The instructions were to be ready to leave the parking lot, in full climbing gear, by 8:00 am Saturday morning, so I picked up Chris at his place in Edmonds at 5:30. This meant getting up at 4:00. Ugh. I spent most of the night Friday night packing up my gear. Here’s a pic of some of the things I brought along.
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| How many things can you identify? (Kitty not included) |
The pack was pretty heavy – it weighed in at 46 pounds. I need to get used to this however, since it will be much heavier for the Rainier trip – probably closer to 60 pounds or more. That’s a lot of weight, by the way. It’s really important to have a properly adjusted pack to carry that much for an extended period, or else you get some nasty hot spots if it is rubbing you the wrong way.
Chris and I made up to the Steven’s Pass parking lot around 7:15. The parking lot was already full of OSAT-ers, milling around. The weather was good – a light mist. That is pretty much how it was the entire weekend, which was just fine with me. The students were split up into rope teams of 3 or 4 students and 2 leaders. Our team had three students (Chris, myself, and another fellow), and two leaders. We met our leaders, provided them with our emergency contact information, and headed out en masse up the hill. It was a short hike up to the camping area, which was near the base of the Tye Mill ski lift. There were 88 people total – 54 students and 34 leaders.
We set up our tents in the snow. This was really cool since it was the first time I had even done this. The new snow shovel worked great and Chris and I carved out what I thought was a nice area for the tent. That was, until I walked around and looked at some of the other setups. These people were getting awfully fancy in their campsites! Most of them had dug out miniature outdoor living rooms next to the tents and made snow benches so they could put on their gear more easily and sit there while cooking dinner. Some had even carved out little square holes in the sides of these living rooms and put their food in there, like an open-air freezer. Everyone staked out their tents with a huge number of stakes and ropes. I didn’t because I didn’t bring enough stakes. I had bought 6 of the fancy snow stakes last week but I need at least 8 more. Apparently it is important to stake out the tent, tightly, using every loophole possible. This is the only way to make it withstand the mountain winds and not blow away. There have been many stories told of hikers returning from the summit only to find out their tents have been completely blow away down the mountain, or are flapping in the wind up the air, like a big noisy kite, tethered down by a single remaining rope.
We had a quick bite, then started in on the day’s activities. We spent the next 9 hours on the mountain, in the snow, learning a multitude of mountaineering techniques such as belaying, self arrest, prusiking, team arrest, etc. It was crazy, but kind of fun. They had a prusiking station set up, similar to the one at Camp Long, but this one was hooked up to the ski lift frame so we had to prusik ourselves up around 25 feet. This was very hard for a lot of the students. It was hard for me too, but I focused on relaxing and not getting frustrated and just took it easy. I made it easily.
Our two leaders were complete opposites of each other. The primary leader is a former commercial fisherman, and was coming across as a real grouch. He’s a very nice guy, but he is also crass and gruff. His assistant is a high level director in a large corporation and is much calmer and has very good people skills. The primary leader tried to show us all of the different belay and arrest techniques but he had a hard time getting the steps down just right. This was tough for us students because we don’t know any of these things, and we are counting on the leaders to show us the right way to do them. It gets frustrating when we are shown four different ways by four different people and told each one is the right way and the others are wrong. This is kind of a big deal, since the reality is that we need to know how to do these things in order to come back down the mountain alive.
After many hours of marching around with the three students all tied together as a rope team and the two leaders alongside, we finally were allowed to come back down to the camp site and fix dinner. It felt great to untie from the ropes and drop those harnesses. Those things are NOT comfortable and tweak you in all the wrong ways.
Chris had prepared a great dinner for us - smoked salmon, instant rice and little chunks of steak. I heated up water in the JetBoil and used that to reconstitute the rice, along with the salmon and steak bits. It was great! We also had chips, apples, bananas, peanut butter sandwiches, trail mix and granola bars. I’m liking this plan of me providing the tent and Chris taking care of the food! Seems like a great deal to me. All of the gear worked great, with the exception of the automatic starter for the stove. It quit working after a few tries so we had to use matches or a lighter to get the stove going. I had heard reports of that being an issue at altitude. Luckily we had both waterproof matches and a good lighter. Good thing for the 10 essentials!
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| Chris executes an epic photobomb on my self-portrait |
After dinner, we all gathered for a big AA meeting, sitting around a bonfire. As part of the equipment list for the weekend, everyone was supposed to bring one piece of firewood, so we had close to a hundred big pieces of wood for the fire. It was really cool! It was a great meeting, with many of the grizzled and grumpy old guys (including our crusty leader) getting all misty-eyed and teary as they shared how special this was to them. We were all sitting in a huge circle that had been carved into the snow, surrounded by these big peaks all around us. What a setting.
The meeting went on for over two hours, then we started getting ready for bed. We didn’t get to sleep until around 10:00 or 11pm, which was really late considering how much work we had done that day, and how early we needed to get up the next morning. I took off my boots and placed them inside the tent so they wouldn’t freeze solid overnight. A bunch of the guys were firing up their stoves and putting the hot water into their Nalgenes, which were then put inside the sleeping bag as a footwarmer. I had heard of this but didn’t want to bother doing it, until one of the guys came by and handed me his warm bottle. Damn that felt good! I climbed out of the bag, scooped some snow into the trusty JetBoil, and melted it down. I made a hot water bottle for both Chris and I and we put them in our bags down by our feet. That really did help! They were still warm in the morning.
It was pretty comfortable in our little tent. The bags were warm and the inflatable air mattresses worked well. I slept off and on all night, and was awake before the alarms started chiming at 3:00am. It was so quiet out there! No sounds at all. I’m lying there, in my fancy down bag, face freezing cold but the rest of me is warm, just savoring the moment. Then the small chime of a watch alarm went off in one of the nearby tents, then another one. I hadn’t bothered to set mine since I figured everyone else would have set theirs, and they did.
It took me 20 minutes to climb out of the bag. By that time, there was a lot of activity around the camp. Man it was cold! Probably in the 20’s or so. We all about an hour to heat water, eat breakfast, clean up our cooking stuff, get all our gear together, and get roped up in our climbing teams. We were to start on the climb by 4:30am. Getting out of my toasty bag, I decided to put on one of the Under Armor Cold Gear long sleeve baselayers that Julie and Rachael got me for Christmas. These shirts are super warm, but the problem was that it was too warm later on. Sweating on these climbs is a problem, since you can get very chilled standing around with a wet baselayer. There’s no way to get warm after that. I forgot to pack a change of shirts for this morning’s climb, so I was cold the rest of the morning, until we came back down the mountain to where the tents were set up.
I had kept the boots inside the tent, down by my feet. I put on new socks (liner and mid-weight combo) and put on the boots, but my feet were instantly cold and didn’t warm up for a few hours.
I had slept with long underwear capilene, nylon hiking pants, gore-tex rain pants on my legs, capilene shirt with a wool mountain HardWear mid-layer shirt, and my nice new wool neck gaiter. With all those clothes on, in a down sleeping bag rated for zero degrees, I was just barely warm enough.
We fixed a quick breakfast of instant oatmeal and banana, and heated up some water for coffee. I had brought some packs of VIA and these things worked great.
Before the morning climb, we had to get into full gear, including jackets, hats, gloves, boots, crampons, gaiters and climbing harnesses. We tied into the rope pretty quickly and checked out each other’s tie-in. It was at this point that I realized I had looped the climbing rope through the waist strap of my pack instead of the harness loop. Oops. I guess there’s a reason why we check each other out.
Starting out was good but I tripped on the crampons after about 2 minutes. The points on my right boot caught on the crampon straps on my left boot and I went down on my hands and knees. I didn’t yell out “Falling!!” and one of the leaders gently reminded me that I should have. Another oops.
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| Crampons are Fun!! |
Going up the hill in the dark was really cool. There was no issue with visibility – the headlamps provided plenty of light. Mine’s rated at about 100 lumens which is plenty. Plus, there were dozens of others out there too so we basically just followed the line of lights up the hill.
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| Stevens Pass, 4:45am |
Chris was leading today our rope team today and he set a pretty good pace. My legs were sore from the day before. It took them a good 30 minutes to warm up enough not to be sore anymore. We made it up to the top of the ski lift, which was about a 1200 foot gain) in 45 minutes. We waited for the other climbing team, then took a group photo.
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| Chris and I with the rest of our rope team and leaders |
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| Nice group photo |
We then spent the next 5 hours practicing Z-Pulley rescue techniques. This is an impossibly complicated process for rescuing someone who has fallen into a crevasse. It involves setting up an ice axe anchor, bomber (aka dead man) anchor, two pulleys, and a ton of prusiks. In theory, two people can use this method to haul a third person out of a crevasse in an emergency. In reality, this rescue technique is so bloody complicated that there is no way in hell that anyone would remember how to pull it off. Especially when you are freaking out on a windy, icy, steep glacier, it’s freezing cold, and your buddy is screaming that they’ve snapped their collarbone and are quickly bleeding and/or freezing to death. In the end, we had a slightly better idea of how this is supposed to work, however we still need to practice.
The weekend ended with everyone hiking down the mountain together. The packs were heavy and the weather was nasty but it was a great feeling to be headed down after a very long and productive weekend on the hill.
I am really looking forward to the next big trip. In three weeks, we head up to Mt. Baker, where we will hike in for a few miles up to a real glacier, with real, bottomless crevasses, and dangle people over the edge while trying to set up this z-pulley thing. I’ve heard many stories about how hard this is, how pissed off people get when they are stuck in a massive freezer (aka crevasse) for 45 minutes while their team struggles to sort out the knots on the rope for their z-pulley configuration.
Seriously though, this is amazing stuff. I am gaining confidence, and I think I am getting in pretty good shape. I look forward to these trips and as soon as I get back, I am counting the days until we go back out again. I like this.
