In 2016, Richard Kresser established the RASH. The challenge was to summit and circumnavigate the four major volcanoes of the Cascades in southern Washington and northern Oregon: Rainier, Adams, St Helens, and Hood. The accumulative effort racked up over 247 miles and 148,000' of elevation gain and loss. He completed the challenge inside of one week. I was blown away, and inspired.

I was fully aware that I lacked the knowledge, experience, and skill to complete such a challenge. I took on the RASH as a means to acquire those things. There was no way I was going to get through it in a week, but I started chipping away at it in the summer of 2017.

I performed the RASH in reverse, starting with Hood. In the Spring, I had recruited my friend, Scotty, to guide me on my first Mt Hood summits. I had only climbed Mt Adams a couple of times, and Hood was a step up in objective danger and technicality. He also joined me for the summit portion of my summit-circumnav. I had several Timberline Trail laps behind me, so I took that on solo without issue--turning in what was then the fastest known time for the summit-circumnav route.

A couple weeks later, Scotty joined me again to summit Mt St Helens before I completed a painfully slow lap around it on the Loowit Trail. The heat that day was blistering, with high humidity. It was the shortest and fastest of the four, yet almost the most challenging.

Later that summer, I took down Adams solo. The summit was fun and uneventful. To circumnavigate Mt Adams, one must make their own path on the trail-less east side of the mountain on the Yakima Reservation. I chose the more challenging, but also more rewarding and adventurous, low route to get the full-value experience. The slow-paced bushwhacking, technical terrain, and river crossings made this ten-mile section the crux of the RASH, but it was an incredible experience traversing wilderness which has never been modified by man. The Yakima keep the area wild so it is effectively the same as it has been for millions upon millions of years. Towards the end the lap, I had become so delirious that I fully hallucinated two trail running partners who ran in the final few miles with me, only to have them vanish when I made it back to camp.

Lacking the skill to climb Mt Rainier, I waited until 2018, after taking up rock climbing to get used to managing gear and ropes, and studying glacier travel and crevasse rescue. Scotty, and our friend James, joined me for the summit. Scotty had to drop due to illness about halfway up, but James and I went on to bag our first Rainier summit--in a single push. After some sleep back at camp, my friend, Denzil, and I started out on the 93-mile Wonderland Trail, which we planned to break into two pushes. The Wonderland Trail lives up to its name as an otherworldly, pervasively scenic tour around Mt Rainier.

On our second push, I did something I would never do again: I split from my partner. I had a goal time in mind, which I managed to hit, but only by running ahead when Denzil slowed. Meeting my goal came at the cost of not being there when Denzil fell ill and needed to evacuate. He managed to self-rescue, and all ended well, but it was a hard-learned lesson, and a stain on the achievement.

It took me a year to complete the RASH, while Kresser executed it in under a week, but I had technically repeated it. And was now armed with the new, growing set of knowledge, experience, and skill I sought from the beginning.