In which Tom gets in way over his head on Mt. Dickerman.
I had been doing a bit of messing around on scrambles, and wanted to hone my skills, or at least pursue that sort of climbing. I perused Beckey, looking for interesting scrambly-looking climbs. I came across the dramatic-sounding "North Face of Mt. Dickerman" which sounded sort of up my alley, class 3 and 4, "one short class 4 section." Sounded like something I could do. No big deal, interesting but not outrageous.
I got to the trailhead by about 7:00. On the two mile walk in, I thought about limits to property rights, and the proposition that since you can't "own" real property (land) in a true sense, you can only hold it, and since what you do on your property can greatly affect others, that it's defensible to put restrictions on the use to which people can put to private property. If my neighbor gets his water from a well, but I don't, do I have a right to saturate my lawn with weed killer and insecticide, when it will leech into the ground water? The basic problem seems to be that our land use laws, and our water rights, stem from English common law, from a thousand and more years ago, and aren't very well suited to the modern world. Anyhow, it's an important topic, and deserves more exposure.
I left the trail and headed up the hillside to the base of the climb. In what seemed at the time to be an omen, I came across in the dying ferns a decayed nylon climber’s bag. I picked it up, and it tore; apparently it had been there for a season or more. Inside were a pair of wool gloves I could see through the tear, and some other, unidentified decayed stuff.
For some reason, I'm incapable of reading a route description correctly, or at least remembering at all accurately. The route description says: climb S through brush and talus to the base of a gully (3600'). This 35 degree gully (possibly snow) ends at 4600 feet... So, the first thing I did was march up to a very slight indentation in a vertical wall, and spent an hour thrashing around, getting about thirty feet off the ground, and then gingerly retreating. I expect it was low fifth class, but in hiking boots with no protection, there was no way I was going to do that.
I finally got down off it about 9:00, dug the photocopy page from my pocket and read it again, then went around to the left and found the rock gully.
It was full of loose rock, I must have dislodged tons of the stuff. It's clear that Beckey never did it, or he would have put in a warning about helmets. I swear I set off rockfall just LOOKING at rocks. There was a huge (10' diameter) boulder jammed in the gully that the description doesn't mention, and I ended up leaving it much earlier than I was supposed to. One thing led to another, and I ended up inching up the face of this mountain, probably 60-70 degrees, scrabbling up the dirt and crumbly rock, grabbing at branches, just a horrible experience. I spent hours near despair, thinking, well, I have the cellular phone, if I get stuck, I can always call for a helicopter. There's no way I could have down-climbed where I was. There was at least a couple of places where I was sure I was at imminent risk of my life, where if a root or branch I was holding had given way, I would have fallen 1000 feet and not had to worry about timesheets ever again. So many holds came off in my hand that I stopped being surprised. As I was climbing, I recalled reading somewhere in Beckey about two climbers in the Snoqualmie area who were so worried about surviving that they wrote their wills on their shirt cuffs. (That was Huckleberry.) They survived, and I didn't feel like I was in quite that dire of straits.
I kept looking up and thinking, well, that must be the summit there, ten or twenty feet above me. Okay, that wasn't but I bet this one is. Okay, that wasn't, but it must be coming pretty soon. Maybe this time... I sort of expected to see blueberry pickers looking down over the side at me from the summit at any time.
I didn't reach the summit until almost 2:30. The mountain is actually a very long ridge (half a mile, at least) and the summit is to the south, but the north face route it (of course) to the north. So, I spent over a hour getting along the ridge from where I finally got to the top to where all the hikers and berry pickers were hanging around enjoying the sun.
Then, of course, I had to descend almost immediately. I'd long since used up all my water, and really could have used more. At the bottom of the trail (an hour) I still had to walk half a mile down the highway (the few cars that passed ignored my thumb) and then up the Perry Creek road for a mile to get back to the car. Completely dehydrated, I stopped at the first store I came to on the Mountain Loop Highway, looking for Gatorade, and settled for "All Sport" which turned out to be just awful. It's carbonated, for crying out loud. Yech!
I don't know, maybe if you actually followed the gully, it would be worth doing. Maybe in winter it could be a potential ice climb, or a mixed climb; that winter I climbed Mt. Forgotten, just across the vally, and saw lots of waterfalls hanging down. But if you try it, don't blame me.