Climbing Mount Shuksan, Mice in the Van & Crossing the Canadian Border First Day it Opens to U.S.

Woke up in the mountains today. The tent almost blew off the mountain. Got back to a bunch of mouse poop. Cleaning everything and now it's our night. Oh my god I hate spiders. It's gonna be heavy but it's gonna be fun. Jordan's just practicing you know. Jordan in peak form. Sprinting downhill on loose green snow to get my tent. Top of the world, bottom of the trash heap. Can't win them all. We have to eat six eggs tonight. We're back at the Wilderness Information Center. We've successfully scored our Saxon permit. Going to the trailhead and there's this giant spider on our van. We're at the trailhead for Mount Shaxson, Shannon Ridge Trail. My hair looks insane but that's because we've been doing mountaineering stuff and we haven't been showering and I haven't been redoing my hair. Going to make us our food for the trail. Jordan's packing right now. We're going to take all of our mountaineering stuff, our climbing stuff, and backpacking stuff because we'll be camping for a couple nights. We'll go camp tonight, climb, and then hopefully come down in one day. But if not we've got our permit for two and it's gonna be heavy but it's gonna be fun. Okay we're a little hungry unforbidden so we brought more food to be strolling off tonight. Tuna for tomorrow, some nuts for tomorrow. Summit mango, a little goo in case we get tired. Summit free snacks of course. Bars. And if you stay tomorrow then we have noodles because they're light. Some sandwiches, bread, and potatoes. Heavy packs and all. Ready to go. Kirsten's coming down the ridge. We're on the crest. Very smoky. You can kind of see you know in the distance. We're heading towards that low pass right there and there's Shuksan. You can't really see the summit at all but top is right into that cloud. Mount Baker's over here somewhere. Moving up. Getting close to camp for today. Getting towards the snow and the glaciers now. You can see we're above some here on Shuksan. Made it up that first pass. Now you gotta head up around there and I think that'll give us our first look at the actual sulfide glacier and upper mountain from close. From up close. Make some food and get ready for the morning. Finally got up to where we can set up our tent. Our first look at the summit period pyramid of Shuksan. It's about two miles across the sulfide glacier which we're gonna walk early in the morning. Yeah pretty awesome views up here. I think this is cool. I wish there's less smoke. Some other guys here today said that they cleared up early in the morning for them. So we're gonna set our tent right there and here we are. Pretty sweet. Jordan in peak form of course. Finally he gets to use his glacier goggles. 45. Can't see. The clouds are kind of behind and under the mountains over there. Sun is rising. Got all of our stuff ready and we're gonna head up. Views up here as we're starting the ascent on the glacier. Pretty spectacular sunrise. 5 or 6 a.m. I'm going at it for a couple miles on the snow and ice here. You can see the summit pyramid. We're heading towards there and the trail. Nice snow. You can see some breaks in the glacier. Some crevasses. So the sun's just coming up. Look at that sweet cascade view along the mountains in the distance. Come up here. We are at the edge of a crevasse. Then we get a step over. This is what 5 glacier is. You can see some more over there. Kind of fun. We get to step across some of them and not fall in. Getting high up on the glacier. That's Mount Baker which is pretty awesome. Came up there. You can't see. We just crossed a bunch of sketchy crevasses and there's the rock. Almost there. It's a good time. It's time to get mountaineering boots. We are restarting up. Southeast Ridge. That's Mount Baker. Sulfite Glacier. We're going to start rock climbing finally and get to the top of Shackson. All right. Just topped out up here on Mount Shackson. You got Mount Baker over there. We did two pitches simul climbing instead of the eight that they said. You know it goes pretty quickly when you're simuling up the ridge. Rock was the easy part. The snow is definitely slow. Again all the way up there. Pretty fun but that was a long glacier. These views of the cascades are incredible as they've been. Our whole stay here. Up there is Canada. Not too far away or just around the border. Made the summit and now we're on our way down. We just rappelled and did a little down climbing. Changed back to our snow gear and we're back on Sulfite Glacier. Just walking down. Basically crossing all the way down to where it's rocky down there. Make some food and then uh yeah I think we're gonna hike out in the morning so just enjoy the night. Right between two crevasses. Making our way down. Made it back a while ago. We've been sleeping in the hot sun. Eating every single thing in our bag. We might eat these noodles at 4 20. Not because of what you think but because the time is 4 20. An early dinner. We might try to go to bed at five or six. Not gonna lie. The tent blew down from up there all the way down there. Yikes. Jordan got the tent. Don't worry. It's time to go. So we're out here at the line between U.S. Forest Service and North Cascades National Park on our hike down. From there, Shuckson is way back there. You can see the smoke has cleared out a ton. In the first videos on our way up you couldn't even see Mount Baker and now it's like blue skies and perfectly clear. Just pretty wild. So it might sit a little more this afternoon but it's nice that it's clearing up a little bit. And uh on the way down and out. Making our way back to the car. Got a few miles left and uh go eat some breakfast. And I have recovered from uh running sprinting downhill on loose green snow to get my tent. Um that was a very stressful way to start the morning. Only a couple tears and the rain fly. Um but we got it. So you know it saved like five hundred dollars which is nice. And it's uh I guess part of the game out here in the wilderness you know. So good stuff. Successful Shuckson. Jordan's trying to get all the spiderwebs off our van. A ritual. There's a thousand of them. Tired. Hungry. But back up the van. There's so many spiders just on the ******* road. Jordan's an MVP and he's gonna go toss it away. Oh my god I hate spiders. We got back from our backpacking trip and we think there's mice in the van too. There was a mouse in our van with Shuckson. Um there was poop all over our bed which is absolutely disgusting. And somehow almost no poop anywhere else. Didn't eat through anything and none of our food even though it could have gotten into it. Um nothing else really had poop in it. So pretty gross. Um we basically spent all day after we got back to town from Shuckson. Emptied our whole van out. Went into this parking lot. Um antibacterialized everything and then put it all back in. Uh currently we're throwing our pillows out. We're gonna wash all of our bed sheets that still has poop all over it. And um set some traps up in case it's still in the insulation and see where we go from there. So gotta wash all our dishes. Do all the laundry. Uh finish cleaning the apartment. Or sorry the van. Maybe stay in a hotel tonight while it airs out. So this sucks. Uh it glows. But you know that's where we are. We're living in a car. It dried on a high. That took like what four to five hours? Having to spend all day cleaning your van is uh nothing's open now. So we got cold meals from Safeway. Noodles and chicken and stuff. We 100% look homeless sitting out here in a strip mall in front of the plants on the little concrete thing. So that's where we're at. We're the people that everybody looks uh intimidated by I think. Because we're dirty. I haven't showered in uh 11 days now. And um we're eating meals that it looks like somebody gave us money to buy from Safeway. So you know this is what happens out here. This is a pink van. I figured it happened to get us down. But it happened to happen to someone. Now is the time. Unfortunately here in northern Washington. Can't win them all. We're literally standing on top of this sweet mountain yesterday morning. Woke up in the mountains today. The tent almost blew off the mountain. Got back to a bunch of mouse poop. Cleaning everything and now this is our night. So I think we're going to stay in a hotel. Do all of our dishes. Enjoy this food. And then finish our laundry in the morning. Checked into Makita for the night. And uh you guys a nice sign from the universe. In our room we have a giant picture of Mount Shuksan. Which we were literally standing on top of yesterday. So couldn't get a picture from afar because of all the smoke and everything. But that's where we were. That was the summit pyramid. We crossed that entire glacier. A huge chunk of snow. And then Simon climbed to the top of that. And here we are now at the bottom. Top of the world. Bottom of the trash heap. You really feel the whole range of spectrum of life out here. So you know this is what it is. Highs and lows. That's life. We are ready to go to bed. Take some showers in the morning. Do laundry. Do dishes. Get our ---- clean. But our instruction complete. Thanks Makita for the reminder. And uh we'll be back. We'll be back again. Top of more mountains to come. So full circle of life. So they said Lion King. And uh just living our best lives out here. Signing off. Washington. Touring gold. 2021. They have race walking as an Olympic sport. What's this feeling? Okay. 8,000 loads later. And everything we own is clean. All right van update. It's clean. Very clean. Probably the cleanest it's ever been. We're still in the new bedding. Um so we washed everything we could. We threw all the sheets away that had all the poop on them. That's ******* gross. That's not happening. Didn't want to catch a disease. You know there's a hantavirus salmonella. Variety of other things apparently you can catch just from inhaling the same air that their poop was in. So don't want to sleep on that. Carpet's actually right again. It was uh a nice dark brown from all the dirt and dust. Whatever. One mouse really screwed us for money and time. I mean everything we've looked up online seems to be that they come in for shelter but then eat everything in sight. There's holes in literally every cabinet in this van that they could have gotten the um food from but they didn't. I don't know what's going on. Maybe we got sweated out because the van gets so hot at night. Okay we're bouncing back from the mice dilemma by eating lots of fruit. We keep seeing people we know and we were at this random mountain biking trailhead in Bellingham and Jordan recognized these two people from his gym back in Colorado. So it's been so weird to see everyone we know in Washington. Blackberry harvest continues. Blackberries seem to be the most common plant in Washington. So uh we have to pick them every time we see that. Yeah so we've eaten endless. We bought eggs two weeks ago and we never ate them. So we have to eat six eggs tonight and then four tomorrow. Yikes. That's a lot of food. Oh yeah. But we just went to the gym so we're hungry. Protein it up right for a vegan time. We're gonna try at least a week of vegan and see how we feel and maybe hopefully continue it. This is our new vegan dinner. We're doing a test for endurance. We're going vegan. The sad part is no chicken. No eggs. No eggs but the good part is avocado and sweet potatoes and a mango beer. Wish us luck for the next week as we go vegan and see if we become superhuman. Okay we just got our COVID test done for crossing the Canadian border. Jordan's first COVID test. Not mine. That was an uncountable. But we know it's going to come out negative so I'm not going to say hopefully it comes out negative. We just went across into the Canadian border on the 9th. Medicine. We are at the base of Mount Baker. Like our day off. We're supposed to be in Canada right now but our COVID test is taking one to four to five days to process before we can get into Canada. It has to be 72 hours or we have to take another COVID test. So we're really hoping that this one gets processed today or tomorrow so that way we can hustle our way into Canada and then climb into Guam and make our way to Alaska. Right now we're just kind of trying to kill some time. There's a climbing wall on the side of the road that is very mossy but Jordan's checking out right now to see if it's worth climbing. If not we might go back to Bellingham and do some bouldering at a gym, go to a coffee shop, maybe run some errands. We also tried to go to Artist Point yesterday but it's been so cloudy and rainy that we couldn't see Baker or Shuksan from the top of the road. So we kind of sat in our van. It rained all night pretty hard and so we were kind of just stuck there. We watched Fantastic Fungi which was really really good. I've made tea, had a cozy day. It was kind of nice because Colorado obviously never has this kind of weather. It's very Pacific Northwest-y but it also kind of feels like you're trapped and um yeah we went down, we hung out at a coffee shop the rest of the day and now we're just kind of thinking like what can we do that's close to the border so that we can get in but also there's something like we need something to do. We're still stuck in Bellingham so we're bouldering today. I want to leave. I've got to tell you something. Guess what guys, we're back in Seattle. Oh my god. Bet you didn't think that was gonna happen. Hour and a half south then go three and a half hours back north. So our COVID test that we took three days ago, four days ago, has not been processed so we can't cross the Canadian border so we had to go find a rapid test that's not rapid just like a rapid PCR test and the only one available was in Seattle. For $185 each we got to drive down for two hours back to the city to go get tested for two seconds yeah so it's been a nice fun time here being trapped in Bellingham and now going back to the city. So now we're going to the flagship REI because I need to buy new TC Pro climbing shoes which is also another 200 bucks and I need to buy a rain cover for my backpack because Denali looks like it's going to be a bit rainy when we bike through. Shout out to Elise for checking the weather when we're not. So that's our current life update. Good stuff. That's Canada, we're at the border, there he is, we just can't get to him. We have to eat all our unmarked fruit before we go to Canada. These are all our currants, all the blackberries we've been picking which is the number one cause of our severe bloating. We've been having way too much fiber we're here starving yet seemingly full from all the fiber. Veganism is hard. Okay we just got our test results. Covid free. Covid free even though we knew that we feel great. We've been sitting in Starbucks for I don't know three four hours just waiting for our test results. Now we finally cross the border. We can cross the border. We'll be in Canada tonight. Squamish bound. America by breakfast, Canada by dinner. All right here we are. We are almost in Canada. That was the most time-consuming process of my entire life. That was a lot. Like 30 minutes of instructions to get our test results. We've now taken so many Covid tests in the past two days. I've gone from taking zero Covid tests in a year and a half to three within three days. Oh man but we're in Canada.