Human Powered 100 Peaks: The Washington State Duo Who Biked and Hiked the Entire Bulger List in a Summer

Meet Jeff Hashimoto and Langdon Ernest-Beck. This duo climbed the 100 tallest peaks in Washington State and accomplished the feat by riding bicycles for the entire journey. This human powered adventure took 107 days to complete.

Join us as we delve into the diverse ecosystems and magnificent views that are forever etched in Jeff and Langdon’s memories

Dive into the exhilarating experience of swimming in crystal clear waters, mirroring the feeling of being on a high peak, overseeing the beauty of the surrounding valleys and peaks!

Gain different perspectives with every climb, as Langdon and Jeff explore unique peaks with their own weather, geology, and perspectives.

Learn from their challenges, triumphs, and moments of pure awe as they conquer each peak, including the majestic Mount Baker!

Whether you’re an experienced climber or a curious listener, this episode is full of inspiration, advice, and breathtaking tales from Jeff and Langdon, and the heart-stopping peaks of Washington State! Listen now and elevate your adventure game!

Mental Tricks and Relentless Positivity: “I used all those tricks at some point in the summer, so being in the moment is really important… just reminding myself that, hey, I can do this, or it’s not that far, or I can get this next little bit. And just being really positive, those were some of the things that it took.”

— Jeff Hashimoto

Find out more on Langdon’s website here.

Jeff Hashimoto and Langdon Ernest-Beck Episode Transcript

Hello, friends, and welcome to the Exploring Washington state podcast. My name is Scott Cowan and I’m the host of the show. Each episode, I have a conversation with an interesting guest who is living in or from Washington state. These are casual conversations with real and interesting people. I think you’re going to like the show. So let’s jump right in with today’s guest. All right. Well, I’m sitting here with Jeff Hashimoto and Langdon.

Scott Cowan [00:00:28]:

Ernest Beck. I did say that, right? I always second guess myself every episode. For those of you who listen to us, this is Scott messing up again. But we’re going to roll with it. All right, guys, you did something crazy. You climbed 100 of the tallest peaks in Washington state and you did it in one season. But if that’s not enough, you use bicycles to get to them. Jeff, what I’ve read is you were the brains behind this idea initially.

Scott Cowan [00:00:57]:

What on earth were you thinking?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:01:01]:

I’m not sure if brains is the right term, but I’ve done a lot of stuff in the mountains for my whole life, pretty much. And I’ve done a lot of trail running and I like setting out crazy challenges and trying to do hard things, do challenging things. And then it kind of came about in a couple of ways.

But one of the things I did about 25 years ago was bicycle to our local mountain, mount Stewart, which is really visible from Ellensburg, and climbed it and bicycled back. And it struck me that people asked me about that a lot more than a lot of other things that I’ve done. And that was something that just kind of like, I don’t know, it had a certain appeal to it that was kind of cool. And I think the idea of human powered kind of grew on me as concerned for climate change and carbon emissions because,

like I said, I’ve done a lot of stuff in the mountains, but I’ve also traveled a lot and emitted a lot of carbon in traveling to the mountains. So the idea of doing human power takes on more importance the worse that climate change gets.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:02:14]:

I kind of had been looking at these mountains and I thought, I wonder if it’d be possible to do those in a year. And I wasn’t really sure it’d be possible, but I thought it might be. And so I kind of hatched that idea. And then Langdon approached me and was like, langdon and I were talking and he’s like, hey, I’d like to do some video. And then you can pick that interrupt.

Scott Cowan [00:02:40]:

Because I read this part about how Langdon was training before you kind of decided to let him come along. So it was like, what? Wait a second. I’m not going to let you off the hook. Jeff, when did you come up with the, AHA, this is what I wanted. This is the idea, like you kind of crystallized it actually was in June.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:03:02]:

Of 2022, so about a year before we did it.

Scott Cowan [00:03:05]:

Okay. And when did you approach Langdon? How did he hear about the idea?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:03:10]:

Well, we’re neighbors, so we see each other a lot. And we talked that summer. He was talking about doing a video for it. And then, see, I think we’ve told this story differently, which is not he didn’t really ask permission. He just said, do you think I have the skills to do this trip?

Scott Cowan [00:03:30]:

Okay. All right.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:03:31]:

And at that time, I said, well, probably not. But then he basically spent all of summer 2022 climbing mountains and developing all the skills that he would need. It was really cemented. I think we did a trip together, just a day trip around sokwami pass, climbing a bunch of the peaks around commonwealth basin. And it was like, oh, yeah, this is like you’ve learned all these was.

Scott Cowan [00:04:01]:

So he had the skills and the aptitude, and more importantly, he put in the work.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:04:06]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:04:06]:

Jeff, you’re a school teacher. You are cross country instructor for the school.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:04:13]:

Yeah, I coach cross country. I coach track and field. And also we have a cross country ski team that’s a club team.

Scott Cowan [00:04:20]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:04:20]:

So I kind of coach a lot.

Scott Cowan [00:04:21]:

Yeah. So you like to exert yourself in long distance type of things. Have you ever completed a marathon?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:04:31]:

That is a fair statement. I’ve completed a bunch of marathons. No, I’ve done ultra trail runs. I’ve done the fat dog 120 miles trail run in British Columbia. That’s outside magazine touted it as one of the, I think, nine toughest trail runs in the world.

Scott Cowan [00:04:55]:

Okay. Langdon, have you ever done a marathon?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:04:58]:

No.

Scott Cowan [00:04:59]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:05:04]:

But he has run 30 miles.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:05:07]:

Yeah, I guess I’ve done a marathon, but not as a race.

Scott Cowan [00:05:10]:

Not as a race. Okay. All right. So langdon, what about Jeff’s idea? Spoke to you?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:05:21]:

Well, pretty much any idea that Jeff has is usually great, and it just sounded like a fantastic adventure, and it was something that never had been done before. And so, at the beginning, I was really interested in just documenting the expedition. And then as I started getting in the mountains more and spending time climbing with Jeff, I kind of realized that it would be fun just to do the whole thing as well.

Scott Cowan [00:05:50]:

Okay. Yeah. So, what you guys accomplished is it the bulger list? Is that what it’s called? Actually, I’m mispronouncing that.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:05:59]:

I think it is the bulger list.

Scott Cowan [00:06:03]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:06:05]:

Which is the historical list of the hundred highest peaks in Washington that was developed back in the late 70s by a group of mountaineers that called themselves the bulgers.

Scott Cowan [00:06:19]:

Do we know why?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:06:23]:

We do know why. We do know why.

Scott Cowan [00:06:25]:

Can we share?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:06:26]:

Yes. There is an Australian poem that one of these mountaineers had memorized and was reciting on a climbing trip, and he mispronounced the word bludgers as bulgers, and it stuck.

Scott Cowan [00:06:46]:

Stuck. Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:06:47]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:06:50]:

Well, one of the things I’m sorry, go ahead.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:06:53]:

There are a number of lists of mountains in the state that people are interested in. So this one was kind of the historical list of the highest 100 mountains. And at first it was kind of a closed list just to the members of this climbing club, and then it was publicized. And there’s some rather arcane rules for picking peaks.

And for example, there is a peak called Horseshoe Peak, which is not a particularly prominent peak, but is included in the list a lot of times. If two peaks are right next to each other and they’re basically connected, then only one of them will count. So that the amount that a peak stands out is called its prominence. And so peaks are considered usually to have to have 400ft of prominence unless they’ve had some historical interest.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:07:43]:

And the Bulgers made that list, and that was the first list of its type. And they made it as soon as the surveys of the Poseidon were done, and there were really good maps. And so they poured over these maps, finding these peaks that satisfied the criteria, including some new peaks which they named, that hadn’t even been named or climbed before, which is pretty cool.

Scott Cowan [00:08:02]:

Like, give me an example of one.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:08:05]:

Monument Peak is in the Poseitan up monument Creek. And there are three peaks in there, monument Lake and Blackcap, which were they identified on these new surveyed maps and thought, hey, I don’t think anyone’s climbed this peak or any of these peaks. They made the first ascent of two of them.

And then word got out to mountaineer and peak bagger extraordinaire Fred Becky that one of these peaks might be unclimbed still, and he actually scooped the first ascent from the Bulgers. And when the Bulgers arrived on top, I guess there was a cairn that Becky had left. But anyway, so there’s this historical list, and there’s other lists around, too.

But one of the funny things this summer is there’s another guy who’s out surveying these mountains and trying to figure out the strict 400ft foot prominence list and resurveying with modern equipment and is sort of changing the list, which, to the chagrin of mountaineers who’ve already accomplished a list, only to find that it changes. But the Bulger list is unchanging.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:09:11]:

It’s kind of the traditional list, and that’s the one that most people choose to do.

Scott Cowan [00:09:17]:

When you decided to do this, you said basically in June of 22, so you did this when did you guys start you started in May of 23, right. Didn’t you start reading that? So less than a year of planning here.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:09:32]:

That’s correct, yeah, which seems short to.

Scott Cowan [00:09:36]:

Me, because do you have to get permits? Some of these are like you just don’t go like rainier. You just don’t get to go up climb up rainier on Tuesday afternoon for the heck of it. Or do you?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:09:54]:

Well, you can. Some places are hard to get permits for. St. Helens is the hardest to get permits for because it’s very popular.

Scott Cowan [00:10:03]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:10:03]:

And so permits become available on the first of every month for the following month and they’re gone within a couple of hours. So we were actually in the mountains and my wife got online. I told my wife, let’s get a permit for August 16, and so she got on and got the permits for us because we didn’t have cell coverage that morning to do it on July 1.

Scott Cowan [00:10:34]:

Okay, so out of the 100 peaks, did you have to get permits for all 100?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:10:41]:

Oh, no.

Scott Cowan [00:10:42]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:10:43]:

No, but there are a lot of peaks, like in North Cascades National Park, where you need to permit to camp overnight, not necessarily to climb, but a lot of those permits are available. Like you can just walk up to the ranger station and if they have availability, then you can get a permit.

Scott Cowan [00:11:03]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:11:04]:

And we were very fortunate to go to the North Cascades Ranger Station in Marble Mount on, like, a Tuesday or something because we just walked in and got a permit and we encountered some people a few days later. Who were there on a Friday morning and said that there’s a little take a number thing and said that there were 100 people ahead of them in line.

Scott Cowan [00:11:25]:

That’s mind boggling to me that there’s that many people running around climbing peaks.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:11:31]:

Well, and that’s not just climbing, that’s just to go camp to camp in the natural.

Scott Cowan [00:11:37]:

So how did you decide what order you were going to climb the list in?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:11:45]:

That’s one thing that’s really figuring out the route was a big part of the planning. And we started on the east, partly because we live on the east side and worked our way up the east side.

And one of the big worries was fire, and the east side is drier, and so we were worried that we would get shut down by wildfires. And there have been some pretty big fires that have shut down big areas, including this year, there were four areas where we were that were later closed by fire, but the closest we were was, what, four or five days away, but the east side we were more worried about.

So we worked our way up the east side and then across the North Cascades Highway to the west side. Most of the peaks are in the North Cascades and then all the way south to St. Helens and Mount Adams.

Scott Cowan [00:12:39]:

So I’m going to ask this one question. I’d like both of you to answer it independently of each other. Put your hands on your ears so you don’t hear the other one answer, something like that. But out of the hundred peaks, which was the most difficult for you to.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:12:51]:

Climb, we don’t have to plug our ears because I think we know this.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:12:55]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:12:55]:

Is it the same for both of you?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:12:58]:

No.

Scott Cowan [00:12:59]:

Okay. All right.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:13:02]:

Yeah. For me, the most difficult peak was mount St. Helens.

Scott Cowan [00:13:09]:

Really? Why is that?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:13:10]:

Not because traditionally it’s not that hard of a peak to climb, but our circumstances were such that we had to climb on August 16, the day of our permit. And we woke up in Shahalis on August 16 and still had something like 120 miles to go on our bikes. So we didn’t end up getting to the trailhead until around 10:00 p.m.. And we climbed through the night and I was very dehydrated.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:13:48]:

It was the hottest day of the year.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:13:49]:

It was the hottest day of the year, and it was borderline hallucinating and it was not a very pleasant experience.

Scott Cowan [00:13:59]:

So wait a second, you rode 120 miles that day and then you climbed St. Helens on top of it and came back down St. Helens?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:14:12]:

Yeah, it took us a little more than a day. I think we got back to the trailhead at, like, 630 in the morning or something.

Scott Cowan [00:14:20]:

Okay, Jeff, if that wasn’t the hardest one for you, I really am scared to hear your answer, but what was the hardest peak for?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:14:28]:

Oh, the hardest peak for me was probably Snowfield, which is in the north Cascades, and we both came down with some intestinal illness, which leading candidate is something like Nordovirus. And so we had been feeling fairly sick on Jack Mountain the day before, and then the next day we just lay in our sleeping bags all day long and felt fairly bad.

And then the next morning we woke up to climb snowfield Mountain, and it initially went pretty well. And then in the middle of the day, my intestines started to act up and I started feeling pretty nauseated. I think really the problem, I wasn’t really able to take in food and water, so I just was out of energy and dehydrated.

And on the hike down from Snowfield, actually it’s a very steep hike down, but even at the end there’s 2 miles on a trail and I was just really suffering on the trail. And I had to stop, I think, three times in that two mile hike down on a downhill trail just to lie down and kind of gather myself to make it the rest of the way. And then when I got to the trailhead, I still had 30 miles to ride back to get to Marble Mount that night.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:15:54]:

So I think that was the toughest day for me. I wasn’t sure I was going to make that day. And we haven’t mentioned the other character on our trip was, uhuru, my son, who probably did 95% of the work on the trip and climbed about 60% of the peaks. But, uhuru, was dealing with recovering from a back injury, so we weren’t even sure he was interested in the trip initially.

But then we weren’t sure if it was going to work. So he started off with us, and we thought, well, maybe he’s just going to go bike for a few days with us.

And then he just kept plugging along. And it worked out pretty well, because when he needed a rest day, he could just take one and we would climb up some peaks and he he would rest or he would do fewer peaks, but then he ended up doing all the biking and doing lots and lots of hiking and being along on the trip.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:16:54]:

But I got to the trailhead on that snowfield day, and Huru was waiting for me, and I think I would have just collapsed there on the side of the road if he hadn’t been there. But he’s like, hey, let’s go ride down there. We’ll be okay. I want some we we worked our way there and got there a couple of hours after Langdon or a few hours after Langdon got there.

Scott Cowan [00:17:18]:

Oh, my gosh. Well, you just kind of casually said he did most of the biking, and there’s an article out here that says you guys biked almost 1900 miles. Okay? So that’s not a little bit of biking. That’s a lot of biking, and that you climbed almost 835 miles. And earlier, we were talking this article says 381,781ft of elevation. Langdon, you told me it was a little more than that.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:17:47]:

Yeah, well, if you add the hiking elevation with the biking elevation okay. Then it comes out to pretty much half a million.

Scott Cowan [00:17:58]:

That’s crazy to me. I don’t know how you guys did it, and I think that’s why I’m talking to you is I want to figure out how on earth you guys accomplished this. So I have more questions. What was the most peaks you did in one day?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:18:16]:

The most peaks we did in one day was five.

Scott Cowan [00:18:20]:

Okay. And how long of a day was that?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:18:22]:

Which we did two times.

Scott Cowan [00:18:24]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:18:30]:

Both of those days were probably 18 or 19 hours.

Scott Cowan [00:18:37]:

And how much recovery then the next day, were you going out the next day, or did you take a day off to recover?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:18:46]:

One of them was on a weekend trip in May while Jeff was still teaching. So we had the next day. I had the next day to rest. Jeff had to work, and then.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:18:58]:

The.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:18:58]:

Other day, we did five peaks. We probably slept five for 6 hours and kept going the next day.

Scott Cowan [00:19:11]:

OK, so, Jeff, you did five peaks, and you went and taught school the next day. First off, I don’t know. Kudos to you for being a yeah, but what did your students think of this?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:19:29]:

I think they think it’s pretty cool. In May, when this was happening, I think a few of them knew what was going on, and I talked to a few of them, or I talked to some of the classes that I teach and the kids that I coach, but I wasn’t even sure we were going to pull it off.

So I was not trying to hype it up too much or anything, but certainly all the runners knew because we do summer running and I wasn’t going to be there for that, so they all knew and then, yeah, probably those weren’t the most inspiring teaching days that I’ve had. Although actually I feel like that day after the first trip, I was pretty energetic that day, actually.

We were in Leavenworth and we were biking back home over Bluetooth Pass. I’m not that good at staying up super late and so we’re biking along and it’s getting to be like 1011 o’clock and Lane is like, let’s just go home. I don’t care what time we get home, it could be four in the morning, that’ll be fine. And I’m like, okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:20:36]:

But I was falling asleep on the bike and I said, Lana, I don’t think I can ride. I’m going to just wake up and be crashed on the side of the road. And Linus like, that’s ridiculous, you can’t fall asleep on the bike. How is that even possible? But I convinced him to stop. He later learned that that is possible. I convinced him to stop.

So we slept and it rained that night and we were in a tent and we woke up in the morning pretty early to bike the rest of the way home. And it was fairly close for me to get back in time to make it to school to teach class, but I did have enough time to go to a local coffee shop and get some coffee and some breakfast and I might have been hyped up on a lot of caffeine that morning.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:21:27]:

You did not go home before teaching?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:21:28]:

No, I did not go home before teaching.

Scott Cowan [00:21:30]:

You went to the class after riding your bike and climbing and no shower?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:21:36]:

That’s correctly. Why? Yeah, I used some deodorant and I’d left my teaching clothes from the previous week there, so I had from the previous Friday so I could go and change into those and try not to stand too close to people.

Scott Cowan [00:21:58]:

What was the longest bicycling leg on this thing? Mileage wise? You said 120 from Shahalas to St. Helens, but yeah.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:22:11]:

The longest single day was probably maybe the day before that and it was maybe 140 or 150 miles, but the stretch from the North Cascades where we were actually BC down to St. Helens ended up being something like 425 miles that we did in three days.

Scott Cowan [00:22:41]:

What route did you take, how did you go?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:22:46]:

We took a bunch of odd bike paths down the west side and county roads. Yeah, kind of a mix of bike paths, county roads, city roads, and this.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:23:02]:

Is kind of the thing that’s different about the west side and the east side. So when we map out a bike route, like from here to Leavenworth or here to Mazama, if you just look at it on google Maps. For a car and a bike, it’s basically the same route, but on the west side, you can drive down I Five, and it’s fairly direct, but on a bicycle, there’s all this east, west, and so on.

And so I thought this was going to be 300 or so miles, and that bike ride turned out to be, like, 420 miles. I mean, it was so much longer, really. Biking in urban areas, there’s just so much extra side to side and finding ways. Across the Stilleguamish river, there’s, like, not a bridge, except for the I Five bridge. And then there’s the Centennial Trail Bridge.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:23:51]:

But our infrastructure is all designed around cars right now.

Scott Cowan [00:23:59]:

You bring up a good point. So how did you guys cross the Still Guam? On the Centennial Trail Bridge.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:24:07]:

Yeah, that was correct. That was a pretty good bike trail.

Scott Cowan [00:24:09]:

Yeah. Okay. Have you ever done the STP, either of you? Seattle to Portland. Bike ride.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:24:15]:

No.

Scott Cowan [00:24:16]:

You should probably try Seattle, right? From Seattle to Portland in a day.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:24:21]:

Yeah, it doesn’t have any.

Scott Cowan [00:24:25]:

A friend I had a friend once who was going to do it, and they asked me, they said, hey, can you drop me off at the U in the morning and then pick me up in Portland in the afternoon? Yeah, sure. We’re going to go down to Eugene for music event the next day. And I go, how long is it going to take you? And I can’t remember exactly. It was this a long time ago? Like 11 hours and 15 minutes or something.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:24:48]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:24:48]:

Okay, whatever. And they were, like, off by, like, three minutes. I mean, they had this thing. They knew what they were doing. I don’t know, but it’s awe inspiring to watch all those bicyclists start off all at once in just a big old herd of them. All right, we’ve talked about your bikes, but we haven’t talked about your bikes. How much gear were you guys carrying around? Because you got to carry some camping supplies and you got to carry some climbing supplies, and you can only carry so much on a bike.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:25:19]:

And food. You missed food.

Scott Cowan [00:25:22]:

Okay, that’s very unlikely to miss food. How did you guys coordinate supplies and all of that on this?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:25:33]:

So one of the things is we wanted to carry all our own gear, and then we mailed resupplies, but we didn’t want to have someone driving along and bringing us stuff. Because if the purpose was to be carbon emissions free, then having someone drive along kind of defeats the purpose. Like, if that’s the case, we could just ride with them. So we had mailed resupplies, and then we had gear. We had front and rear bike racks. We did not use trailers, but we had front and rear bike racks with bags all over them. But food was a major weight, especially on this section across the North Gas Cades Highway, because there’s not a place to get food between Mazama and Marble Mountain. So there’s a long stretch with a lot of peaks of about 16 days or so where we had a lot of food to bike up Washington Pass with.

Scott Cowan [00:26:31]:

Okay, so, weight wise, what do you think you were probably carrying then?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:26:38]:

I think when we left Mizama, my bike was maybe 110 pounds.

Scott Cowan [00:26:50]:

Okay. By the time you got done with that leg, cowan to about 20. Just kidding.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:26:57]:

But, no, I think I figured that I had about started with about 50 pounds of food, maybe a little less. Maybe like 40 pounds of food.

Scott Cowan [00:27:13]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:27:14]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:27:14]:

And it’s got to be food that’s easy to prepare, too. It’s not like you’re in refrigeration. And there’s just a lot of logistics that you guys crammed into a really brief period of time of massive activity.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:27:30]:

Yeah, that’s true. And then in terms of camping gear and climbing gear, we went pretty light. We were really trying to not have any unnecessary stuff and have the lightest gear that we could. And if there was a piece of gear that we didn’t think we’d need, we would not bring it. We went as light as we could. I think in retrospect, we’re like, oh, maybe we could have saved a little weight here and there, but we did a pretty good job with keeping the equipment really light.

Scott Cowan [00:27:59]:

Well, one question about equipment, and this is for Langdon what camera were you using? Because your photography that you’ve got going on here, it’s beautiful. Kudos to you. So what were you using?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:28:11]:

Yeah, I was shooting on the same camera that’s sitting that is shooting us right now, which is a full frame Sony mirrorless camera.

Scott Cowan [00:28:23]:

Like an a seven.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:28:25]:

Yes. A 74.

Scott Cowan [00:28:27]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:28:27]:

And it’s not particularly light, but I.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:28:34]:

Wanted to be able to take the.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:28:35]:

Photos and the video, and so that was kind of a necessary piece of equipment for me.

Scott Cowan [00:28:41]:

How many lenses did you take with you?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:28:44]:

Just one lens, 20 to 40.

Scott Cowan [00:28:48]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:28:49]:

Yeah.

Scott Cowan [00:28:51]:

How did you keep that’s cool? I’m scrolling on your website right now, looking at the explosion of the Sourdough Ridge fires. That’s the photo I’m looking at. That was, like caught my eye.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:29:00]:

Okay.

Scott Cowan [00:29:02]:

From a battery standpoint, what were you required to what did you bring along?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:29:08]:

I had two batteries, a solar charger, and then every time we would roll through town, even if it was just, like, stopping for lunch, we’d, like, plug in all of our electronics. And then we each had a rechargeable battery pack that we could use to recharge phones or the camera. But really, the camera was not ever a problem to keep charged. The batteries last forever, it seems.

Scott Cowan [00:29:48]:

What were people like when you ran across the mountain while you were doing this? Because on some of it, I read there were some other hikers on the same things you guys were doing that individual. Well, Jeff what did your wife think of all this?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:30:07]:

I mean, she’s been married to me for a long time. I think she kind of rolls her eyes when I come up with ideas. And so she was awesome. She was very mean. I guess the first thing is that I said, hey, I’ve got this idea. And she didn’t say, heck no. She was like, oh, that sounds cool. She was supportive, but, yeah, she’s awesome.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:30:38]:

She’s very understanding.

Scott Cowan [00:30:40]:

She got you your pass for St. Helen. So she plays a role. Probably a lot more than that in this, too. But how about when you ran into people when you’re out climbing and you’re out doing your were, I’m sure you’re having some conversations with the people you met out there. What was the general consensus of people?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:30:58]:

Well, I think Lana did a good job posting stuff on some Facebook groups. And so one thing that was really funny is we would run into somebody. And a lot of times, if you see someone way out in the first of all, most of the first peaks that we the first 40 or 50 peaks, we didn’t see anyone. I think of the first 50 peaks, we saw people on rainier, and we saw someone on Remmel mountain, but those were the only two mountains where we saw people, and so we didn’t see that many people. But once we started seeing people in some of the more popular peaks and during the high part of the season, there was a time where we saw someone and struck up a conversation. What are you doing? Oh, we’re climbing the bulger peaks this summer with human power. And they would say, oh, you’re those guys. And that happened a bunch of times in a row.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:31:56]:

Kind of the funniest instance of that is we were biking up to a trailhead, and it was evening, it was late, and it was still light, but we’re biking up, and there’s a couple camped in their van by the side of the road, and we bike by it, and we just say hello. And then a few seconds later, one of them comes running up to us and says, hey, wait, are you the guys climbing all the bulgers this summer, human powered? And we’re like, yeah, that’s us. And he’s like, oh, my gosh, you’re those guys.

Scott Cowan [00:32:25]:

You should have shirts made that said we’re those guys on the back.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:32:30]:

So that was pretty cool. There was once where okay, one question is, what do you use for a helmet? Do you use a climbing helmet or a bicycling helmet? So I consulted with a friend of mine who works on climbing helmets and works on climbing gear and asked him about safety trade offs and what he would recommend. And he said, the safety features are pretty similar for impact protection, but biking helmets can have more holes, so they can have better ventilation. So I took a biking helmet and. Who took climbing helmets. But at one point, we’re on a mountain, and someone looked at me and it’s like, why are you wearing a biking helmet? Do you bike here? And I said, well, actually, yeah. And they said, oh, you’re those guys.

Scott Cowan [00:33:10]:

Those guys. Oh, my gosh, that’s actually interesting because, yeah, double duty, the helmet would be something you could save weight on by going with one versus carrying two. Okay. You’re those guys. You said earlier that you weren’t talking to the kids about it because you weren’t sure you were going to do it, that you weren’t going to be able to accomplish it. 100 hikes is 100 peaks. That’s a lot of work. When did you guys come to the conclusion, we’re going to get this done?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:33:47]:

I don’t think that we thought we’d get it done for sure until, like, two weeks before we finished because there’s so many unknown variables with fires and weather and injury.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:34:09]:

Sickness.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:34:09]:

Sickness. But going into the trip, I think there’s a video of us somewhere, and I think I gave it, like, a 30% chance of success.

Scott Cowan [00:34:21]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:34:22]:

And then I think around the halfway mark, we were ticking off peaks pretty good, and my mindset kind of changed, and I was like, this is actually if things keep going well and there’s not some catastrophe, then this is possible for us to complete other than for you, Jeff.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:34:47]:

I think there was well, the other moment that it’s one thing to lay all these things out in a spreadsheet, which is what I did, like, planning the calendar of, okay, we’ll climb these peaks on this day, and how long will this take? And the funny thing is, at the beginning, we had, like, eight or so extra days, and we even were like, oh, well, there’s these other really cool peaks that aren’t on this bulger list. Maybe we’ll go climb those because they’re right would be right there, and that would be really fun to go climb those. And at some point later in the summer, we just looked back, like, remember when we thought we would have some extra time and we just laughed about but so it’s one thing to sit there with a spreadsheet and a schedule and plan it out, and it’s another thing to actually be out there. And on our very first trip of the summer, where we were up the Chihuahua River north of Leavenworth, we had a lot of snow, we had thunderstorms, we had bad weather, and it was just a hard trip, and I thought it was going to take three days, and it took us four days. And we got back to our bikes at, like, midnight on the fourth day. So it was much longer than I thought. And I was like, wow, if that trip takes 33% longer, then this is not going to happen. And we biked to a diner and plane and got some food the next morning, and we’re getting ready for our next trip.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:36:07]:

And I was talking to my wife on the phone, and I said, I don’t know if we’re going to do our we’re already way behind. And Landon overheard that, and he afterwards just said, no, I think we can do. And so that was a nice dose of optimism because I was getting kind of I mean, I you know, it was four days into the summer, and I was feeling a bit down about it, but then weather improved. We still had a lot of thunderstorms during the first few weeks of the trip. Our feet were wet almost all the time. But once the weather got better, and even with the thunderstorms the nice thing is the thunderstorms would come up in the afternoon so you could wake up early, climb peaks, move, and then if you got pinned down by a thunderstorm, we still were able to accomplish some of the climbs every day. Okay, I still haven’t answered your question of when I thought we were going to do it.

Scott Cowan [00:37:04]:

I was going to let disclose that. So yeah. When did you think?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:37:08]:

Probably similar, a couple of weeks in and a couple of weeks from the end. I mean, I was really worried when I got sick, and I just didn’t seem to be getting better, that I wasn’t sure what was going to happen then. So I think a lot of it, though, is just living in the moment. And one of the things you were kind of asking earlier is, how do you accomplish something really big? And the answer is just one step at a time. And so you don’t think about the whole thing. You just think, what am I doing at this moment? And what am I doing? If you have five peaks to climb, you don’t think I have five peaks to climb. You don’t even think you have one peak to climb. You just think, what am I doing right here? What is the thing that’s right in front of me? And so you make each step is what you need to focus on, because that’s the only thing you have control over, is where you are at that moment.

Scott Cowan [00:37:59]:

Well, that’s absolutely very true. Okay, I’m going to ask this question. I don’t know that you can answer it, but let’s try. Can you walk me through the timeline of a normal day on this trip?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:38:21]:

Yeah.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:38:24]:

Do we want to more than I thought.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:38:26]:

A day that involves both biking and climbing, or just do that?

Scott Cowan [00:38:31]:

Yeah, let’s do that. So walk me through a day.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:38:34]:

All right. Our typical wake up time, which we termed bulger time, is 04:30 A.m., which was pretty much the time we woke up every day, unless there were thunderstorms forecasted, we’d often wake up earlier. Okay, so 430 wake up, try to be moving shortly after five, load the bikes up, bike to the next trailhead. So would usually involve maybe some pavement riding, and then a lot of riding up steep, gravel roads. Once we get to the trailhead, there’s a transition period where we take our climbing gear off the bikes, hide the bikes in the woods, load our packs, and then start hiking. Hike to the base of a peak, go up the peak, come down, back to the bikes and camp, and hopefully we would get back to the bikes before dark. I don’t know how often that actually happened, but that was always the goal, was to be done before dark and repeat the next day.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:39:53]:

I would add that if we got to the bikes before dark, we’d usually try to bike to the next trailhead before camping. So a lot of times we had a phrase also that there are no easy days. There were a lot of days that we thought were going to be easier, like, oh, this day will be a shorter day. And it never turned out to be shorter or easier. It always seemed like there was something unexpected and a day that there were no easy days.

Scott Cowan [00:40:24]:

All right, you said you got up at 430. What time were you guys going to bed?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:40:32]:

It varied a lot. I mean, it probably varied from there were days where it was thundering and we went to bed at four in the afternoon. And then there was a segment in the peaks in the Sawtooth kind of just east of Lake Shalan. We had probably four or five days in a row of going to sleep at eleven or midnight and still waking up at 430 or five, which was, you can’t do that forever.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:41:12]:

When I first talked about this trip with Langdon, I might have misled him about the ratio of sleep or the amount of sleep that we might be getting, because I said something like, we got to be getting like, 9 hours of sleep a night because otherwise our bodies will just break down. But we had to just get done what we had to get done, and we were not getting 9 hours of sleep at night.

Scott Cowan [00:41:36]:

But how much did your bodies physically break down? Did either of you suffer any I mean, besides the stomach issues that sound just awful, but physical broken bones, any injuries like that?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:41:55]:

No major injuries. I mildly dislocated my shoulder early in the trip, but that didn’t cause problems. But the physical breakdown was definitely significant. By the time we were done, both of us were wasted and pretty much good for nothing. The pictures and videos of us from the end were like, we’re waking up in the morning, like, barely walking and talking and wasn’t super pretty.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:42:34]:

Yeah, we each lost about ten pounds.

Scott Cowan [00:42:40]:

That’s not that bad. It’s not that much, actually.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:42:44]:

Yeah, we both have very low body fat. Ten pounds for me is like yeah, you’re losing muscle. Yeah, it’s a lot.

Scott Cowan [00:42:56]:

Okay, see, for me, ten pounds would be like a rounding error. So I’m like that. Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:43:03]:

But I think also just the general fatigue level was the sleep deprivation and just the exertion. Some people have made comments like, oh, what great training you’ll have. You’ll be in great shape. And I think it’s too much training to be in great shape because you reach the point where you’re getting so.

Scott Cowan [00:43:26]:

Fatigued, kind of like cannibalizing your body yeah, okay. You mentioned you planned this out on a spreadsheet. You also mentioned that you were concerned that you were really late, that one day you mentioned you might have told them 9 hours of sleep. How close you obviously completed it. So we know the story here. You succeeded, but your initial calculations how close were you to the initial calculations?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:44:03]:

I think probably about eight days off. Eight to ten days off? I thought we had those eight slack days or so in there. And out of the 62 days of the main summer trip, eight. So that’s 12%.

Scott Cowan [00:44:23]:

Yeah, it’s not bad.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:44:24]:

My wife will also tell you that when I say that I’m going to be somewhere at a certain time, I’m often a little bit late for that, that I’m very bad at estimating durations of things. Landon also noticed that about me this summer, and I would say, I think we’re going to climb this peak, and we’ll be back here in 4 hours. And there was a day where Landon said, hey, you know how you said we’d be back in 4 hours? Well, we’re just getting to the peak, and it’s been four pre. I think I am not very good at estimating things. I prefer to think of it as optimism, but that might be just self delusional.

Scott Cowan [00:44:59]:

How well did you guys get along during this exertion lack of sleep? You’re sitting next to each other, talking, so obviously yeah, we got along fairly well, actually.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:45:13]:

Really well for most of the trip. Towards the end, I think, especially me, I got a little snappy. But, no, we got along well, and now we’re closer than we’ve ever been. So it worked out well.

Scott Cowan [00:45:34]:

Yeah.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:45:34]:

I mean, there were definitely moments, but it was a real privilege to do the trip with Langdon and then with the huru, and so to do the trip with those people was a real special thing and something that, you know, I’ll treasure for my whole.

Scott Cowan [00:45:55]:

When you well, jeff, I’ll ask you this question. I’ll like you to follow up. So when you were planning this out, what were you looking forward to? Was there something about this that sounded like, oh, that’ll be cool to do that? Is it maybe a specific peak, maybe a ride between point a and point b? What were you looking forward to? Were you excited for? Was there a peak that you were like?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:46:27]:

There were peaks that I was excited to do, but I think mainly I was excited to spend a lot of time in the mountains with Jeff and learn a bunch and see a good portion of my home state. And then I think also I was just excited to have a super difficult task at hand and and work towards a goal like it was it’s just fun to work super hard every day towards something. Yeah, it was very exciting.

Scott Cowan [00:47:09]:

Okay, Jeff, how about.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:47:13]:

I thought of it as I just want to put beauty before my eyes all summer long and just expose my eyes to the most beautiful places and for as much time as possible. One of the special things about these peaks is they’re really tall and they all have really good views and they’re all spectacular. They have different ecology, they affect the weather around them and the climate. And so you have different assemblages of plant communities and as you go through the elevation zones, they’re different and they’re just all different and spectacular and beautiful. And so I just wanted to just put all that just to enjoy all that beauty. So I was just looking forward to immersing myself in so much natural wonder.

Scott Cowan [00:47:58]:

You guys are both in. Ellensburg, there’s a professor at Central, Nick sentiner, I’m sure you probably know. Yeah, I had Nick on really early on in the podcast. Like he was like the 7th episode and great guy. And normally I talk to people beforehand now, like Langton, I talked on the phone, get a little bit like break the ice just a little bit. Didn’t do that with Nick. He literally popped up on the screen. We chatted for 30 seconds, he goes, okay, let’s go.

Scott Cowan [00:48:30]:

And we were talking and he was telling me stuff and the one thing that he told me, and I’m still blown away by this, is that he was talking about the enchantments and that that rock originated down in what’s now Baja California. That it’s. Through millions of years that rock has moved north through to where it’s at today. And it’s still moving incrementally very small amounts. So when I think of the cascades, I don’t think of it you just described it as the peaks were different, there was different ecology and all that around them. I think of them as all kind of the same, which is obviously I’m wrong. And I think that was a really cool observation that you made that you saw. So once again, those impossible questions like who’s your favorite kid? Were there any views that you guys saw that were magnificent, forever etched in.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:49:30]:

Your minds almost every day? Yeah. One of the things that is really cool also, I feel like, is when you’re swimming, if you’re swimming and you are at the surface and you look around and then you put your head down and swim for a while and then look around, or you swim underwater and you come and look around, it was kind of like that. When you’re up on a high peak you can see all the peaks around you, and you get this view, and then you go down in the valley and go up to the next peak, and it’s like coming back to the surface, but having a different view. And we got to do that like, 100 times over the summer. So you could see all the peaks that you had been to, and you could see the peaks that we were going to. And every peak had a different perspective. It had different weather. And as you mean, the geology is different.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:50:31]:

And I also am a geologist, so I definitely know Nick Zetner quite well, and my wife teaches in the department with definitely I love the geology of the Cascades, and I’m really interested in that, too. So just that idea of going up and looking and then diving down and going and seeing a different view and the sum of all those views is way more than just, like, the parts.

Scott Cowan [00:51:00]:

I love that. So I have a couple more questions for you. Somebody walks up to you and says, hey, thinking about doing the 100 peaks, going to do it on a bicycle. What are you going to tell them? What’s the piece of advice that you wish you would have had before doing this that you would give to somebody who’s thinking about doing it now?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:51:26]:

Um, don’t do it with someone who only has 70 days of summer. I think it like the the time crunch was the hardest thing for us, but I think if you had from May to September, you could probably enjoy not that we didn’t enjoy it, but you could enjoy every minute of it, probably.

Scott Cowan [00:51:56]:

Okay. How about you, Jeff?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:52:00]:

We would not have had to climb Mount Baker in that mean. I think I would tell him you’re in for a fantastic, um and yeah, I’d be super psyched to share information about routes and equipment and all kinds of stuff that I’d be super stoked to help anyone who is wanting to do this or wanting to do it faster. And I think one thing that maybe will incentivize somebody is we actually didn’t do it that fast because we did three trips in May over weekends, which were great, because, first of all, we couldn’t have fit the trip in between the end of one teaching year and the beginning of the coaching year without those three trips. But also those trips were really useful for training and for helping us dial in how to pack our bikes and equipment and food and all kinds of things. So we learned a lot on those three trips. But because of that, really, the duration of our trip was 70 days, but really, that was spread out over from the first day of the first trip to the last day of the last trip or the last day of the summer was 107 days. So someone could break that record. And if someone wanted to do that, then I would be happy to give them all kinds of information and all the advice and I’d be super psyched for them to do it.

Scott Cowan [00:53:27]:

If you were going to do this again using the same parameters that you have, you got the school year and then the coaching, would you do it in the same order or would you change the order up?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:53:39]:

Same order?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:53:40]:

Yeah, I think the order was pretty good.

Scott Cowan [00:53:42]:

The order was pretty good.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:53:43]:

One thing, it sure would have been nice to do St. Helens and Adams early, but the problem with that was that the roads between them are pretty high and snowy, and so we didn’t think we could do those in May.

Scott Cowan [00:53:57]:

Okay.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:53:57]:

It takes more personal days, save some more personal days for the spring, okay?

Scott Cowan [00:54:03]:

Because, yeah, you’ve got the weather, you got snow on one end, you got fire at the other end of it. Unfortunately, hopefully not fire, but you got those two things. And then how hot was it on the hottest day that you guys were climbing?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:54:19]:

Well, it wasn’t that hot in the mountains. The hottest was biking down the west Side. We did it during that heat wave in August when it was, I don’t know, 90s unpleasant. Okay, I know it was like 110 in Ellensburg 108 that day here, but was not that hot on the West Side.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:54:38]:

Another piece of advice I think would be nutrition.

Scott Cowan [00:54:41]:

Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:54:42]:

I had a day early on in the trip, the first trip of the summer Jeff was mentioning that went four days instead of three, where I totally ran out of food and Jeff was rationing me bits of cheese and it was just very unpleasant to not have any. So I think proper nutrition and just eating as much as you can all the time is pretty crucial.

Scott Cowan [00:55:16]:

How many calories were you guys trying to consume a day?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:55:22]:

I tracked calories pretty carefully and it was funny. We kind of figured out how many calories each one of us needed. And then when we’d go to a store to purchase food, we just say we need food for five days. And my calorie count was about 6000 a day. So I just take the number of days we needed food for times 6000, and get my calculator, my phone out and throw stuff in the cart until I hit the magic number.

Scott Cowan [00:55:52]:

How about Jeff, were you tracking calories?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:55:55]:

I was about 5000. Same thing. Well, I learned that from Langdon because he was like, I’m really going to in one of our first resupplies. He’s like, I’m going to do all the math on this. And I was like, I’ll just see what looks right. And then I thought, this is probably a really good idea that he has to actually make sure. So, yeah, we’d sit there doing our math with our calculators. It was kind of funny because one of the things those resupply days, which were maybe like kind of a quote unquote rest day, were not actually very restful because sometimes there’s a lot to think about.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:56:31]:

If you go through a town, you got a grocery shop, you’re dealing with repairing your gear and trying to make sure you have all the information downloaded that you need for the next thing. Maybe we stayed at some friend’s house, which was fantastic, but it wasn’t, like, necessarily a laid back time. Like, there was a lot to do, and so I forgot where I was going with that. But just figuring out the food was one of those big chores. And so sometimes we would be shopping and we’d be just kind of, like minds would be foggy. And plus we were fatigued and we were trying to figure out what to buy for food for this upcoming trip. And some of those trips might have looked kind of funny in the grocery stores.

Scott Cowan [00:57:22]:

So what would you eat on an average day?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:57:27]:

A lot of cheese. So I spent a good amount of time before the trip preparing a bunch of dinners that we ate for pretty much the whole trip that we mailed to ourselves. And then everything other than the dinners we bought at stores be, like, a lot of cheese and crackers, usually some summer sausages or beef jerky. And then a lot of candy and a lot of junk food, like candy and pastries, brownies cookies. You go to the grocery store and it’s like, what has the most fat, like, the most calorie dense things we could buy that you can just eat and not prepare?

Jeff Hashimoto [00:58:23]:

Well, one of those was, like, Mazama. So we stopped at the Mazama store, which is kind of a grocery store, but it’s kind of a touristy place, but it’s not like a normal full service grocery store. And we got a lot of good stuff there for sure. And then the next place is Marble Mount where there’s just a couple of gas stations. And so we’re trying to outfit ourselves with convenience store food. And so there were, like, peanut M, Ms and things like that. But they have a lot of right, right. But it’s probably not the healthiest of diets.

Scott Cowan [00:58:58]:

And a couple of twinkies.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:59:02]:

My gosh, at one point there was the store where they were, like, these brownies that was in Marble Mount where there were the brownies, but they were like the guy at the checkout stand was, like, hitting him on the stand, and they were like, These are really hard. I can’t sell these to you. And then I think he gave didn’t.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:59:16]:

He give he just gave them to.

Jeff Hashimoto [00:59:16]:

Me for free, and I still ate them.

Scott Cowan [00:59:18]:

You still ate them? Okay. You said you prepared dinners. What sort of were you preparing for dinner?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [00:59:30]:

Yeah, so I think there are, like, six different dinners I made, and they were all between, like, 1001, 200 calories. We had couscous and salmon ramen with tuna. We had rice and beans and cheese with tortillas, tortilla soup kind of thing. We had, like, Thai curry, chicken curry.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:00:06]:

Thanksgiving.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:00:07]:

Thanksgiving, which is one of our favorites. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy mix, cranberries and tuna instead of turkey. Yeah, stuff like that.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:00:22]:

All right, so I’m going to put a little note it in here. Lana did an excellent job with the food preparation, and we kind of split the duties in the spring. And I was working on route. So for mountains, there’s often a lot of ways to climb a mountain. And so I’m going to tell you a story about this one mountain near the north end of Lake Shalan called Tupshen. And there’s a set of books called The Becky Guides to the Mountains of Washington State. And so my route information was typically looking a little bit at trip reports, but also just photographing the pages of the Becky Guides that I had, although I actually didn’t get to that because I was really busy. So I photographed a bunch of them in the Leavenworth Library and then at a friend’s.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:01:15]:

So but Tupshen anyway, the first thing that Becky lists is this route called the West Face, which turned out to be fairly challenging. And we’re on this route, and we’re like, there is not any sign that anyone has been here. Sometimes there’s climbing gear left behind for the descent and things like that, and there wasn’t really hardly anything there. And then we get to the top of the mountain, and then there’s some gear for the descent on top. And Lenan whips out his phone and has coverage and searches for Tipshin Peak. And the first thing he finds is, absolutely don’t climb the West Face. No one climbs it. It’s dangerous.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:01:50]:

It’s hard. The only route you should even consider is the East Face. On the other, that I I did not do as good a job with that part of the route reconnaissance as Linen did with the food. And I said, well, I just looked at the Becky Guides and didn’t do as good a job searching the Internet. And Landon said, well, it was the very first thing that popped up when I typed in Tipshin Peak was, don’t go on the West Face, go on the east. So and we were going to descend the east face, but then we realized that actually we had left our trekking poles at the base of the west face, so we had to descend this kind of treacherous way as well.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:02:38]:

Because.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:02:38]:

We’D left our poles at the base of the route.

Scott Cowan [01:02:42]:

All right, last question about the event. The whole thing. And once again, I tend to ask these questions that are hard, not intentionally hard. So what was your biggest takeaway from the whole thing?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:02:59]:

For me, there were two I’m going to break the rules of your question. There were two biggest takeaways. One is that Washington State is just absolutely gorgeous. And there are a lifetime worth of adventures to be had in Washington State. Even if you climb 100 peaks in the summer, there’s still a lifetime worth of adventures. So it’s a rad place. And two, the glaciers all around the world, but specifically Washington State, are melting insanely fast. We saw a lot of glaciers, some that we had seen before, and the rate at which they’re melting is just astounding.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:03:55]:

There was a report that came out just within the last week that’s based on glacier data from the last 40 years and this summer, the summer 2023 on average. I think Washington lost about 6% of glacier mass in one summer. So they’re not going to be there forever. And I’m just very glad I got to see the one I did.

Scott Cowan [01:04:26]:

I had no idea that I knew the glaciers were melting, but I had no idea that that number was that significant.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:04:34]:

Yeah, I mean, there are times where we’re looking at a map, and it’s like we’re supposed to be on the glacier, and we’re nowhere near the glacier, it’s receded so much, or there’s supposed to be 300ft of ice here that we’re on top of, and it’s all gone.

Scott Cowan [01:04:51]:

Wow.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:04:53]:

I think one of the things that I got out of it is definitely what Lenan said about Washington State being an incredible place. So I definitely echo that. But it was so neat to do a trip like that without carbon emissions. And I know there are carbon emissions from well, first of all, we use fuel for our stove, and we had a bunch of gear that was manufactured, and so it’s not completely carbon free. But to live like that was really special, and to live without cars is really special. But now I’m back in my normal life, and I’m trying to bike as much as I can to school, but not as much as I was in the spring when I was biking all the time. Because from the beginning of the trip, I just decided, okay, I’m not going to get in a car for this whole duration. So the last month of school, and I just biked everywhere, unless I was driving students or going to my son’s graduation.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:05:50]:

Those were the two things. But it’s so easy to fall back into a routine of a car based lifestyle, and so much of our infrastructure is designed around that. And I think one of the takeaways is to make me just think a lot more about that lifestyle and also in terms of recreation, to think, how can I recreate more locally and what are the things that are right in front of my face that I can do and appreciate?

Scott Cowan [01:06:26]:

Okay, all right, we wrap this up a couple more.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:06:30]:

What?

Scott Cowan [01:06:31]:

Didn’t I ask you that? I should have.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:06:36]:

I think one thing I talked about a little bit, you kind of asked, how do we get through it? And I. Told you the mental trick, and this is one of the things that I’ve talked to my athletes about is how did we get through it? I felt like I used a lot of the mental tricks that I’ve learned in competitive sports and distance running. I used all those tricks at some point in the summer, so being in the moment is really important. Sometimes if there’s a long day and just thinking about those steps, but also appreciating the things around you, I would kind of do this little challenge with myself where I would try to make it so that if I ever closed my eyes, I could name three species of trees that were right in the area. So I was trying to be aware of my surroundings. So there were all sorts of tricks like that, and then just being relentlessly positive with things that you say out loud, but also things that you say in your own head, and just reminding myself that, hey, I can do this, or it’s not that far, or I can get this next little bit. And just being really positive, those were some of the things that it took. We’re not like elite athletes, but we’re we’re maybe stubborn and and determined.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:08:05]:

And so I think that’s I think those tricks are things that are really helpful, and I try to share those with my my students and especially the athletes.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:08:16]:

Yeah, I think another big takeaway that we haven’t really talked about is just I think the trip would have been totally impossible as a single person, just the group dynamic and knowing that I have a partner who is equally as committed as I am. You wake up in the morning, and it’s, like, really cold, and you’re super tired, and you don’t want to get up, and if it was just me, I probably just fall back asleep. But when you have someone next to you that you don’t want to let them down and they don’t want to let you down, the power of having partners that you believe in and that believe in you, I think, make things that would be impossible by yourself very possible.

Scott Cowan [01:09:07]:

Okay. All right, so, Jeff, you weren’t privy to the questions that I ask at the end of every conversation, so I apologize.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:09:16]:

Okay, I’m good to go.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:09:17]:

I’ll go first.

Scott Cowan [01:09:18]:

There’s three questions. All right, number one, where’s a good place to get a cup of coffee in Ellensburg?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:09:28]:

Best place to get coffee in Ellensburg? DNM.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:09:33]:

Ditto.

Scott Cowan [01:09:34]:

So at DNM, what are you ordering?

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:09:41]:

Drip coffee. Black.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:09:44]:

Mocha with whipped cream. Mocha with whipped cream.

Scott Cowan [01:09:51]:

I’m going to get to Ellensburg around lunchtime. Where’s a good place for me to go grab lunch in Ellensburg these days?

Jeff Hashimoto [01:10:03]:

Binman’s Bakery.

Scott Cowan [01:10:04]:

Oh, yeah. Okay.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:10:08]:

So I’m going to break your rule on this question again. I’m going to combine the first question and the second question. And this place actually isn’t even in Ellensburg, but it’s close so if you’re in Ellensburg, it is worth the ten minute drive. And that is the Kititas Cafe is, I believe, to be the best breakfast in the valley. They have great coffee, great breakfast, and it is just a wonderful place, so I would go there.

Scott Cowan [01:10:47]:

OK. All right, so here’s the last question. Neither of you know what the last question is unless you’ve listened to episodes of my show, which you haven’t done. All right, jeff, you’re going to answer this question first. Cake or pie? And why.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:11:04]:

Pie? Because it’s got fruit in it, usually.

Scott Cowan [01:11:08]:

What pie would you go with?

Jeff Hashimoto [01:11:10]:

Well, I love an apple pie or, like, a peach pie. It’s really good. Yeah, so many pies. But then I also really love a chocolate pie or pecan pie.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:11:27]:

Yeah.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:11:27]:

Huckleberry pie with wild picked huckleberries, though, is maybe the top.

Scott Cowan [01:11:31]:

Okay. All right.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:11:35]:

Pie also, because you put fresh fruit in it. And I would probably go with strawberry rhubarb or yeah, strawberry rhubarb pie.

Scott Cowan [01:11:48]:

Strawberry rhubarb. Okay. There’s no wrong answer here. Well, maybe there’s a couple that to.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:11:53]:

Me are wrong, but although today my students had to make a model of an atom, and a few of them made those models out of cake, they made a cake to represent the atom and the different components of the atom, and that was pretty cool.

Scott Cowan [01:12:12]:

Can you elaborate on that? Because I’m having a hard time visualizing that.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:12:16]:

Well, they made a cake, and then they frosted it with protons and neutrons and electrons in their proper energy levels and amounts.

Scott Cowan [01:12:28]:

All right, that’s pretty cool.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:12:30]:

And then they shared it with class.

Scott Cowan [01:12:32]:

There you go. Well, you have to don’t isn’t that the rule? If you bring cake to class, you have to share it? I mean, you can’t just yeah, at least that’s the rule. It was when I was in school a long time ago, even when I went to Central. Jeff, where did you go to school at? How did you end up in Ellensburg?

Jeff Hashimoto [01:12:47]:

I ended up here. My wife got a job teaching at Central. We knew we wanted to live in a small town in the west, and she got a job here, which was fantastic, in the geology department. I grew up in Seattle.

Scott Cowan [01:12:59]:

Okay, where’d you go to college?

Jeff Hashimoto [01:13:02]:

I went to college at Dartmouth and went to grad school in California at a I’m a huge science nerd.

Scott Cowan [01:13:14]:

Yeah.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:13:15]:

I decided that I wanted to be a high school science teacher.

Scott Cowan [01:13:19]:

And Langdon. You grew up in Ellensburg. You didn’t have a choice, but why do you stay? And there’s no wrong answer, by the way. I love Ellensburg. Ellensburg is like, my favorite little town in the city.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:13:31]:

Yeah, it’s funny. When I graduated high school, the only thing I want to do is leave. So I went to Bozeman for a few years, and now I’m back here, and it’s a great little town, and it’s close to the mountains, and Washington is a great state, and, yeah, it’s a great place to live.

Scott Cowan [01:13:52]:

I lied. I do have one more question for both of what’s next for you guys? You might not do it together, but I can’t imagine that you’re done. Like, you’re tapped out, we’re done. That’s it. I got to imagine you got other things you’re thinking about.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:14:11]:

Yeah, I will say that I am thinking about future trips along the same lines as the trip this summer a little different. I don’t want to give them away just yet, but there will be future expeditions.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:14:32]:

I think one thing that we’ve been doing together a little bit since getting back is doing a little more rock climbing. And in the mountains, the rock is typically well, a lot of times the rock is not very solid, as in there’s loose rock, there’s a lot of freeze thaw. And so getting to climb, like rock that is all put together is really fun and challenging. And there’s a lot of very challenging peaks that are not among the top 100 highest that are still really beautiful and inspirational to go to. So I’m looking forward to doing some rock climbing and some rock climbing in the mountains.

Scott Cowan [01:15:11]:

Okay, guys, thank you so much. This was super informative. I’ve talked to you for an hour. I still know how the heck you did it, and you’ve even explained it 1ft in front of the other. I get it, the mindset, all of that. But still, just the sheer effort that you guys put out is super impressive. So thanks again for taking the time to sit with me today.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:15:39]:

Yeah, it’s really fun. Thank you.

Langdon Earnest-Beck [01:15:41]:

Thanks for having us.

Jeff Hashimoto [01:15:42]:

Thanks for listening, everyone.