The packing and repacking ritual in progress.
Michael is the 12-year-old son of my good friend Fred, the guy who got me started climbing (and who fixed me up with Heidi.) We had been talking for a while about taking Michael climbing, and earlier in the year we'd gone up Mt. Pilchuck to see how he felt about steep snow and ice axes. He had a great time, so we went ahead with this.
The original plan was for all three of us to go, but Fred had done RAMROD the previous Thursday (I skipped it this year) and his back and knees were feeling pretty bad. He's tremendously older than me, at least five months, that probably explains it.
As these things go, we got out of town later than I’d hoped; we were probably on the road by 8:30. And, the traffic wasn’t bad, but it’s a damned long drive. This time, I printed out directions from Mapquest, which minimized the meandering through suburban east Portland. Highly recommended. Makes navigation back to I-205 quicker too. All the way down, the clouds were heavy overhead, but as we approached Mt. Hood, things cleared out. A good omen, I thought.
We signed in, used the bathroom, kitted up, and hit the trail. Fred had emphasized that we had to go slowly, and take breaks, and remind Michael to eat, and we did. We took our time, went slowly. We chatted with a guy who was heading up there just on a one-day conditioning hike, with a pack full of gear, and later, at the top of the second chairlift, we chatted with a snow-boarder who’d hiked up to board down. He was from back east, going to college in Portland.
Michael was getting pretty tired of hauling his pack, so I left him at the top lift station, and went ahead to find a camping area, and found on less than a hundred yards above the lift station, and I dumped my pack, then came down for Michael, and hauled his pack up.
We set up the tent, and got the stove started. This was my first time using the stove outdoors, and I was pretty apprehensive; I’d brought matches and a new lighter. It took a couple of tries to get it working right; it seems like you need to sit there and nurse it, at least for a while, to keep it working right. Fortunately, the snow was very wet, so I didn’t have to haul a lot of loads of snow. The snow had that red algae in it, about six inches down, where we were, so I had to be careful, scraping the top layer of dirty snow off, then not digging too deeply.
On the hike up, he’d been asking when we’d go to sleep, and I said, oh, 8:00 or 9:00, maybe, and he said that was too early for him. In fact, he fell asleep on the pallet board where he was sitting at the lift station, waiting for me, and by the time we got the cooking done and everything, it was approaching 9:00. The sunset was beautiful, and I think he enjoyed it as much as I did.
He took off his boots right after getting to the camp, because his feet hurt, and I guess he thought that it would feel better to walk around barefoot. Of course, the rocks are really sharp and hurt badly. I showed him how you can take the liner out and walk around in it, and so he did that, and it worked better.
We could faintly smell the sulfur from our campsite. Michael noticed it first. I didn’t realize what it was, until I remembered it from other trips.
Neither of us slept well, or much at all. It was pretty windy on the way up, and I thought it was a good omen that the wind died down when we started building camp, but it picked up, and continued through the night. It was pretty annoying; it would go dead calm for fifteen seconds or so, then you’d hear this roar in the distance, and then the tent would start shaking, increasingly hard, for a minute or so, then it’d die down to nothing. It was a bit like sleeping right next to a freeway which was abandoned except for convoys of semis that come by, all night long.
Initially, the plan was for all three of us to go: Michael, Fred, and myself. Certainly the three of us couldn’t have fitted in that tent; my plan was to bring my bivvy sack and use that; it chills my mind, thinking about what the conditions would have been, laying out there in a bivvy sack in that wind, that driving grit. Yeesh. I’m wondering now what the point of a bivvy sack might be!
And, the grooming machines were out all night long. They weren’t particularly noisy, but we could hear them, and see the headlights. The problem with the wind was that it blew tremendous amounts of grit into the tent, every time we opened the door. In the night, it occurred to me that the lid of my pot was going to blow away, and I lay there for half an hour thinking about it before I finally opened the door in a lull, reached around and found the pot, found a rock and put it on the lid, and zipped the door shut again.
We talked a lot as we lay there in the darkness, I don’t remember what all about, those slow conversations that meander around, about this and that. It felt pretty comfortable, like the talk was no more work than not talking. Then, from time to time, he'd crack a fart joke ("can you smell that?"), to remind me that he's twelve.
We finally got up at 2:30. I’m not sure if I fell asleep at all or not, because I went to look at the watch and saw what time it was, I was surprised. I guess I go into this sort of trance that’s not really sleep, but I can lay there and not be bored.
So I "woke" Michael up, who wasn’t sleeping either, and asked how he was feeling. He didn’t feel great. I told him "well, we’ve got two choices. We can lay here awake for another four hours until it’s light enough to get up and break camp, or we can go for the summit." So we did.
We got going by about 3:15. I was pretty slow thinking and moving. Partly I wanted to put off opening up the tent door until I absolutely had to, because of the blowing grit.
It felt more like the stories I’ve read of Everest climbs than any other climb I’ve been on; leaving the tent in full darkness, bundled up against the hostile wind, walking out into the rocks, headlamp picking the way. It had something of the feel of an epic. Of course, things are subtly different at 8000 feet than at 8000 meters, but still… it was pretty clear; the moon was bright enough that we couldn’t see the stars as well as we’d have liked.
So, we headed out. Michael liked walking on the snow more than the rocks, especially in the crampons. He liked the crampons a lot. We stopped a couple of times, making poorer time than I’d hoped. A couple of times I had to stop and adjust his crampons, and once mine came off as well.
There were a lot more people up there than I’d expected; I bet there were two dozen. We saw a party of two with headlamps, below Crater Rock, and I thought we’d be able to catch them, but we didn’t.
The sulfur smell got stronger as we headed up. I’d forgotten that there’s a long tedious slog up a crappy scree slope before you get up to the hogsback. I hate that kind of stuff.
At the hogsback we roped up. I wanted him to have a little practice with a rope before we got to where we really needed it. He didn’t have a seat harness, so I rigged one from a strip of webbing I’d brought. I’ve done this before for myself on Emmons glacier, but this time I actually looked at the diagram in the Mountaineering book, and it worked much better. I'd forgotten the locking biner for him, but I was able to use two regular ones reversed. We dumped his pack, too, and put his food in mine, to simplify things.
Michael did very well in handling the rope, keeping the right distance. As we headed up the lower hogsback, which isn’t very steep, I took care in doing the rest step, going slow, and looking back to see how he was doing. At one point I asked him how he was doing, and he said "I could go at this pace forever!" which I took to be a good sign.
The bergschrund was badly opened, but there was an established route around it. The real problem was above; the pearly gates were "chossy gates;" there was actually some water ice there, as well as steepness and extreme rockfall hazard. Part of the problem is that the route up to the final summit goes directly above it, and that’s really sloppy, so climbers knock a lot of rocks down.
I didn’t think we were going to make it up the gates. In fact I suggested a couple of times that we turn around, but he didn’t want to. We had to cross this gully of water ice that totally unnerved me, though it didn’t bother Michael at all, to my surprise. (I am haunted by photographs I didn't take, and this is one of them. I wish I'd gotten a shot of that nasty gully.
Above there was just some more slogging to the summit. We unroped for the last bit, and then Michael called his family, and I called Heidi (I’d tried calling last night but couldn’t get through; turns out they’d been at a carnival) and we headed back down.
As we got up to the summit, the clouds came in, and suddenly it wasn’t just windy, it was windy and damp. My beard was covered with condensation; it was like a very light drizzle. A light drizzle in a thirty-mile-an-hour windstorm.
Michael did well on the descent through the crux, but just after, as we were heading down the steep upper slopes to the bergschrund, he suddenly came down with what looked like the beginnings of hypothermia. He got very cold, and was complaining that he couldn’t feel his hands, and was stumbling badly. I got back up to him, and had him take off his gloves, which were thick but soaked, and had him put his hands on my bare stomach. They were in fact awfully cold.
After a minute or so of that, he felt better. I dug the green polypro shirt out of my pack and put it on him, on top of what he had (a polypro shirt, pile jacket and windbreaker) and tried to have him wear my big glove shields, but they were too big for him (in retrospect, I should have had him take off his windbreaker first, but I didn't think of it up there.) I looked in my pack for my gloves, but apparently I’d left them in the car. So we headed down, slowly, me trying to guide him. My plan was for him to go first, so I could catch him as he fall, and we did that through the crux, but below he seemed in such bad shape that I figured I should go first to lead him.
I was doing everything I could to keep him motivated: "every step down is one step closer to safety" "you’re doing great" and so on.
The rockfall got worse and worse. At one point, an enormous rock the size of an engine block came bouncing through; if anyone was in the chute, they’d have been killed. The cold, the wind, the rockfall, made the place just look completely deadly.
Incredibly, there were still people heading up. We saw at least a dozen coming down before we got up the chute and there were more coming up and we headed down. A solo guy came up, and I warned him, but he said he’d try to sprint up, in his British accent.
We got to where we’d cached his pack. He said he wanted to leave it, but I said that we’d take it; it would keep him at least partly warm. I decided I had to do something drastic, so I took off my shell, and gave it to him, leaving me with just the cotton long-sleeved t-shirt, but I wasn’t as cold as I’d feared.
I crammed the rope back into my pack and worked on getting him down the scree slope. It was pretty slow going, of course, but eventually we got onto the snow field, which felt at the time like a major accomplishment.
I decided we had to get down, fast. We were still in the clouds and it was pretty cold and I felt like I had to get him to where it was warm. There were three Germans coming down right behind, us, and I asked them if they could carry our ice axes. I took my pack off, and hung it upside-down from my waist, and picked up Michael to piggy-back him, but the guy in the group of Germans told me to give him my pack. They knew where the tent was, they’d seen it on the way up.
So I took Michael, piggy-back, down the mountain. Fortunately going down the snow field felt pretty secure; in retrospect the image of me heading down the hill in crampons, and him in crampons too, seems like a completely dangerous scenario, but it felt quite secure. My legs weren’t tired at all, but it was hard on my hands, after a while.
We descended probably 1000 feet or altitude, maybe half a mile, this way, until we got to some some rocks, and the sun broke out from the clouds, warming us in a most gratifying manner.
As we were piggy-backing down, we passed yet another group heading up, a couple of people who asked if they could help, again with a German accent. I was a bit surprised by the number of German speakers on the mountain. Eventually we got down to where Michael felt like he could walk, and then to where it was sunny, so I left him, and headed back up to retrieve my pack and the ice axes from the others. I found the Germans ten minutes behind us, and retrieved the stuff, thanking them profusely, and mentioned that there were other Germans on the mountain, and that I was a bit surprised. He said, "We’re not Germans, we’re Austrians" I don’t know if I offended him or not.
A funny bit; after I rejoined Michael, he asked me "did you thank them?" Michael, of course, thanked me profusely, on the drive down, on the hike up, at the camp, on the summit day, heading down, and the drive back up to Seattle. The interesting thing is, he seems much younger when he’s expressing appreciation than when he’s cracking fart jokes.
So we walked to the lift station, where a clump of ski patrol folks in their red windbreakers were watching us. I guess we stood out; a small kid stumbling in crampons and wearing a comically big coat, being led by the arm by a guy in a cotton t-shit. I asked them if he could rid the lift down; they took us into the first aid station, bundled him up on blankets and were quite solicitous to him. They asked him some questions to gauge whether he was lucid or not; he did fine until they asked what day of the week it was, and he drew a complete blank. I had to explain to them that it’s summer vacation, so he had no clue about days of the week.
Anyhow, they took him down to Timberline on a sled (pulled by snowboards, I found out later) and told me I should ride the lift down with our stuff. So I left him there and went back up to the camp.
But the epic wasn't over. First, I got lost, that hundred feet or so, trying to find the tent. How bloody hard could it be? I went up and down twice before I finally recognized the landmarks and found it. And then, the tent got blown down. The fly was blown off, and barely kept from blowing away; two of the poles were bent and one was broken. It was a real ordeal to crawl into the collapsed tent to get stuff out. Packing up the camp took a good hour or so, and the wind was a real drag. There was grit in absolutely everything, including the bagel sandwich I was eating as I worked; grit on the mouthpiece of my platypus, grit everywhere.
Finally, with everything packed up: both sleeping pads biner’d to my pack, his ice axe on my pack, mine in my hand, his sleeping bag in the other hand, I headed down the mountain.
The ski patrol folks had told me I could take the ski lift down, and I headed down to the lift station, but the three ski patrol guys standing there watching me approach didn’t seem to know anything about it, so rather than argue with them, I just headed down the mountain.
The wind continued hard; it caught the pack and sleeping pads pretty strongly, blowing me around. Every few minutes I stopped to take a drink from my platypus; man that thing is great!
It took a long time to get down, it felt like, probably an hour, although I wasn’t watching the time very closely. It felt quite good to get to the day lodge and the first aid station, and I found Michael there, looking quite comfortable in a bed, wrapped up in blankets, a ski patrol woman sitting with him.
So we headed back to the car and dumped our stuff off, back to the lodge to sign out, use the bathroom, and change. I bought Michael a Mt. Hood patch in the gift shop, and we headed out.
We stopped at Rhodedendron, Oregon, at the Dairy Queen for lunch. Michael insists that a Mr. Misty is better than a blizzard. He’s wrong, of course, but I guess youth is a time for hanging on to misconceptions.
It’s a long drive; an hour or so just to get to I-205, then north on I-5. I was so tired, though, that I had to stop at the rest stop there north of Castle Rock. I was afraid I wouldn’t make it; my eyes kept shutting, and I’d see the traffic lines crossing and recrossing. I wiped water on my face; that felt very good everywhere but on my eyes. Michael slept soundly, of course.
The stop at the rest stop kept me until we got home. But the traffic was awful, through the Centralia area; we’d be going 60, then all the tail lights of the cars ahead of me would come on, and traffic would slow (lurch) to a halt. This is on the fast lane. Sit for five, ten seconds. Then, accelerate to 50. Repeat. Things didn’t clear up until we got out of Tacoma; from then it was clear sailing.
We got to his house, and Fred and Chris came out to welcome him. Michael seemed very small and young, and tired and happy, and we unloaded all his stuff from the car.
It sure felt good to shower, and get all the grit out of my scalp. I wasn’t that sweaty, I don’t think I broke a sweat at all the second day, until the last quarter mile to the lodge. And not much the day before, despite the heavy pack. I guess going slow, combined with the wind, kept me pretty cool. It is nice and almost luxurious to move at the pace of a twelve-year-old, to keep to his speed instead of pushing to what I think I should be doing (with ten miles to cover before dark.)