Outlaw Biker Cousins on 10-Speeds vs. the Volcano

At the end of the summer of ’92, my cousin Luke and I decided to ride our bikes to Mt. St. Helens. We were going to find a path to the top even if we were the first people to do so.

I can still remember the decision point. We were sitting on the porch at my house talking about Mt. St. Helens for some reason. It came up from time to time because hey, there she was, brooding on the northern horizon our entire lives. Just as she had been since flea-bitten Lewis and Clark first strolled down the Columbia, and millennia before that. 

Well, not JUST as she always had been. On May 18, 1980, she’d had a bit of work done.

Luke is about four years younger than me. As with all of the men in my family, he’s more pragmatic, aggressive, and therefore more successful. (All I got from the gene pool was the good looks and humility.) From the time we were kids, Luke was able to tap into some otherworldly energy source that would they would definitely try to drug out of him nowadays. We’d call it A.D.D. 

Back then, as today, it was his fire.

Luke probably came up with the Big Idea first. When he proposed it, I no doubt waffled and came up with all the reasons it couldn’t be done. He persisted, likely for hours, until we were finally packing up some gear and supplies to strap to our bikes. In a move that would be unthinkable nowadays, we got permission from our parents to ride all the way up to the volcano on narrow, two-lane roads used by stoned loggers.