Hiking Mt Si, Sr Year of HS, circa 1975

A year older than me, Chuck Wolfe (may he rest after a piss), posted this photo from the top of Mount Si:

Note that the hike up to Mount Si is a steep 4 miles, so 8 miles round trip.

I replied:

I half (or 1%?) recall hiking the trail with high-school buddies. You were there, yes, Stephen S and Eric P? Do you remember who else? Maybe 5 or 6 of us?

This is what my brain "remembers" - I'll estimate an error margin of 98% :

Five or six of us had packed backpacks with small tents, sleeping bags, a bit of stove-type gear and some tins of food we had scrounged for dinner and breakfast. We got a late start. We parked at the bottom, across a street from the trail head, and started up around 4.

We got to the top around 6 maybe? We sat down and rested and then started unpacking our stuff. We looked at our tins of food- they didn't look appetizing... I felt sweaty and hungry. I didn't feel like canned food for dinner. Someone said there was something happening elsewhere that night. Someone, maybe I?, said something like, "Let's bail." Grunts of agreement followed.

Maybe at 7 we started quickly packing up and started jogging down the trail in the waning light. We had just a couple of small flashlights with us. It was getting darker and darker. Maybe I was in front, or second, with a tiny light, peering down at the ground. Suddenly the trail disappeared. Did we miss a turn? We were on a little plateau. We were lost!

I went forward carefully. At the edge was a cliff! I couldn't see the bottom with the tiny penlight. I shone it to the left at the trees and then out, across the abyss. There were a couple of glints in the distance. Something in my brain clicked and I said, "It's this way!" and jumped over the edge. It was about 6 feet down a 45-degree embankment to the road, and across the street was the parking lot. The light must have shone enough off the car- maybe 60 feet away- that my brain had matched them to its shape. (I have no idea how I knew the cliff was actually an embankment...)

A year or two later, my philosophy occurred to me: There's no point in being lucky unless you can count on it.

I don't recall what we did after driving home...
Thanks for the memory!