SUNLIGHT flickered through the forest canopy and danced across my dashboard. My girlfriend sat beside me, her legs hanging partway out the passenger-side window. Three friends were in back and surrounded by gear and provisions for a few days in the wild.
It was road trip season, and we had our sights set on Mount Adams, a 12,281-foot volcano in Washington State. The road to the start of the climb is buried by snow for much of the year, and it is notoriously rough when it’s not.

But my new tires, the All-Terrain T/A KO from BFGoodrich, never slipped. They pulled us over the sand and ruts and made short work of the rugged and narrow switchbacks that climbed to Cold Springs.
With two gas tanks, plenty of ground clearance, and a great set of tires, the van was well equipped to go where many vehicles could not.
We began our climb just under treeline the following morning in a forest that was slowly recovering from a large burn. We remembered that fire well. We had raced north through the smoke that September in 2012 on our way to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail, just barely beating the closures in the Mount Adams Wilderness.

The lower mountain was an easy go, a long slog through the burn and up over the treeline on boot-packed snow. The forecast for the trip was questionable, but the sky had been clear so far, and we enjoyed views of Mount Hood on the horizon. Mount Saint Helens was to the west.
Above treeline on Adams we hiked to a saddle, the Lunch Counter. Most climbers spend their first night on the mountain there, setting up tents among hand-stacked windbreaks and dividing the 6,676-foot ascent to the summit over two days.





