South Sister

Earlier this week Kevin and I had the chance to finally climb South Sister just outside Bend. We dropped the girls off at camp on Sunday and then headed to central Oregon for a few days (early anniversary celebration).

There are 3 "sister" mountains  - North, Middle and South OR Faith, Hope and Charity. South Sister is the tallest of the three and is the third tallest mountain in Oregon. It's 10,358 feet tall and isn't a technical climb like Mt. Hood or other glacial peaks in the area. I don't usually look at a mountain and think to myself, "I need to stand on top of that mountain," but I have wanted to climb South Sister for a couple years. I think it's because it's really just more of a difficult hike and less of a mountain climbing adventure.

If you do the math, it's about 12 1/2 miles round trip. Not too bad. But what this sign doesn't say is that there is a 5000+ gain during this hike. It was steep, and despite being in pretty good shape, we were both very sore for several days.

1 3/4 miles in and you arrive at Moraine Lake. It's a beautiful lake - we've hiked here before with the girls. You can see better photos HERE.

Then we headed toward the mountain....

It's basically up hill the whole way. Without the girls we were able to hike at a pretty good pace and I didn't stop to get my camera out much. I was focused on putting one foot in front of the other. But there was a beautiful display of wildflowers about halfway up the mountain.

After hours of hiking we finally crossed the saddle between the Lewis Glacier and the Clark Glacier and found this beautiful little lake.

This is looking up at the trail we still have to climb. 

You can see from this pic that the clouds would roll in quite quickly. On a clear day, the views from up here are amazing. But it was cloudy and there were times when we could really only see our feet.

Our view of Broken Top mountain

When we got to the top of the mountain, you realize you still aren't at the actual summit. You are at the "false" summit. The actual summit was over there by those peaks...yes...we walked over there.

on the summit

One of my instagram friends had posted on her account that morning that she was watching her grandkids that day so her daughter could climb South Sister. I commented back that I, too, was climbing South Sister. So we exchanged some info and when we got to the top of the mountain I found her daughter.

parital view from the summit....We didn't stay up here too long. It was cloudy, windy and cool. Plus being at 10,000+ feet was making us a little dizzy with altitude sickness. 

So then we started the long hike down. Hiking down was worse than hiking up...it was very steep and much of the trail is just scree. Plus with a touch of altitude sickness, the initial descent was miserable.