#mtmorgan

·:*¨༺ ♱ COVER REVEAL ♱༻¨*:· 

These Vicious Games, an all-new Beauty and the Beast inspired, forced proximity, dark romance and the first book in the Seattle's Underground Series from bestselling author M.T. Morgan, is coming September 25th!

Pre-order your copy today → https://amzn.to/4f0J738

Influencers, sign up for the promotional tour here → https://tinyurl.com/tvgsu 

He was the hunter, and I was nothing more than his prey.

They call him the Beast of Seattle.

Once he wins me in the poker game, whisking me away to his secluded island, I soon realize why.

He wants to play a game, one that has me running for my life. 

Winner survives another month. 

Loser dies.

He spends his time breaking me, leaving only the most animalistic parts of me intact.

I shouldn’t want him. I shouldn’t… but I do.

My only question is…

·:*¨༺ ♱ TITLE and TROPE REVEAL ♱༻¨*:·

These Vicious Games, an all-new Beauty and the Beast inspired, forced proximity, dark romance and the first book in the Seattle's Underground Series from bestselling author M.T. Morgan, is coming September 25th!

Pre-order your copy today → https://amzn.to/4f0J738

Influencers, sign up for the promotional tour here → https://tinyurl.com/tvgsu

♡ Amnesia

♡ Beauty and the Beast inspired

♡ Boy Obsessed

♡ Dark Romance

♡ Forced Proximity

♡ Grumpy x Sunshine

♡ K!dnapping

5/29/16 - 5/30/16

This trip report is going to be hard to make just about the mountain, because of all the other nonsense going on. After waking up at the hot springs in Mammoth, Leo and I decided it would be nice to do an overnight together for the last two days of Memorial Day weekend. With Leo not being a fan of avoiding the permit system, we drove to the ranger station in Bishop to see what availability they had — I had a number of peaks in mind, so we’d do whatever they had permits for. I was hoping Stan would be in (if you ever call the White Mountain Ranger Station in Bishop and get to chat with them, you’ll get to see why he’s so awesome — his enthusiasm is insane), but he wasn’t. We chatted with the other rangers and finally settled on Mt Morgan (S), which had permit availability.

As we were getting the paperwork ready, I saw I was getting a call. Someone was supposed to rent my car for the weekend, but when they went to pick it up, it wasn’t there. Great. While Leo filled out the paperwork, I immediately called the San Francisco Police Department to file a police report. Crazily, they said they would only let me file the report in person. What? I was 300 mi from San Francisco and didn’t want to cut our trip short just to file this damn police report. When I told them that, they said I could go to the local police station where I am to try and see if they would let me file it there. Wonderful.

Leo and I drove to the Bishop police department, with me totally in disbelief and full of stress. Thankfully, the people at the Bishop police department were beyond kind and helpful. They were shocked that SFPD wouldn’t let me file the police report over the phone — they said they do that all the time, it’s totally common practice. However, Bishop PD didn’t want to file the police report for me until they knew for certain that my car was indeed missing. I tried to think if I knew of anyone in town who could go check on it for me, but everyone was away for the long weekend. Thankfully, the woman working the front desk got in contact with SFPD, and they were much more helpful for her. They sent one of their officers on patrol out to the location where my car was supposed to be parked, and confirmed it wasn’t there. This process took about an hour, so Leo and I went to get breakfast in town, and then came back once it was confirmed. We filled out the report, and were done with the whole ordeal around noon. In complete distress, we had decided that we should just go back to San Francisco, in case there was anything that needed to be done. But after thinking about it more and chatting with my Mom on the phone, I figured — why let the next two days go to waste? So, at the last minute, we decided to take on Morgan instead.

We drove to the Tamarack Lakes trailhead by Rock Creek Lake and packed up in the parking lot. It was unclear where exactly overnight parking was allowed, (most everything had signs saying no overnight parking), so I wrote a note to put in the windshield and called it a day. We split up the group gear, finished packing, and started up the trail.

Selfie on the hike in.

We planned to camp at Francis Lake, which isn’t too far of a hike in — which was nice, since the whole morning had been lost. The trail was mostly clear of snow, until the last climb to the lake. We completely lost the trail there due to snow, and ended up doing some bushwhacking and route finding. There was no one at the lake, but we did a see another tent. We had been thinking we’d be camping at snow, but the area was by and large free of snow. We picked out a nice spot by the lake and set up camp. Leo has a Z-Packs tent uses trekking poles as the tent poles, so I was excited to see how that worked.

Camp, with the clouds coming in.

After setting up camp, it was still nice and warm, so we took a walk around the lake, and Leo went for a swim. Soon after, clouds came in though (the afternoon storms that had been in the forecast for the whole weekend), and it even started to snow for a little. We got in the tent and hung out until it passed — it probably only lasted 15 minutes. Afterwards we hung out a bit more before making dinner. I still had some dehydrated veggies left over from my last dehydrating work, so I made us a dinner of couscous and veggies, with toasted pine nuts.

Dinner.

We went to sleep early, preparing for another early morning so that we could have hard snow. We walked around Francis Lake, and then started the hike up. The route consisted of snow fields and boulder hopping for quite some time. Eventually as we reached the peak itself, we had to choose our route. We discussed whether we should walk back towards a bowl and then gain a ridge from there, or we could take a nearer slope up to the plateau. This slope was fairly steep and rocky, though half covered in snow. It seemed reasonable and fairly short, so we opted for that.

Our route – we took the feature on the left rather than the bowl in the back.

Once we started up, we realized how annoying this type of terrain was — but it was still reasonable. We did our best to stick to rocks as much as possible, which helped. This section was also much longer than it looked from the bottom — about a thousand feet, when I had expected it to be a couple hundred. I was definitely happy to be up on a plateau afterwards.

Leo nearly at the plateau.

We had a snack here and then continued on, with the route to the summit in sight. We saw two boot paths — one that went straight up the bowl to the summit, and one that zig-zagged near a ridge. We suspected this must have been from the other group we saw camped near the lake from the day before. We decided to take the direct route. The snow was still a bit hard, but melting quickly. On the walk over to the boot path, I was able to walk on the crust fairly well, but Leo had more trouble, with the crust frequently breaking through. Finally, at the boot pack, the route started to get much steeper, going straight up. Given that the snow was getting soft, this section would have been beyond miserable if the steps weren’t already there. With the boot pack and soft snow, we actually never even put on crampons (but carried them the whole time). After another 20 minutes, we made it to the summit.

Last section to the top.

The day was gorgeous, with clear skies and barely a breeze. The views were spectacular. After trying a couple times and always having to bail on a few summits, Leo finally cleared my thoughts that he might be bad luck. ;) I searched for the summit register, but couldn’t find it among the snow. We had some snacks, took some photos, and headed back down, not wanting to let the snow get overly soft.

Summit panorama.

Summit selfie. Look, an ice axe!

It looked like the boot pack that went straight up the summit was actually a descent route, with the climbers glissading down a very steep slope. This more direct route was definitely appealing, but I was afraid of the possibility of rock fall (which we had heard some the day before while we were hanging out at camp). So, we headed over towards the farther bowl that we had avoided on the way up. After walking towards the edge, we were able to glissade, albeit slowly. We were shortly back at the boulder hopping, which seemed to go on forever on the way back.

Back at camp we had a snack, packed up, and took a self-timer photo before heading out. We had a much better time route finding through the snowy parts on the way back down than on the way up. After that, it was an easy hike back to the car. I was happy to have summited and have a nice overnight in the mountains, but once we got back, all the stress came back of my stolen car, with the distraction now over. But, at least for those 24 hours, it was an awesome trip.