First looks at Mount St. Helens

Turns out we have just a wisp of a Verizon signal here at "Eagle Cliffs Store & Campground" and so here we are with a small report.   :)

Per plan we took it easy again today and rolled just the 40 miles x 4000 feet of climbing necessary to get us over Oldmans Pass and lined up for the longer haul tomorrow to climb up to Elk Pass and back down to one of the small towns beyond.

The big news today was that we got our first looks at Mount St Helens.   Even though we were seeing it from the south and southeast (opposite of the crater) it was still a breathtaking.   As with most things, our pictures didn't come anywhere close to capturing it.    I suspect we're going to see a good bit more of the mountain in the coming days and so hopefully we'll capture more of it.

In other news, most days we meet southbound cycle tourists and today was no exception.   We met a German couple riding southbound and had a nice chat about road conditions and so on.   They're only going as far as Crater Lake as is another cycle tourist we met here in the campground tonight.   Yesterday we met an American couple who were in day 3 of a coast to coast tour along the Northern Tier -- headed for Maine.   Anyway, increasingly we're getting the sense that we've actually accomplished something.   In the beginning we were the newbies and all the cyclists we met had come much further already.   Now the tables are turned and we're the ones who have come a long ways and it's the others who have just started.   Tina commented today that soon we should actually be able to inventory the number of major climbs we have left and start a countdown.   Sounds good.  :)

That's all for now, David