First of all, here are 80 or so pictures from the Rainier trip. I've put captions on the first bunch... hopefully I'll get around to doing the rest as well.

Since I haven't yet written a trip report, I'll bring you up to speed by mentioning that after we climbed to Camp Muir we befriended one of the local climbing rangers who turned out to be 100% awesome and agreed to climb with us to the summit once the weather stopped being complete crap. So that's who this Peter is that you see in so many of the pictures.

And speaking of Peter, he put us in the official Rainier Route Conditions blog.

We spent two hours at the summit, partly because the weather was awesome, but also partly because there are ice caves in the crater and also a geocache. Turns out Peter is into geocaching, so this was an easy sell. But how sweet is a single event that combines caving, mountaineering, and geocaching!? If only we had launched a rocket and maybe done some FPGA design while up there... Climb of the nerds indeed.

I'm off to Durango tomorrow for my second ever handball tournament. And let me tell you... I am going to suck because right now I feel like my toes might just come off. And my calves aren't too happy either. That, and I haven't played in the last two months as a result of all the mountaineering training. But whatever. Staying with a couple of local caving buddies there and hopefully will learn a few things about handball. Back Sunday.