49.8

Every time I think about shooting this particular morning, the movie "Swingers" plays in an endless loop in my head. Up on Mt. St. Helens for sunset with three of my best buddies; Steve, Ryan, and Charmin (it's actually Mike, but he's just so squeezably soft...), we scoffed off our typical skunkfest sunset with some serious pizza, which I quietly and stinktastically stowed in a compartment of Steve's car. He still smells like pepperoni. As we were car camping, the trek up and down the mountain was eerily similar to that scene in the movie where each guy drives his own car between clubs. The night dragged on, and as dawn neared, I grew angrier and angrier with Charmin for flailing around with his flashlight in his car. It was like he was trying to recreate the light saber scene in Star Wars with himself. I finally couldn't take it anymore and sat straight up, banging my head on the roof of my 4Runner, and looked out to see all quiet in the cars next to me. FLASH. It wasn't Charmin's flashlight, but lightning. We don't experience T-Storms in the Pacific NW very often, and especially not at dawn, so I scrambled out of my car and booked it up the hill for the flowers we had scouted the night before. Completely clueless about how to effectively shoot lightning, I took a guess and kept firing the shutter. The bolts were all around us, but none would cooperate. Finally, I got a hit.... and shrieked like a teenage girl at a Justin Bieber concert.