Mt. Baker

My flight into Seattle arrived late due to bad weather and mechanical problems. Lynne picked me up and we went to stay at my friends house that lives in the area. On Thursday, we woke up early and started arranging the huge pile of gear that we would have to take up the mountain. The plan was to climb up to the base camp, spend the next day practicing all of our crevasse techniques, and then summit on the Saturday.



We drove to Mt.Baker and signed in at the ranger station. At that time we also picked up our "blue bags" which are what you use to clean up your "waste" on the mountain. We parked and picked up our very heavy packs (I estimate that my pack weighed about 80 lbs.) We did the short 3 mile (2300' elevation gain) hike to the base camp. We arrived really tired, and desperately wanting to remove the huge packs from our backs. Base camp was in a hill side at about 5700', with large snow fields behind us that turned into the Coleman glacier just 300 feet above. The weather was not very cold, but really foggy. There would be moments of clearing, and then we would be right back into the fog. Sometimes the visibility dropped to about 50'



The next morning we awoke to a nearly clear day (except for the high clouds). We were camped near a set of boy scouts, and we watched them head out to the summit leaving at 7 AM (this is really late). We practiced our crevasse travel, and placed a bunch of snow anchors in the snow field near our tent. Then spent the afternoon hiding from the rain in the tent. After talking to a couple of parties that were coming down from the mountain, we decided the ideal time to depart would be 1 AM. We decided to hit the sac, but I don't think either of us slept much.



At 12 AM, the alarm went off. I looked out the tent window, and we had a nice clear night. We could look to the northwest and see Vancouver, BC. After quickly boiling some water and getting dressed we were off at 1 AM. We got to the base of the snow fields and started to rope up, when Lynne remembered something... she forgot her funnel. You see, when women go climbing on mountains, they are at a disadvantage when it comes time to relieve themselves. Thus women mountaineers often carry a funnel which saves them a great deal of time (and allows them to write their name in the snow :) She went back to the tent, while I finished the preparations for the glacier.



Our route of choice was the Coleman-Deming glacier route. It is not the easiest route on the mountain, but it is not the hardest either. We started up the first face which was a 20-25 degree snow slope for about 1000' of elevation gain. We could see other teams ahead of us, their bobbing headlamps going up the mountain. After this hill, there is a gentle slope that is filled with crevasses. At on point, we came to a large open slope were a large group of seracs (ice chunks the size of a car or small house) were looming above. You could see the rements of when seracs had fallen in the past. Needless to say, we moved quickly through that section. We navigated through the field, and made it up to a steep wall below the ridge at 9000' elevation.



We took a break, and then headed up the steep wall to a rock ridge. The ridge took us up about another 500', and then we traversed to the side to a ~40 degree slope that leads to the summit. When we arrived at the top, the sun broke through and we rested as well as fueled up for the decent. Another group on the summit had decided that the weather was good enough to get naked (much to the joys of the surrounding mountaineers :)



The decent took much less time, and we enjoyed the sun for the first thousand feet. The sun and warm temperatures were starting to really melt the snow causing my crampons to ball (snow gets into the spikes making them useless). We removed our crampons and continued the decent. It started to snow, and continued to snow it rain for the rest of the decent. On the way down, we could see some of the avalanche prone fields that we had walked by at night, and we were both glad the we didn't see them then. Near the end of the crevasse field, we came to one of the larger crevasses that had a snow bridge across it (a section where the snow has not melted, and you can walk across). The snow bridge had been weakened a great deal by the warm temperatures, and was starting to fail. We found an alternate route around it, and soon we were back at our tents, and very tired. Total time: 12:45 tent to tent. After that, we packed up our 80 lbs. packs and headed down to the car (slowly).



Mt. Rainier



After Mt.Baker we took a rest day where we ate just about everything and picked up last minute provisions for Mt.Rainier. We drove out to Rainier on Monday morning, checked in with the climbing rangers, and prepared once again to carry our very heavy packs up the mountain.



We had decided to do the Disappointment cleaver route which is one of the easiest routes up Mt.Rainier (far away from Liberty ridge where so many people have died this season). The hike to base camp was about 4.2 miles with 4000' of elevation gain. Again, we had ~80 lb. packs on :( As we started up, Lynne started to notice some pain in here neck from not sleeping well the night before. After about 1000' of elevation gain, she decided that she could not go on with the weight (causing her neck more and more pain). I was feeling pretty good, so we decided that I would go up to the high camp, drop off my gear, come back down, and help Lynne out with her pack.



I trucked on ahead up the long snow fields of the cleaver route. The route is well marked, and the weather was perfectly sunny. At about 9200' (still about 1000' vertical feet from the high camp called camp Muir) I realized that I was going to run out of time to drop the gear, descend, and come back up again before dark. I found a little flat area where we could see up the tent called the moon rocks, and dropped back down to meet up with Lynne. Lynne had made it up the mountain a little more, and during that time, boiled some water so we would have something to drink on the way up. We split up her pack, and headed back up to where I had stashed the gear about 1500' above. The weather was still perfect, and it was supposed to be great for the next several days. We ate some dinner, drank some water, and then hit the sac at about 9 PM (we were both very tired).



What comes next is 7 hours of pure fear and terror.



At 3:30 AM Lynne woke me saying that she thought she saw lightening. In my groggy state I looked out the front of the tent, and sure enough, there was a large thunder storm coming. I watched it for a minute, partly to see if we had to do something and partly in disbelief that this was happening to us. The storm was moving closer so we made the quick decision that we had to get off the ridge we were camping on as fast as possible. We quickly grabbed our headlamps and jackets. Lynne grabbed a bottle of water, and I grabbed a little food. We raced out of the tent, and started running down the snow slopes illuminated only by our headlamps and the occasional lightening strike nearby. It started to rain, so we put the hoods up on our jackets to keep warm.



Then I noticed something.



There was an odd sound coming from my jacket. It sounded like the static when you take clothes out of the dryer or something. I had heard of this before. The phenomena is called St.Elmo's fire. Where essentially the air becomes highly charged, and you are one of the best conductors around for the lightening to hit. You end up getting a large static charge on your body, and often times, you are then struck by lightening. I removed my shell hood and ran my fingers through my hair. There was a bright discharge from my head of blue and yellow light that I could see above the light of my headlamp. I knew we were in trouble.



In a panic, I removed several of my layers of clothes, hoping that this was somehow due to the fact that I was wearing a fleece jacket (which often causes static). I ran my fingers through my hair again. Another large static discharge occurred. I dropped to the ground to try and ground myself, again, this did not help. I yelled at Lynne, "what the hell do I do?" At that moment, she started to notice the static as well. There was only one thing we could do, descend. We were two large sac of ions high up on a mountain, and we were likely the best targets around for the lightening to hit. We started running down the snow field as fast as we could. Lynne took off ahead of me, and I followed behind as fast as I could, still very tired from the day before. On the way down, there were several more large lightening strikes on the surrounding mountains, and I could see that two of them had started fires on the mountains just a few miles away.



We dropped 1500' down to a small glacial stream and hunkered down in a flat area below a ridge. As we lay there, still pretty scared, we noticed that it smelled a little funny. Like urea. We were lying in an area that several climbers must have used as a bathroom on the way up. Lucky us, this was the best place to lay. High above us on the mountain, we could see the headlamps of people trying to summit. Their lights darting around in every direction trying to find a place to hide. There were obviously much worse places to be then where we were lying. After about an hour, we decided it looked ok, and that we would start heading up. After about 500' of elevation gain, the lightening came back, and we found ourselves running down the slopes once again.



We found a better shelter this time and hunkered down again. The wind started to pick up, and the little clothing that we managed to grab before running down the hill was now not working so well. We huddled in real close in the hopes that some body warmth would keep us away from hypothermia. After another hour, the weather looked better, and we decided to head up to the camp.



Upon arriving at the camp, we noticed the tent looked funny. It had moved down the slope and turned upside down. We had only attached the tent to a few rocks the night before because we knew we would be leaving so early in the morning, and that we would be inside the tent almost the whole time we were there. We emptied the tent, and started to reorganize the gear that had been tossed around. Then the winds started to pick up. A lot. We quickly disassembled the tent packed our gear. Lynne finished packing first and started to descend. I finished packing as the winds got stronger and stronger. Nearly knocking my off my feet several times. I threw the pack on just as more lightening started to hit the surrounding area. Now I was running down the snow slopes with an 80 lb. pack. Besides thinking about how crazy this was, I was also thinking, this has got to be great for my back.



As we ran, I looked up and could see the smoke from the fires that were started by the lightening strikes earlier that morning. When the slope was steep enough, I sat down and used my butt as a sled down the hill. Sometime during one of these decents, my snow shovel fell out of my pack.



We rested down by the stream, and then the sun came out. Already exhausted from running up and down the slopes, we decided to call it a day. The mountain will be there next year.



Mt. Adams

Rainier had been a shaky experience to say the least. After Lynne and I returned back to my friends house in Seattle, we took the next day to rest and eat. A lot! Even though the mountain had scared us, after a day of rest, we were both interested in tackling another peak. As we were sick of carrying our oversized packs, we aimed to climb that something that could be done in a day. Mt.Adams seemed to be just the peak. We also knew that a now former POCer (Vlad) had just moved out to the Seattle area and so we decided to give him a call. Vlad agreed to go (although he received a lecture for taking the day off :| We decided to climb Adams on Friday.



Thursday morning, Lynne awoke sporting a brand new cough. She was out for Adams. Vlad and I decided to just make it the two of us. We headed into Seattle and picked up some last minute things at his apartment and at REI. We headed out of Seattle at 9PM. The plan was to do the 4.5 hour drive, camp at the base for a few hours, and then head up the mountain early in the morning.



The plan did not go off quite like we had hoped.



The drive took us down into Oregon near the Columbia river (near the famous Gorge concert arena). When attempting to cross the river back into Washington, we discovered that the bridge was closed until 5AM the next morning. There was still about an hour of driving following the bridge. Our options were to drive another hour to get around the bridge, or camp in the nearby parking lot. Being sooo tired, we opted for the parking lot. I set an alarm and we passed out trying to hide our eyes from the light of the street lamp.



At 5:30, I awoke. The alarm had not gone off. Crap! We immediately started driving, and after picking up a permit at the rangers station, we headed to the trail head. We got started at 7 AM (a late start) but we were in luck, the weather was great.



Mt.Adams is 12,276 feet tall (second highest in Washington). It is not a difficult peak, at least not technically. The route we had chosen was to come up the south route (south spur), the easiest route, but also quite long. At ~10 miles in length and 6,600 ft. of elevation gain, most people climbed the route in 2-3 days. Being foolhardy as we were, we decided that one day would be enough.



The climb starts up a fairly easy trail for a couple miles arriving at a long snow field that we would follow the rest of the way to the summit. Along the way we past dozens of camp sites where people had created rock walls out of the pumice to make a small flat area to sleep. It was apparent to us that this climb must be much more popular on the weekends. We arrived at the snow slopes, and soon we had our first major obstacle, a steep 40 degree snow slope that went up about 100 feet. Following this, the snow slope eased up in angle to about 20 degrees all the way to the false summit at 11,700 feet.



The summit was made up a fairly smooth snow slope with a run down shack on top. It turns out that there used to be a lot of mining done on Mt.Adams, and consequently there was a shack on top. The shack was snow covered, so the summit was actually located on its roof. After the customary summit shots, we started to descend.



This was the part that we were both looking forward to.



Because there were no crevasses, and there was about 4000 feet of snow slopes that we came up, we had about 4000 feet of snow slopes to glisade. Glisading is done by basically sitting on your butt and sledding using your ski pants as the sled. Due to the length of the slopes, you normally use an ice axe to slow yourself down. This also come in handy when you notice the occasional rock in your path (it can save your butt, really!) This was the best glisading that I had ever done. The mountain provided several 500 hundred vertical foot decents, with slopes steep enough that you were digging in your ice axe to prevent going out of control. Often times we would follow the routes of other climbers, and the deep channels left behind made the decent almost like being on a water slide with large banking turns.



We arrived back at the trail, and already there was team after team ascending to claim the earlier camp slots that we had seen. We stumbled back to the car, and started the 4.5 hour drive back to Seattle. We arrived at about 12, so I had 4 hours to pack before my flight left at 7 that morning.



Mt.Adams was a great climb, and I would recommend it to anyone that wants to get a good first taste of climbing a peak in the Cascades.