(Disclaimer: People's definition on climbing and hiking may vary depending on their skill levels. A friend, who was about to climb Mt Rainier, got this message from an office-mate who had summitted Mt Everest - "Best of luck on the hill!". The point is, the terms I have used in this post are based on my own perspective.)
Being a hopeless romantic with stats, I have kept an account of all the hikes I have been on. And I recently finished 50 unique hikes, Bandera mountain being the 50th. The hikes have included some simple ones, like Delicate Arch in Utah, to relatively tougher ones, like Mt St Helens and hiking to the bottom of Grand Canyon. (Here's a link to all the hikes with the stats.) A common theme has been that they were all day hikes. The highest I had gone was to Camp Muir at 10k feet. The most altitude I had gained was at Grand Canyon (5k feet), so never had to break it up over 2 days and carry camping stuff. And although it's most advisable, the only one of the 10 essentials we carried without fail was a reservoir full of water. So as long as I could have the stamina, the hike was done.
Some of the memorable moments of these hikes have been getting lost on the hike to Goat Lake after sunset. And getting extremely dehydrated coming back up on a baking afternoon at Grand Canyon. Also not having the right footwear while hiking up Rattlesnake mountain, so slipping and falling down 11 times over the 11 miles. The point is - our hiking equipment, if any, was quite primitive and that's the way we intended to keep it.
Every hiker in Seattle at some point has thought of going up Mt Rainier. But to me it has always looked intimidating and a little out of my league. So when some friends mentioned attempting to climb it this season, I was not convinced. My approach has been to learn the things that are required for mountain climbing and see how it goes. Besides for somebody who has only been a hiker and not a climber (more on the distinction later), climbing Rainier in summer requires a spring-wide weekends worth of commitment. And while I was not averse to hiking all throughout summer, having just committed 2 months worth of weekends to staging a Marathi play, I was just not up for another commitment. Nevertheless, some friends decided to commit to a charity group organizing and training for the climb. And given the kind of competitive spirits I have to deal with, I just had to at least do everything else that they did barring the actual climb to Rainier.
So we started with Mt Hood, a 11k+ slightly technical climb close to the Columbia River Gorge. Let me try to define "slightly technical" here. Any snow hike would require some of the following things -
1. Microspikes - would have been awesome to have them on that Rattlesnake Mountain, would have prevented a sore backside
2. Crampons - optional, only work when the snow is hard enough to sink them in. Snow would ball up into them if it's not hard. Also you would want to glissade on slushy snow and you have to take them off, otherwise you could end up with a broken leg.
3. Ice axe - generally useful in place of a hiking pole. Useful for self arrest if you slip and lose control, also on fast glissades.
A technical hike is the one that requires you to be roped up. Either long roped, for something like Mt Rainier, which has large glaciers, and possibility of crevasses. You typically have 3 to 6 people on a rope, with enough distance between them, so that not all people fall in the crevasse at the same time and someone is up to rescue. Or short roped, like we learned on Mt Hood, where there is not as much danger of glaciers and hence crevasses. Since the mountain is steeper, if someone happens to slip and fall down, a short rope would allow him to be arrested quicker. Mt Hood is a little more technical than that, as the old chute part of the Pearly Gates right prior to the summit, requires a technique called belaying. The rope leader climbs up without any help (so obviously any climber requires an extremely proficient rope leader), just on the insurance of being roped up to the other guys, which is not great insurance as a slip would cause him to fall some distance before an arrest, if not a complete free fall. Once the leader is up, you have to pull yourself up with the ice axe. The thing that makes a difference is the leader holding you up (not pulling you), making sure that you don't slip and lose the elevation that you have already gained. A technique where you will be well served by some weight training in the gym, (something that I had done rather belatedly in my life, over the prior 6 months). The good thing was that the Timberline Mountain Guides, the company we climbed with, trained us in snow skills for 4 hours on the day prior to climb. The bad thing, the training did take a toll and we got to bed at 7pm, which is later than what I would have liked.
One of the biggest challenges for climbs is alpine starts. The scheduled start was at 2.30am. We had to be at the Timberline Lodge, from which they were going to hoist us 2500 feet via a snow cad, a fact for which we got ridiculed a lot within friends with no hiking credentials and friends with climbing credentials alike. So we had to wake up at 10.30pm and get ready, for extremely time consuming things such as wearing gaiters, crampons, helmets etc. But that's not the real problem of alpine starts. It's adjusting the body cycles. Convincing your body that it's 7am when it's actually midnight is a hard task. And then you have to toil at a time when your body is generally programmed to rest. The alpine start allows you to hike with no sun on your back, which is a big deal, as your stamina is going to last longer, and also through compact snow. However, since the body clock has gone for a toss, you are going to struggle with a sick feeling.
After some added drama with a broken snow cad, which caused a 1 hour delay, we got going in a blizzard. I kept wondering that there was no way we could have taken this on, without a guiding company. But given the kind of protective gear we had, it wasn't that bad. First lesson learnt, get good gear, especially for a not so mundane activity like mountaineering. Actually the realization about gear isn't very new and can be related to the first time you come to US and see freeways and understand how they function, or move from a keyboard that you used to call as "Casio" to a digital piano with touch response and weighted keys. It's a feeling of more empowerment, of an opening of a pandora's box with more possibilities. This was especially true as we had hiked up mailbox mountain in a snow/ rain storm with little visibility, in primitive rain jackets, soaked up by the time we got back, wondering why we did it. Things like waterproof seems, breathability just began making sense. We were told to report any sort of numbness in the hands, and I duly did as I couldn't feel one of my fingers. Turned out I had put 2 fingers together, so there was one empty finger on my glove that I couldn't move. To add to the drama, we were walking in a line, with one guide behind me, and the rest of the group ahead of me (8 of them, 3 of my friends, 2 guides and 3 other random people), and there was this constant H2SO4 smell that was causing nausea. We kept whispering to each other (in Hindi) that someone up ahead in the line was suffering from an upset stomach, the result of the above mentioned alpine start. So finally one of us dared ask a politically correct question to the guide- "Does the mountain always smell like sewage?" where what he meant was "Who the heck is spoiling our experience?" And then it dawned us that the mountain, being a volcano, was at fault, and all the hikers were clean.
The blizzard relented around sunrise and after a plain hike to the hoggsback, it was time to rope up. The criss cross technique, the rest step, all of that helped up to get to the old chute, after which we just belayed up to the summit. Having forgotten how easy the belay down technique taught on the previous day, I could not enjoy the summit as much. I was worried about having to get down the treacherous path that we had just come up. When asked what path we were going to take back down, Nick, our guide, chuckled and said "The same one, that's the easiest one anyway!". So I wasn't the usual photo model at Summit that I generally am at other picturesque places. All I wanted to do was take a couple of pictures as a proof of summitting and get back to the bottom of the old chute.
Turned out, the belay down the old chute was the most pleasant time of the hike. It's a bit like rappelling, with the leader actually feeding the rope and all you have to do is put your weight on and descend. The face to the mountain technique of descending was also very useful, much like climbing down a ladder, the difference being you also kick in the steps in the snow.
After getting to hoggsback, we took off the helmet, the ice axe, crampons and started doing the plunge steps. The guides didn't allow us to glissade, which was a disappointment as it is fairly high on the list of things that climbers look forward to on a snow clad mountain. The other frustrating bit was that I tied my rented helmet to my backpack, ignoring the advice of the guide and it fell off somewhere up the mountain, costing me $59. Descending down the 5200 feet through complete slush was such a tedious job (it wasn't hard, it was just tedious, with no motivation, a feeling that mountaineering books tell me that every mountaineer suffers on the descent), that I really didn't give a damn about the $59. We kept cursing all the way down for taking up this challenge and were convinced that this would be our first and last snow climb. Much of the same discussion (barring a refreshing bit of mimicry of Amitabh Bachchan singing "Choli ke peechhe kya hain") continued on the 4 hour long drive back fighting off sleep (as the guides had told us, it was a task as difficult as the mountain itself, since I was the driver).
Until the next day of course, when a summit shot became my most "liked" facebook photo. I realized what a sucker I am for public praise, much like any other modern human being. Also that this is probably just the beginning of a pursuit of a very curious and expensive sport, well illustrated here.
Link: Mount Hood Climb on Flickr
Being a hopeless romantic with stats, I have kept an account of all the hikes I have been on. And I recently finished 50 unique hikes, Bandera mountain being the 50th. The hikes have included some simple ones, like Delicate Arch in Utah, to relatively tougher ones, like Mt St Helens and hiking to the bottom of Grand Canyon. (Here's a link to all the hikes with the stats.) A common theme has been that they were all day hikes. The highest I had gone was to Camp Muir at 10k feet. The most altitude I had gained was at Grand Canyon (5k feet), so never had to break it up over 2 days and carry camping stuff. And although it's most advisable, the only one of the 10 essentials we carried without fail was a reservoir full of water. So as long as I could have the stamina, the hike was done.
Some of the memorable moments of these hikes have been getting lost on the hike to Goat Lake after sunset. And getting extremely dehydrated coming back up on a baking afternoon at Grand Canyon. Also not having the right footwear while hiking up Rattlesnake mountain, so slipping and falling down 11 times over the 11 miles. The point is - our hiking equipment, if any, was quite primitive and that's the way we intended to keep it.
Every hiker in Seattle at some point has thought of going up Mt Rainier. But to me it has always looked intimidating and a little out of my league. So when some friends mentioned attempting to climb it this season, I was not convinced. My approach has been to learn the things that are required for mountain climbing and see how it goes. Besides for somebody who has only been a hiker and not a climber (more on the distinction later), climbing Rainier in summer requires a spring-wide weekends worth of commitment. And while I was not averse to hiking all throughout summer, having just committed 2 months worth of weekends to staging a Marathi play, I was just not up for another commitment. Nevertheless, some friends decided to commit to a charity group organizing and training for the climb. And given the kind of competitive spirits I have to deal with, I just had to at least do everything else that they did barring the actual climb to Rainier.
So we started with Mt Hood, a 11k+ slightly technical climb close to the Columbia River Gorge. Let me try to define "slightly technical" here. Any snow hike would require some of the following things -
1. Microspikes - would have been awesome to have them on that Rattlesnake Mountain, would have prevented a sore backside
2. Crampons - optional, only work when the snow is hard enough to sink them in. Snow would ball up into them if it's not hard. Also you would want to glissade on slushy snow and you have to take them off, otherwise you could end up with a broken leg.
3. Ice axe - generally useful in place of a hiking pole. Useful for self arrest if you slip and lose control, also on fast glissades.
A technical hike is the one that requires you to be roped up. Either long roped, for something like Mt Rainier, which has large glaciers, and possibility of crevasses. You typically have 3 to 6 people on a rope, with enough distance between them, so that not all people fall in the crevasse at the same time and someone is up to rescue. Or short roped, like we learned on Mt Hood, where there is not as much danger of glaciers and hence crevasses. Since the mountain is steeper, if someone happens to slip and fall down, a short rope would allow him to be arrested quicker. Mt Hood is a little more technical than that, as the old chute part of the Pearly Gates right prior to the summit, requires a technique called belaying. The rope leader climbs up without any help (so obviously any climber requires an extremely proficient rope leader), just on the insurance of being roped up to the other guys, which is not great insurance as a slip would cause him to fall some distance before an arrest, if not a complete free fall. Once the leader is up, you have to pull yourself up with the ice axe. The thing that makes a difference is the leader holding you up (not pulling you), making sure that you don't slip and lose the elevation that you have already gained. A technique where you will be well served by some weight training in the gym, (something that I had done rather belatedly in my life, over the prior 6 months). The good thing was that the Timberline Mountain Guides, the company we climbed with, trained us in snow skills for 4 hours on the day prior to climb. The bad thing, the training did take a toll and we got to bed at 7pm, which is later than what I would have liked.
One of the biggest challenges for climbs is alpine starts. The scheduled start was at 2.30am. We had to be at the Timberline Lodge, from which they were going to hoist us 2500 feet via a snow cad, a fact for which we got ridiculed a lot within friends with no hiking credentials and friends with climbing credentials alike. So we had to wake up at 10.30pm and get ready, for extremely time consuming things such as wearing gaiters, crampons, helmets etc. But that's not the real problem of alpine starts. It's adjusting the body cycles. Convincing your body that it's 7am when it's actually midnight is a hard task. And then you have to toil at a time when your body is generally programmed to rest. The alpine start allows you to hike with no sun on your back, which is a big deal, as your stamina is going to last longer, and also through compact snow. However, since the body clock has gone for a toss, you are going to struggle with a sick feeling.
After some added drama with a broken snow cad, which caused a 1 hour delay, we got going in a blizzard. I kept wondering that there was no way we could have taken this on, without a guiding company. But given the kind of protective gear we had, it wasn't that bad. First lesson learnt, get good gear, especially for a not so mundane activity like mountaineering. Actually the realization about gear isn't very new and can be related to the first time you come to US and see freeways and understand how they function, or move from a keyboard that you used to call as "Casio" to a digital piano with touch response and weighted keys. It's a feeling of more empowerment, of an opening of a pandora's box with more possibilities. This was especially true as we had hiked up mailbox mountain in a snow/ rain storm with little visibility, in primitive rain jackets, soaked up by the time we got back, wondering why we did it. Things like waterproof seems, breathability just began making sense. We were told to report any sort of numbness in the hands, and I duly did as I couldn't feel one of my fingers. Turned out I had put 2 fingers together, so there was one empty finger on my glove that I couldn't move. To add to the drama, we were walking in a line, with one guide behind me, and the rest of the group ahead of me (8 of them, 3 of my friends, 2 guides and 3 other random people), and there was this constant H2SO4 smell that was causing nausea. We kept whispering to each other (in Hindi) that someone up ahead in the line was suffering from an upset stomach, the result of the above mentioned alpine start. So finally one of us dared ask a politically correct question to the guide- "Does the mountain always smell like sewage?" where what he meant was "Who the heck is spoiling our experience?" And then it dawned us that the mountain, being a volcano, was at fault, and all the hikers were clean.
The blizzard relented around sunrise and after a plain hike to the hoggsback, it was time to rope up. The criss cross technique, the rest step, all of that helped up to get to the old chute, after which we just belayed up to the summit. Having forgotten how easy the belay down technique taught on the previous day, I could not enjoy the summit as much. I was worried about having to get down the treacherous path that we had just come up. When asked what path we were going to take back down, Nick, our guide, chuckled and said "The same one, that's the easiest one anyway!". So I wasn't the usual photo model at Summit that I generally am at other picturesque places. All I wanted to do was take a couple of pictures as a proof of summitting and get back to the bottom of the old chute.
Turned out, the belay down the old chute was the most pleasant time of the hike. It's a bit like rappelling, with the leader actually feeding the rope and all you have to do is put your weight on and descend. The face to the mountain technique of descending was also very useful, much like climbing down a ladder, the difference being you also kick in the steps in the snow.
After getting to hoggsback, we took off the helmet, the ice axe, crampons and started doing the plunge steps. The guides didn't allow us to glissade, which was a disappointment as it is fairly high on the list of things that climbers look forward to on a snow clad mountain. The other frustrating bit was that I tied my rented helmet to my backpack, ignoring the advice of the guide and it fell off somewhere up the mountain, costing me $59. Descending down the 5200 feet through complete slush was such a tedious job (it wasn't hard, it was just tedious, with no motivation, a feeling that mountaineering books tell me that every mountaineer suffers on the descent), that I really didn't give a damn about the $59. We kept cursing all the way down for taking up this challenge and were convinced that this would be our first and last snow climb. Much of the same discussion (barring a refreshing bit of mimicry of Amitabh Bachchan singing "Choli ke peechhe kya hain") continued on the 4 hour long drive back fighting off sleep (as the guides had told us, it was a task as difficult as the mountain itself, since I was the driver).
Until the next day of course, when a summit shot became my most "liked" facebook photo. I realized what a sucker I am for public praise, much like any other modern human being. Also that this is probably just the beginning of a pursuit of a very curious and expensive sport, well illustrated here.
Link: Mount Hood Climb on Flickr
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