Dogs like glaciers!
Glacier Peak
Saturday, Aug 30, 1997. Solo, with Max.
A long day: I got up around 4:00 AM, we left the trailhead around 6:20, summitted around 4:00 PM, and got back to the car around 10:15. About 20 miles in distance covered, maybe 8000’ in elevation gain (and lost); too long for a fun day. It’s more appropriately a two-day (or even a three-day) climb than, say, Rainier. We summitted, though, which means we won’t have to do it again.
I deliberately went a little easier than usual; it was 5 miles to Kennedy Hot Springs, so I allowed myself two hours, and we did it in just about that. Normally I’d have tried to push myself to do it in 1:40 or something, but today I eased up, partly because I didn’t want to beat Max up too badly. I figure I can haul my lazy carcass out, but there’s no way I’ll carry that 55 pound dog any distance.
The trail crosses the White Chuck River near the hot springs, and we stopped for breakfast there in the sun. It was a beautiful day, the sky blue as far as I could see. We didn’t look in at the hot springs, which I sort of regret; I’d have liked to have a look, and by the time we left it was dusk and I felt too pressed. Plus, it sounded like there was a party going on there, and I wasn’t sure about barging in, particularly with a dog.
After the hot springs the trail goes fairly steeply uphill for half a mile or so, then another mile or so along the ridge top, to where it joins up with the Pacific Crest trail. We saw a couple of guys down by the river, and passed two women coming out, who’d been camping out there all week in the rain, and at the trail crossing, there were a couple of forest service looking packs (and a crosscut saw) just sitting there. I took the crest trail, and fortunately ran into the forest service people on the trail, and they gave me directions to the trail up to Boulder Basin, which was fortunate since it’s not marked. There’s a sign pointing to a pit toilet (which is just a wooden throne sitting there in the middle of a little clearing in all its glory) and the trail kind of meanders around until it gets to the hillside, where it’s really steep, unpleasantly steep, about like that Little Shuksan Lake Trail: 30- 45 degree angles much of the time.
We passed a guy coming down here, with skis on his pack. He’d gone up yesterday, and got socked in around 9000’ feet, so he gave up.
Boulder Basin felt a little like the Fischer Chimneys on Shuksan -- open, rocky, full of wild flowers. Quite beautiful, worth the climb itself. Not another person up there, I was thinking that we probably had the whole mountain to ourselves, which was both stimulating and worrying. I stopped for lunch by a rocky stream, but there were too many marmots around for Max to sit very much. I was really trying to keep a moderate pace for him, and give him plenty of access to water and food. He ate most of a packet of his Gaines Burgers back at the river, but didn’t eat much here. Too many distractions, I guess, so we progressed up the hillside, following the boot track.
Del says he things Max’s eyesight isn’t that good, but Max saw the two guys ahead of us when there were probably over a quarter mile away, up on the snow. In fact, I saw them because I noticed Max staring intently up the mountain, and looked to see what he was looking at. They were going slower than me, and so within an hour or so we’d passed them. They’d both been up here before, so they gave me pointers on the route up ahead, which was fortunate since the summit was beginning to cloud up. They also snapped a photo of us.
You climb up the Sitkin glacier until you get to this crummy sandy ridge which goes up to the right, and follow that basically all the way to the summit, around the summit rocks. It was pretty slow going, though a trail was evident on this too, and it wasn’t so loose as long as you stayed on that. Most of the last 500 feet or so was near-whiteout conditions, probably 20 feet visibility, really cold -- by then I had my shell on with the hood up, and gloves -- and I was pretty dependent on following the track ahead of me.
Again, like Stuart, there was no book in the summit box, just a collection of papers, so I tore out a page from my little notebook and wrote our names and the date, and dedicated the climb "to my unborn son, Peter Muir Breit." That middle name occurred to me on the climb up, so I wrote it, without knowing how Heidi’d feel about it. (That is in fact his name, he was born Jan 2, 1998)
We sat up there for 20 minutes or so, called Del, and then headed back down. I couldn’t eat much of that awful dry cinnamon raisin bagel, so I fed much of it to Max, who seemed happy to eat it, even though he generally doesn’t like cinnamon.
The decent was much quicker; I was careful to follow my tracks up, since visibility was still pretty low. I met the two other climbers below the summit, they were probably an hour behind us.
The slope wasn’t too steep, but the snow was grainy enough that I was able to "ski" down much of the way. I probably took back two hours of climbing in fifteen minutes. Max seemed to like it, he ran along next to me barking, but he couldn’t glissade himself. At one point I fell, and just slid on my but for a few hundred yards.
Max stays pretty close by on the trail, generally, but above the treeline he ranges pretty freely. On the glacier he was 100 yards away much of the time, wandering around investigating stuff. And, of course, on the rocks he had to hunt marmots. As soon as we got back on the boot track on the summit ridge, though, he stayed with me pretty closely. I did notice that he does switchbacks when he’s walking up the glacier; I suspect that it was because he was tired, but obviously I can’t know for sure.
There was a surprising number of people in Boulder Basin on our decent, probably eight or ten tents. I stopped and talked with a couple from Federal Way for probably ten minutes, about the conditions and whatnot, and took a picture of Max relaxing in the flowers.
The trail down from boulder basin to the Pacific Crest Trail is hot, steep, and there’s no water at all. Harvey Manning wrote about this trail: If God is so good, why does He put the water down in the valleys, and not up on the ridges where we need it? I expect Max was feeling the same way. He was looking pretty beat, so at one point I stopped and gave him as much water as I dared from my bottle, which I’d refilled with snow and meltwater. He was pretty happy when we got to the bottom and he could drink from the stream down there. There was another couple of guys camped down there, and we talked for a minute.
I was mostly worried about getting back on the White Chuck River trail before dark set in, so I pushed until we were on the trail heading down, then we stopped at a stream for dinner. Max ate every bit of his dog food, and was interested in my apple as well.
By the time we got down to the bottom of the hill, to the hot springs, it was well past sunset, and I felt like I had to dig out my headlamp and have it ready. We stopped for more water for Max, and because of the late hour I didn’t stop and soak my feet in the hot springs the way I’d planned, instead we pushed on.
It was another two hours out from there. At this point I was getting pretty worried about Max; he seemed to be doing okay, but he walked behind me much of the way.
At one point when the trail ran next to the river, after the darkness was complete outside my headlamp, he went down to the river and drank for a pretty long time. At one point, I looked away, down the trail, and when I looked back at him, he’d stopped drinking and was looking up at me very concerned. He would only drink when the light was on him, which surprised me; I’d assumed he was comfortable in the dark.
Even though he was pretty beat, he’d hear a noise in the bushes, and spring into action like he’d just got out of the car. Adrenaline seems like it plays a much bigger part in his physiology than in mine.
Halfway out, my headlamp started getting dim, and I didn’t really want to have to deal with changing the batteries in total darkness, so I stopped, sat down with the new pack of batteries, and discovered to my pleasure that you can take out two batteries and the light will still work. It’s a little dimmer, I guess, but it’s still a valuable lesson. If I find myself in dire circumstances, I could always run on two batteries, saving the other two, if it came to that.
Finally, finally, we came to the trail book. Unfortunately, the parking lot was still a good quarter mile away, maybe to discourage vandalism. It’s a long-ass trail!
Max was so tired he wouldn’t eat anything, and he tried to jump into the car before I could feed him the last of the water. He did drink a fair amount, then plopped down on the back seat, and probably fell asleep almost instantly.
I worried about Max a lot more than about myself, it seems that maybe that kept my own spirits up, feeling like I had to focus on his needs rather than my own.
It’s about ten miles from the trailhead to the highway, pretty good roads, and along that drive I started thinking about seeing a Bigfoot; it seemed almost inevitable that I’d see one, especially since my camera was in the back. Oddly, it never crossed my mind that I’d see a deer, or a raccoon, animals that I could likely see. Just the Bigfoot. I didn’t though, didn’t see another person, or car, from the trailhead (actually from the hot springs) to Darrington. In Darrington, I was able to call Heidi on the phone; she wasn’t upset because she’d figured out from when I called from the summit (at 4:00) that we wouldn’t be home until midnight.
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