It was an early July evening, perhaps back in 2000 or so, when Scott and I left the cars in the surprisingly empty overnight parking at Maroon Lake. It being summer and nice out, we eschewed our spring-weight packs full of extra clothing, go-food, and heavy metal climbing implements, and decided to see how light we could make this trip. Truth being, I think we were both pretty tired after several days of hiking, and our motivation levels were waning quickly for the week. Our packs were light, only enough to get us through the night - a bit of non-cook food, sleeping bags, a gore-tex each, and Scott's amazing, old, light-green Boy Scout pup tent (with real 3-section aluminum poles and everything!).
Even though it was after 6pm, it was still hot and even the relatively flat hike past Maroon Lake to Crater Lake wasn't fun. We took a right at the Buckskin Pass trail and started climbing up, thankful for the tree cover and shade. No one else was out hiking today beyond Maroon Lake and the flat tourist area around the parking lots, a light breeze in the trees and the rushing of the creek the only sounds. We were still actually enjoying being outside at this point, not quite ready to head back to the deserts that we called home, walking through the dry but still relatively lush forest. Shortly after leaving the hiker's trail for the fainter, steeper climber's approach trail, we hopped across the small creek and began to beat back thick bog bushes, growing up to our heights even on the quickly steepening side of the vale; the trail begins to 4th class on eroded mud and broken rocks very quickly adding five hundred feet of elevation.
Just prior to reaching the headwall of the mountain's North Face (or so it appears as you're hiking up to it, anyway - it's actually another 20 minutes of boulder-hopping before you could touch the wall, if you were so inclined), the trees give way to the Grassy Gully under the watch of the Notch and North Faces; small rolling knolls of grass, dandelion, thistle, and clover, with occasional seat-sized rocks that have jumped the trough ahead. Even the bushes give way up here, around 11,200', to low tangles of branches that faintly resemble trees spread out on the ground rather than having grown upwards. And, although we didn't notice it as we were arriving, as you look down towards the valley and lakes far below, almost without exception the first hundred feet of trees are burned, blasted, or have old scars across their bark from lightning strikes in years past.
Scott and I set up his little pup tent, using rocks to hold out the corners and tie-downs, on top of a small rise fifty feet above the last stunted, twisted tree on the trail. The front was positioned perfectly to watch the sun rise over Pyramid Peak, across the valley, and to catch a small angle of the lightening breeze still wafting down from up-valley. As the sun had dropped below the Notch ridge west of us as we had climbed, twilight was now fast approaching. We scarfed down a little food (triscuits and random MRE parts, not exactly the gourmet meals that we'd have really liked just then) and a liter of water each, and decided to get up early and summit around dawn. Watching the valley and Pyramid fade into blackness from above treeline was amazing.
We had been sleeping (or working on it, anyway) for about 20 minutes when it started to drizzle lightly outside. This was particularly strange, we thought, because as we had watched the last lights of the day go completely dark, the sky had been perfectly clear. No breeze or anything. Amusingly, I was informed at this point that the pup tent, although not technically a four-season
freestanding expedition tent, was perfectly suitable for this application, had been through much worse, and that I had nothing to worry about from the tent.
After maybe an hour of dozing, with the drizzle still coming down, I awoke to loud thrashing. The wind was gusting in seemingly all directions at once, at probably 50 knots, and despite the earlier assurances, I had severe doubts that this particular tent couldn't stand up to the beating. Along with that, giant raindrops (we thought it was hail at first) were just pounding at the walls, denting the fabric with each hit, and soaking through. For probably 20 minutes we just spread out on the floor of the tent and just tried to hold it down. You couldn't hear either one of us talking at a normal volume, the wind and rain were so loud on the tent.
After the first half hour burst, the precipitation and wild winds seemed to let off some, and we dozed back off while it kept drizzling. The first indication it was about to really get bad was a bright light that you could see while dozing, with your eyes closed, and maybe two seconds later a moderate boom from the thunder. Call the speed of sound around 750m/s; the direction of the light source put that one up near the peak of North Maroon, well above us. We were pretty well awake again at this point, beginning to wonder why we were stuck in yet another storm above treeline. Opening the tent's front door and pushing our ice axes a little ways away from the tent seemed prudent; the light show from the storm, all around in the distance, was spectacular.. It was still just drizzling, but the last 2-1/2 hours of rain had unsettled quite a number of rocks further up the gully and down the main slide paths. Continuously we heard little shifts of rocks, and every once in a while a good-sized landslide of rocks and mud. That also was worrisome, but we were on high ground away from the gully's edge, and only a few strays apparently made it down off the wall, across and through the gully, and back up to the meadows we were camped on.
We discussed, while listening to the rocks fall away and the rain hit the tent, if it was really worth getting up early to climb. We decided it probably wouldn't do us any good to try climbing until the sun dried all the rocks we'd have to be climbing, so we said, ah, whenever we get up is good. Well, I'd closed my eyes again and was just hoping to fall asleep solidly when the green fabric walls of the tent got nearly transparent with light, and with a flash-to-bang time of exactly zero, the second loudest noise I'd ever heard picked me, in my sleeping bag, off the ground. (The loudest was in IOBC; they set off a 155mm HE shell next to the bunker we were in to show us what they could do. We got earplugs for that one.) The bolt had apparently hit just above us, on a pinnacle of rock maybe 200m up the gully. Well, no time for bravado now. We put on our boots, threw on our parkas and headlamps, and traipsed out straight down the hill a couple of hundred meters so there were some trees and rocks above us, and there we sat, hunched in the low bushes, in the rain, for about 45 minutes. Someone down at the campground/parking area had apparently seen our headlamps moving around, a few miles away and several thousand feet above, because they were shining what had to be mag-lites back at us, possibly attempting to signal us. I hope they understood that we were the ones in the not good spot. We turned off our lamps to save batteries and not have a rescue party come up after us.
Nothing else came close to where we were set up, but there were spectacular strikes all down the valley as the mini-storm pushed by us. It just kept drizzling on us, reminding us I suppose, that we should have known better (as we certainly should have). After we saw the storm exit the canyon and had had nothing shooting at us for 20 minutes or so, we climbed back up to the knoll, picked up the tent with our gear still in it, and carried it down the hill towards where we had been hunched, in a small mostly flat clearing. Not easy without a freestanding tent, in the dark and rain, going down a steep, muddy, bushy slope. We finished setting everything back up by about 0100, and I fell right to sleep.
I woke up about 0730, and poor Scott looked like he hadn't slept all night after the excitement. It was surprisingly dry on the tundra and rocks already, though anywhere there had been dirt it was just like mud soup. There wasn't anything else to do on a beautiful, clear, warm, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky day but go on up, so we threw on our packs and set off. The new rock slides and mudflows in the gully testified to the strength of the water and storm the previous night, but the remaining 3000' of climbing were dry or just damp, and extremely (and not surprisingly) anticlimactic.