While the redwoods this morning were great, once I got onto I-5 and into Oregon things got a bit less exciting — any state where pumping your own gas is illegal is suspect to begin with, and several hundred miles on the interstate didn’t make for any lasting moments. The afternoon’s highlight came when I began filling the tank at the Shell station only to find a rather scary looking man standing behind me saying “You’re in the wrong state for that. Did you know last year over 800 people lit themselves on fire while pumping gas? Better give me the pump.” There was a tale that followed about a guy hauling a barrel of diesel and a spark of static electricity, but fun stories like that one really need to be told in person.<\/p>\n
After arriving in Washington I tried to take the direct route up to Seattle, but Mt. St. Helen’s was calling to me, and despite my best efforts to stay the course I’m now camped out in the national forest adjoining the mountain. The plan for tomorrow is to get up early and make brief<\/i> visits to Mt. St. Helen’s and Mt. Ranier before getting back on the road to Alaska and hopefully making the most of the remaining good weather up there. Whether or not I can actually visit Mt. Ranier without getting out and hiking ten miles remains to be seen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While the redwoods this morning were great, once I got onto I-5 and into Oregon things got a bit less exciting — any state where pumping your own gas is illegal is suspect to begin with, and several hundred miles on the interstate didn’t make for any lasting moments. The afternoon’s highlight came when I … Continue reading “Mt. St. Helen’s National Monument, Washington”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal","tag-alaska"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1255,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/1255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mountaininterval.org\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}