Middle and North Pyramid with Emily

Today Emily and I wanted to get out of town and go for a hike so we decided to head to Santiam Pass and go for a short hike. We looked in my book of hikes in the area and chose a 4.2mile roundtrip hike up Middle Pyramid. I had to go to work at 4pm so we had to be down from the mountain by 2pm for me to make it back in time. We started our hike at about 10:15am and quickly made our way up the very overgrown trail to the top of Middle Pyramid... or what we thought was the top at first. We ended up climbing up a very steep spire of rocks to what at first looked like the summit until we got to the top and realized it was a false summit and that the real summit was just to the south. While climbing it I kept thinking, "this can't be fit for everyone the guide book is intended for?" There were lots of forest fires in the area so our views of Three Fingered Jack and Jefferson were hazy at best. We took some time to grab some photos from the true summit then decided to try to climb to North Pyramid too. The trail sign pointed the way and said "North Pyramid" so I assumed it would take us to the top. Nope! The trail simply descended down the shoulder of North Pyramid so after about 15 minutes of descending down the backside away from the car I grabbed my GPS and we decided to just head up through the trees towards the summit which turned out to take much longer than I thought it would. When we finally reached the summit of North Pyramid busting through branches to get there we had a great view of Mt. Jefferson. We had to very carefully skirt along the bottom of cliffs on the way back to the main trail but thankfully we made it to the car by 2pm and I was able to get to work just 10 minutes late after a shower when we got home. It was a quick hike and the top of Middle Pyramid was very cool with all the cliffs above the meadow below but the haze obscuring our views of the Cascades was a little disappointing.