I was planning to add social images to my posts for a long time, and when I launched this version of the website, I didn't really put any effort into making this happen. As soon as I shared the launch post, I discovered that many things were broken with social images, from errors in URL encoding to a wrong background image on each social image. 

As you can see, the background here belongs to a different post, although this particular card doesn't have any other obvious issues. In any case, this is something I wanted these cards to actually look like.

It's not perfect, but here's what's going on this card:

There's a blurred cover image that belongs to this particular post in the background

A card with post info is overlayed on top of this background image

There's a short summary of what the post is about

There are different approaches one could take here, from passing parameters of an image directly to a service like Cloudinary to generating a screenshot. Without going into obscure details, here's how I made this happen.

I created a page, that generates a webpage with all the data I pass to it: title, publication date, category, etc. 

 leads to the page that builds the social card.

All this is is an HTML page dynamically generated based on passed parameters. It's this basic but opens a ton of flexibility. This page is just one of my other pages on this website.

Now we need to turn this page into an image. I use a serverless function to do this. This function accepts required parameters, passes them to the social card page, takes and returns a screenshot. There are different ways of doing this, and I opted for a headless Chrome. I've written a function that loads the page generated in the previous step and takes a screenshot of a viewport of the size I like (780x420 in my case). Again, without going into obscure details, here's what it looks like:

Depending on whether I'm developing or this runs in production, this function takes a URL to the card page, launches headless Chrome, takes a screenshot, and returns a base64-encoded image.

Step Three: upload image to Cloudinary (or anywhere, really)

This is the easiest and the most arbitrary step. I wanted to use Cloudinary in some way to learn more about it, and although here I only use it as image hosting, I was able to poke around it for a bit. Anyway, in this step, we take the image we got in the previous step and just upload it to Cloudinary:

Again, there are different options here: you could return a permanent redirect with HTTP 

 status, or just respond with an OK and move on. The difference is in the way you incorporate the resulting image URL into your HTML. Some might add the URL of the serverless function that captures and uploads a screenshot right inside of a 

 tag: in this case, permanent redirect makes sense. As soon as someone requests the page, they will attempt to read the meta tag URL and receive the uploaded image URL in response, permanently. However, in my experiments, it looks like sometimes the serverless function runs for some time (3-5 seconds) and meta scrappers just default to not having any image instead of waiting for the image URL. What I'm doing is a bit different: I'm "fetching" this serverless function in 

of the post's page and "hardcode" the resulting URL in the meta tag (since I know upfront what the URL would be, it's easy to know beforehand what URL to use for every post — it always look like this: 

https://.../social-images/{POST TITLE}.png

Well, apparently, it's more performant to add the URL to the serverless function directly to the meta tag after all. Sorry about the confusion :)

There are some checks and considerations in place. First, the function checks if the image already exists, and if so, it returns it's URL right away. Next, there are default values in place: in case the function doesn't receive a title or post date, it would use placeholders to still produce an image. Now, it takes up to 5 seconds for the image to be generated for the first time; if you attempt to share the post immediately after publishing without visiting it first, scrappers may not wait until the image is generated and use a default image or no image instead. These are some of the things to keep in mind and improve down the road. 

Since I launched my new blog, I discovered that social images were broken; they were an afterthought after all, and I decided to fix it permanently. 

Using Next.js, Vercel Serverless Functions, and Cloudinary.

Generating Blog Social Images

Oh, there’s a funny story here. So, this one is from the time when we just moved to America from Canada and decided to treat ourselves to a helicopter ride. Apparently, helicopter rides are 

. A 15-minute ride for a family of 3 cost us a few hundred dollars. Well, I thought it was ridiculous and an outrage, and decided to go to take some piloting lessons to be able to take my family on such trips whenever I want, 5-10 times cheaper. It didn’t work out exactly the way I wanted, but I did indeed had a great time flying with them in Nevada and along the Columbia River.

Here’s a video from this historic helicopter ride along the Oregon coast.

Seaside Helicopters is one of the only companies offering helicopter tours along the Pacific coast in Oregon. They are based off of a small amusement park just east of Seaside. You can’t really miss them: there’s a billboard, and their helicopter idling by the side of the road, hard to miss as well. The service they provide is professional, courteous, and focused on safety. For example, your weight might prevent you from taking the tour (I don’t remember exactly, but it’s something like 250 lbs tops per person). The weather could prevent you from flying as well, but being a pilot myself (albeit a student pilot), I really like this saying:

All takeoffs are optional, all landings are mandatory

Basically, you’re 100% in control to take off or not. However, if you make a bad choice and fly in poor conditions, you will land, one way or the other. We were lucky, and the weather was amazing for our booking date, so we enjoyed the tour a lot. Pilots comment on what you see, point out where things are, and give you a certain freedom to decide where to go and what to see. All in all, we enjoyed the experience, even though, as I mentioned before, it cost us something in the ballpark of $300 for a 15-minute tour for two adults and a child.

and where I ended up flying with them just once.

Saturday Helicopter Fun @ Seaside

About Me

PGP Public Key

 about rebuilding this site, I’ve made enough progress to actually launch the site. You’re looking at it right now :)

, and I in fact built the entire site with Gatsby at its heart. But where’s fun in that?

While I was finishing the site with Gatsby, 

 came out, and I had to try it. It's such an impressive framework, there was no way I won't give it a shot. It took me a few hours to completely replace Gatsby with 

, and there's so much I love about Next! Just some of them are:

Choose your own data fetching (GROQ, GraphQL, plain fetch, you name it!)

By-default performance and web-vitals optimization

Built-in serverless functions (especially, when deployed to Vercel)

Developer experience is also pretty nice. With Next's amazing flexibility and ease of use, I was able to rewrite major chunks of code trying different approaches, and it not only was a breeze, but it also allowed me to try multiple things within just a couple of hours. All told, I'm a fan. I wish 

 gets to the same level of maturity sometime really soon — for now, Next.js is the next best thing.

I'm a huge fan of utility-first approach offered by 

. It takes a minute to get a hang of it, but when you get it, you get it. It's fantastically easy to style elements, move them around, make things as responsive or rigid as you want. It's a truly great tool for efficient and productive web styling. While I've been working on the rewrite, Tailwind upgraded from version 1.x to 2.0, migration was a breeze. 

 as a CMS for my website. Some of the reasons for this decision were, in no particular order: 

Great community and awesome documentation

Data portability: if Sanity doesn't work out for me, I can easily take all my data and move it wherever

So far, I love what I've built with Sanity, and I will showcase my setup in a separate post. I got so thrilled with this CMS that I've built a plugin for it: 

The last technology I want to mention is 

. Honestly, it was an afterthought to the large extent, and a lot needs to be done before I can claim in earnest that I'm using it. So far, all it does is "generate" social cover images for my posts. Try sharing this post on Facebook or Twitter to see what I mean. I will write another post about this bit as soon as I get to reworking social images.

Originally, I was planning on deploying this site to 

. I love Netlify, it's a great place to host a JAM website. However, at the time I moved from Gatsby to Next.js, Netlify was not too friendly to certain aspects of Next's powers. And given that Next.js is created by the same folks who run Vercel, I naturally just moved to 

. As a result, not only did I cut build and deployment time in half, I also have access to "real-time" web-vitals/lighthouse analytics — it's built into both Vercel and Next.js.

This year, I plan to make some major improvements. 

Improve progressive loading for images. Now they are lazy-loaded, which is good, but I'm looking to improve the experience with progressive loading. I've implemented this and had to remove it due to its wonkiness. 

Email subscription. With RSS effectively dead, email subscription will be the main avenue for delivering updates along with posting to social media. Low effort solution, shouldn't take long to implement.

Related posts. Another low-effort solution. With tags attached to every post, it's fairly easy to introduce relevant related posts at the bottom of every post.

Improve design. So far, I like the boldness of it, but there are things that I'd like to improve and so far I don't really know how to do it 🤷‍♂️

AI/ML generated image captions. Every image posted on the website will have a caption and/or alt text generated by 

 or vanilla JS. Not sure yet what route I want to go here. Vanilla JS search is easy to implement and could be as robust as I want it to be, but Algolia offers so much more than just search. I'm torn :)

LinkCards with metascrapper. Right now, I'm low-key using microlink.io and their React SDK to generate embedded cards for certain links. I don't like this approach for a variety of reasons, the main of them being it's a paid 3rd-party service. So I will build my own LinkCard component, with blackjack and hookers. 

Comments. Not sure how critical these are, but definitely worth exploring. The main difficulty here is the static re-generation of post pages when new comments are posted. Next's incremental static generation should really help with this a lot. 

. Powered by Auth0, I will offer some sort of extra content or functionality to members. 

. Mostly for the sake of learning how to do this with a JAM site. 

Finally, a variety of post types: book reviews, podcast episodes (

Stay tuned for more. One of my goals this year is to blog much, much more. And I'm determined to stick with this goal 💪

For the past few months, I’ve been rebuilding my website. This time, I’ve built it from scratch, with these two hands. In this post, I want to take a deep dive into what and how I built, and what’s next.

For the past few months, I’ve been rebuilding my website. This time, I’ve built it from scratch, with these two hands. Here's how.

Building this website: Part 2

There's no need to reiterate that 2020 was absolutely terribly awful in every way possible. Dead relatives, friends, and acquaintances, sick loved ones, ruined lives, and futures altered forever. In whatever scheme of things you look at 2020, it was abysmally horrible. Yet humans do human things: we adapt, regroup, process, and move on. And we have hope. Hope that 2021 will be better. That we will persevere, and come out of this whole mess stronger and more resilient, individually and as species. Today, though, I want to take a moment and take a look back at 

All in all, it was not too terrible, albeit terrible nonetheless. 

It was my first full year at Auth0 — I 

 in December 2019 and started really contributing in 2020. I enjoyed commuting to our office in Bellevue and hang out with my colleagues. I've been learning, in scientific terms, a 

 of stuff, and it was so very cool. And overall, I got so much better at everything I do!

In late February, my son Vlad had terrible viral bronchitis, which I'm almost certain was in fact COVID. Both my wife and I got mildly sick afterward, and since COVID testing and reliable information were non-existent, we'll never know for sure. In early March, Vlad's school had a case and was shut down. It hasn't reopened since. 

Auth0 offices closed in mid-March and there's no concrete plan to reopen them soon. They are ready for us to come back when it's safe: the Bellevue team outfitted it with all possible safety measures. I'm not coming back until everyone in my household gets a vaccine; most people I know are in the same boat. Our company offsite in Mexico was canceled, what a bummer. 

It's safe to say that because of where I work, I'm much, much better off than many. I can work from home and Auth0 paid for my home office equipment. I can take as much time off work as I need, at any moment, no questions asked (especially, if it's related to COVID). And for this I'm grateful. 

In March I finished my second tattoo. It's a Phoenix, a mythical bird that rises from the ashes over and over. This tattoo reminds me of all the difficulties I'd overcome over the years and that no matter what happens next, I will pull through. 

 and returned home in one piece. I also met a black bear in the wild and lived to tell the story.

Never in my life was I as productive as in 2020. Don't get me wrong, the first few months were brutal, distracting, and lonely but eventually, I got it.

I worked so much and with such efficiency, I still can't believe it. And it all paid off already or will pay off in immediate future.

This last bit made possible in part thanks to my psychiatrist: this year I was diagnosed with ADHD and bipolar depression and got proper treatment. There's still a long road ahead, but it's a start. 

Even when we were thousands of miles apart:

And of course, these things happened. Now I know what tear gas smells like, and why defunding the police is the only way of fixing it.

I also realized that I don't want to have people in my life, who do not consider human rights above all else. My social circle shrank considerably and I regret nothing.

For the first time, I voted in the US elections.

This by far the worst year in generations is coming to a close. It won't be missed, yet it will remain in our memory, history books, and our shared trauma will take decades to heal. Here's to 2021, hopefully, a better year.

2020, you won't be missed

Practically every week at Auth0 there’s a talk or presentation about something related to our products or technologies we use. My Americas developer support team now has its own talk, every week during team meetings. This past week was the first one of these, and I opened it with a quick talk “5 tools in 5 minutes”. I realize that’s a fairly low-effort topic, but a) you gotta start somewhere, b) Low effort 

 low quality, and c) I really do save hours of my life every month with these tools. Since you may also find some value in this, I decided to make a quick blog post about these tools. 

For any person who deals with multiple time zones, knowing what time is where now, and more importantly 

 now, is always a challenge. Our Americas Developer Support team is spread across 3 time zones, our global support team works in 10 time zones and covers the entire globe, my Auth0 colleagues work from, perhaps, all time zones, as do our customer.

It took me over a decade to get to the point where I’m comfortable using TextExpander. Not because it’s difficult to use but because I haven’t had a good use case for it before. These days as a 

, I type a lot, and a lot of the stuff I type is quite repetitive. Since I started using TextExpander, it saved me about 5 hours of typing things that I would type anyway. It’s quite simple: when you type a snippet, say, 

, TextExpander turns these tiny words into phrases and sentences (

 turns into my full signature, with email, title and such, and 

 turns into “Let’s figure it out.” When you type something a lot, TextExpander would create a new snippet for you and remind you to use every now and again until you incorporate it into your typing. At this time, I’ve got around 50 snippets, and I can’t be happier not to have to type the same things over and over again.

Paw is a native Mac application for inspecting and making HTTP requests. If you are familiar with Postman, Paw is basically the same but native to the Mac (unlike Postman, which is an Electron app). Paw is gorgeous, perfectly tailored to the system, works with all system shortcuts and native extensions, and it could be as powerful as you need it to be. Yet in the true spirit of native Mac applications, it’s not bloated with obscure features, bells, and whistles. It’s clean, beautiful, and, powerful — exactly the way we like our day-to-day tools to be.

There are dozens if not hundreds of apps one could use to take and share screenshots. Hell, you could take screenshots with a simple shortcut built into macOS, no applications needed! Yet with CleanShotX, you could take a screenshot or make a screencast using the same system-wide shortcuts you’d normally use, edit the image (highlight something, blur private information, add a text comment, arrows, you name it), and share it with just another click (or a ⌘-v). Those who remember Skitch killed by Evernote would absolutely love this one!

Finally, Paste. Again, there are a bunch of similar apps and a bunch of apps that have similar features (think Alfred or Quicksilver), but Paste made it really natural for me to never think about my copy-paste buffer ever again. If I ever copied something — anything — an image, a secret, and app id, whatever it is, I’ll be able to find it and paste it again with a natural keyboard shortcut. Paste makes it easy to search whatever you copied in the past and even create collections of frequently pasted things. Super easy to use, and tremendously helpful every day.

These are some of my favorite tools that make my day-to-day job so much easier.

5 Tools in 5 Minutes

For years, I've been rebuilding this website to learn new things and to have a nice website for myself. Year after year, I try different tech stacks, design approaches and platforms, and this time around I decided to do something differently.

My primary goal is to learn new tech and build a nice site. Over the years, I've collected an endless list of things I want to implement on my personal site, but for the longest time I tried to find an existing product I can use and that meets my requirements.

Unfortunately, building on top of my existing blog is not really viable (or flexible enough). At this moment, my main site runs on Ghost hosted on 

. Even though Ghost has a nice CMS interface and somewhat works with static frontends, It's not flexible enough for what I want to do. As a result, I'm doing a full rebuild, from scratch.

Last year I tried live coding on Twitch, and it worked out pretty well. I got some viewers and even subscribers, but more importantly I worked out my imposter 

paralysis. Sharing my coding sessions live with an unknown group of people made me realize that I know enough to share my knowledge and make it helpful for others. It's also fun, I must add ;)

This time, with a throve of new experience and new knowledge I want to share more and more regularly. I will build individual components, design and re-design the site, and poke around many things I know literally nothing about at this moment. Fun, right?!

It's fair to day that I don't have a solid plan to follow. I do track some of the ideas in 

, but it's very much work in progress. But generally the plan is to start with what I've built so far and proceed until I'm happy with the results. I don't think it's the kind of work that has an end, but I'm going to build and improve a bunch of things, from look and feel to personl library and CMS plugins along the way; we'll add comments to blog posts, contact forms, and a bunch of serverless functions. I plan to livestream whenever I can with the goal of streaming whenever I work on this project.

. Santy actually warrants a whole separate blog post: I really dig it and enjoy it enough to build a 

 for identity and user management, and will be using 

 for subscriptions and such. Quite a few things to learn and implement!

 and check back every now and again. Submit your bug report to Github, add your ideas to the project. See you soon!

I decided to do it in public and share what 

Building this website

 just announced that they will be shutting down. It's not really surprising given a mountain of recent events and a significant change of entertainment industry landscape due to the pandemic. Here's why and such.

After just over 6 months, Quibi is sutting down.

Quibi is shutting down

This hike report is long overdue. I've taken a whole week off work to do this hike and apparently it took me over a week to come up with a sensible story about it. This is a long one, so bear with me. Or don't.

The idea to hike the Loowit Trail came to me way back, probably, around 2013, when my family and I visited Johnston Ridge Observatory.

I learned that there was a hiking trail right at the bottom of the breached side of the volcano, and I had this trail in mind ever since.

Throughout this post, sometimes I will refer to Mt. St. Helens by its native name, Loowit (Lawetlat'la, Loowit or Louwala-Clough to be precise). For centuries, the mountain had its name, but colonizers in their infinite arrogance decided to give it a new name. In 1792 Commander George Vancouver named this landmark after his friend British diplomat Alleyne Fitzherbert, 1st Baron St Helens.

Mt. Loowit is the youngest volcano in the Cascades. It is located on the indigenous lands of 

 and Klickitat native people (now part of 

). The slopes of the mountain above the treeline are a Traditional Cultural Property of Cowlitz and Yakama tribal groups. For thousands of years, the mountain has been a central place in the culture and mythology of the tribes, where resources were gathered and young people were sent to test themselves.

Although I only ventured above the "treeline" once or twice along the Loowit trail, I can clearly see why this incredible place is at the center of indigenous cultures. I encourage you to take a look at some of the legends collected and passed down through generations.

Prior to May 18, 1980, Mt. St. Helens was a beautiful cone-shaped peak, sometimes referred to as Mt. Fuji of the Pacific Northwest. It all changed early on that day. There are a few fantastic documentaries about the infamous eruption and the subsequent largest landslide in recorded history.

Ever since the eruption, Mt. St. Helens fascinated scientists, hikers, photographers, writers and became a preserved natural treasure.

Of course, there's a hiking trail around the volcano, it's PNW, what did you expect?! :)

The Loowit Trail circles the mountain at about 4400 ft of elevation, sometimes dipping as low as 2900 ft and soaring to over 4800 ft. Its length depends a lot on the approach, but generally, it's considered to be between 30 and 35 miles, with a total elevation gain of around 9000 ft.

 level, and for a good reason: it throws every possible terrain and challenge at you, all the time! I don't know what I was thinking when I decided that I should totally hike it: I'm not in great physical shape and my backpacking experience prior to this hike was limited to 2-nighters. Anyway, I was set on hiking it during my time off, and when I'm set on an adventure, nothing can stop me (except for a broken leg, evidently)

For this hike, I went all-in on ultralight gear. Ultralight tent, ultralight quilt, ultralight sleeping pad, ultralight backpack, the list goes on. I trimmed my base weight to about 12 pounds, which is quite fascinating if you ask me. I also had 2 65 oz bottles for water and another 2-liter water bag.

So on the gear front, I was well-prepared and ready to go. Some things that I've taken with me I hadn't used a lot or even at all, but those were minor and inconsequential.

I was not as prepared physically as I thought I was but will get to it.

On Sunday, I arrived at Climbers Bivouac, set up my tent, quickly drove to Portland to pay my respects to the folks protesting in front of the Injustice Center. I got back to the camp after dark and went straight to sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a long day.

I got up pretty late — most climbers were long gone. The weather was perfect for me: low overcast, fairly chilly, and quiet.

The first segment of the hike is the approach to the Loowit Trail. To get to the trail from the camp, you need to hike up Ptarmigan trail for about two miles and something like 700 ft of elevation, until you hit an intersection with Loowit trail. There, I took a right turn and proceeded counter-clockwise.

The trail was fairly light for the first few miles. It mostly went downhill, and the climbing segments were fairly light. The views were already quite impressive, especially if you consider that there's a looming volcano behind the clouds!

This first part of the trail, approximately between Climbers to Windy Pass has quite a few water sources, and it gave me a false impression that water is not going to be a problem. Yes, this water was silty and muddy, but it's water so who cares, right?!

I topped up my water containers here at the Chocolate falls and hit my first challenging segment: Worm Flows. This is basically a giant lava boulder field you need to cross. The trail is non-existent, and you hop from boulder to boulder navigating to the next white stake in the distance.

The day was going towards sunset at this point, so I pushed forward to hit my Day One target (about 7 miles) and set up camp for the night before dark.

And there you have it. Day one was in the books, I felt pretty good about my progress and the fact that I hit my first target. There were some wild animals sniffing around the tent all night, but nothing interesting happened, and I didn't find any interesting footprints in the morning.

When you backpack for days, at some point it's easy to sync with the sun. You wake up around sunrise and normally settle down for the night right after sunset. At least that's my experience.

Day two began early: I had about 6-8 miles to hike through pretty rugged terrain and under full sun and clear skies. My goal was to push all the way to Windy Pass — the edge of the Restricted zone in front of the Breach — the part of the mountain that got destroyed during the eruption.

As mentioned before, the terrain on this stretch of the trail is pretty rough. Looking back, it's not 

 rough, especially compared to some later segments.

The views were breathtaking. I paused every now and again just to stare in the distance, taking it in as much as I can.

Rugged boulder fields turned into a huge stretch of huckleberry fields. Quite literally, you're making your way on a narrow trail slicing an endless huckleberry field! The berries were ripe, juicy and so very tasty!

I was getting pretty tired. All these uphills, boulders, lack of shade began to take tall. I refilled my water at Muddy River, and realized that I'm probably not going to make it to my target area before sunset.

I pushed forward for as long as I could. The problem was that since I was tired, hot, and pushing, I drank a lot of water. And I was running out fairly quickly. I decided that I'll go until I find a water source and will break camp somewhere nearby.

 as my primary navigation app, and I truly love it. Aside from providing 100s of map layers (including cell coverage, air quality, and more), it has some unique data I relied on in this trip: campsites.

I was lucky enough to chat with a fellow hiker who let me know that the creek that looks to be running by the campsite here, in fact, changed and is now running quite a bit to the West. This spot became my new goal for the day.

I arrived at the campsite right before sunset, set up a tent, enjoyed the view for a bit, and went to sleep.

When this is what you wake up to, the day just can't be bad!

I think now is a good time to mention a few things that very clearly went wrong by this point:

I was running out of water much faster than I could find water sources.

I somehow punctured my inflatable sleeping pad and despite my repair efforts, it was deflating almost completely within 1-2 hours. My back wasn't happy about this, and sleep quality got pretty low.

The food I brought with me was either dehydrated or too sweet for me to hold. By this point in time, I haven't eaten much in the past 2 days, yet it didn't bother me yet

I was running ~3 miles behind schedule. With a Restricted Zone looming ahead — you must cross it's ~9 miles in one go, no camping allowed — I will have to cover these 3 miles and 9 miles of the Restricted zone today in order to camp legally. 12 miles is ok on easier trails, but by this time I realized that 12 miles in one day on this trail is probably beyond my abilities.

With all this in mind, I embarked on this most exciting part of the trail — the one that crosses the Breach and pumice fields left in front of the mountain by the 1980 blast and subsequent landslide.

The first few miles from my camp to Windy Pass were a breeze. The mostly flat prairie-like trail all the way to the pass. I enjoyed my walk a lot, and was wondering for a while whether I could've made it the day before. I probably could have pushed for a few more miles, break camp after dark beside the Windy Pass and shave these extra miles off of my Restricted Zone day.

Going over the pass look intimidating at first, but was in fact fairly easy. The trail there goes along the hillside and is not very stable and has a few really sketchy spots, but overall it was easier than I expected.

The following few miles go over the side of the mountain slowly introducing the Breach — the side of the volcano destroyed by the blast in 1980. For me, this was the most exciting part of the journey. Walking on top of many feet of fairly new volcanic ash, seeing the destruction side of the volcano myself, and traversing many canyons, streams, and erosion areas while seeing the mountain at a very unusual angle.

It's been 40+ years since the eruption, yet the mountain is still settling in. Constant rock fall noise, steam, and ash floating in the air, ever-changing streams and riverbeds — it will likely take hundreds of years for all this stuff to calm down. Geologically speaking, 40 years is nothing, a blink of an eye, so from the volcano's perspective, it just erupted moments ago and the process of healing hasn't even started yet. Biologically, though, even in the blast zone, life is everywhere. From grass and weeds to all sorts of shrubs and sub-alpine flowers and native trees, it's all here. Chipmunks, coyotes, birds of every color, elk, and deer, it's all here.

To say that this is an active and dangerous volcano would be an understatement. In the past 30 days, there were close to a dozen earthquakes under Mt St Helens, and every year there periods of swarm earthquakes: dozens of magnitude 1-3 shakes that happen within days and weeks. Something is still going on down there, and at any point, the mountain can start erupting again (the same way it happened twice in 2006 and then in 2008).

This is the heart of the blast zone. Behind me is the gaping wound left by the eruption. You can't hear rocks falling, but you can see clouds of ash they send up in the air.

By this point, I'm exhausted. A few miles back, I hit an oasis: a little stream, ice-cold and absolutely clear, surrounded by some trees and bushes. I refilled all my water containers, relaxed in the shade for a bit, and pushed forward through the blast zone.

My goal for the day was to get to the South Fork Toutle River — the next water source and the place where the restricted zone ends and camping is allowed again.

By the time I left the breach area, I was at the end of my rope: I was tired, I practically ran out of water, and I still had about 4 miles ahead of me to get to Toutle River. There was no way I'd make it there, and it was time to admit it and plan accordingly.

I decided to push as far as I humanly can, again. With canyons turning deeper and deeper, and hiking mostly uphill at this point, this "as far as humanly possible" turned out to be about 2 miles or so. I found a spot (still in the restricted area) and pitched my tent — there was no way I'd cross this canyon today. I fell asleep almost immediately.

By this time, I had exactly two sips of water left and 2 miles to hike up and down to the next water source. I was in trouble.

This was one of those days when you think: "Ok, how can I quit this now?" And the answer is, basically, you can't. At this point, there's no exit from the trail that would take you to people faster. There's no way around the upcoming Toutle Drop (I'll get to it in a minute). There's no quitting, only pushing ahead and hoping you can make it, which at this point was not a sure thing.

I had my sip of water for breakfast and hit the trail. Since I haven't eaten much and started to get fairly dehydrated, I got to the point of being slightly delirious. I had to take breaks every few hundred yards — taking my pack off, spreading my sleeping pad, and just laying down for a few minutes. The next 2 miles were the longest two miles in my life.

Luckily, I met another hiker, who was generous enough to share half a bottle of water with me. I've taken a picture of him on his phone in return, and was incredibly grateful for the water and some tips on what awaits me ahead.

Ahead was the Toutle Drop. I don't think it's an official name of this feature, but every hiker I've met referred to it like this.

Right there, at the very bottom of this by far the deepest canyon on the trail, there is a tiny stream. It's Toutle River, and in fact, it's not so tiny, it's just very far below.

It was a terrible mistake and I shouldn't have done this trail. Sheer luck and generosity of other hikers are the only two reasons I'm not a hero of an article about local Search and Rescue trying to airlift a hiker from Mt. St. Helens.

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