delightfully cool. Normally on sunny days, Barometer's trail has direct sunlight ALL day, and very little tree cover, so that mountain is stupidly hot. But today it was very cool and made the uphill climb very tolerable. 

Into the fog!

As usual, Cam is so fast going up that I felt like I needed a retractable leash to keep him from running full sprint up to the summit, leaving us heaving out of shape adults struggling to breathe down below. 

Waiting for us at the summit!

Maybe I'm in better shape than I used to be, or maybe it really was the cloudy skies, but I remember Barometer being a LOT harder the last two times I went up it. This was a breeze (I mean, in a straight up the mountain sort of breeze). 

This is also the first time either of the kids have summited Barometer, which is kind of a household rite of passage. 

Just as we headed down the summit, a few patches of fog cleared and Cam and I got a little bit of a view, which is the only good reason to climb a mountain, after all. 

Kodiak airport directly below us, and our neighborhood in the circle of houses to the right 

That's the fifth summit of the summer! We are almost done!

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