Cheri, Jef, Andy, and I set out at 7 a.m. Saturday morning for Mt. Shuksan. We were SO slow getting to the trail head because none of us got much sleep the night before. We had gone to Wild Waves and to Kings Hardware (bar in Ballard) for Jef's birthday on Friday night. Of course, we had to stop for coffee and Krispy Kreme before we started our climb!
Jef and Andy napped at the trail head while the girls figured out what gear we wanted to bring with us for the summit pyramid. We had 4,000 feet of elevation to gain to get to camp and then we'd have 2,000+ to get to the summit on Sunday. I felt amazing on the hike in to camp. I was full on cruising at Andy's pace and it was awesome! I've been dragging from the salmonella, which I am unfortunately still not completely over.
We got to camp around 6:30 p.m. after dinking around on the trail and checking out the amazing views of Mt. Baker. We've all summit Mt. Baker in the past so it's always cool to see beautiful peaks you've climbed not to mention getting to see a side of Baker we normally don't see with routes that are not the standard climbing routes on the mountain. We ate dinner and made a plan to get up at 4 a.m. and get on route to the summit.
Unfortunately, we did not get up until after 5 a.m. and didn't leave until 6:30 p.m. I have to say that I think that caused us to lose a real chance at our summit bid. We could have used all that extra time because route finding with the route we chose to take was really messed up. We made pretty good time to the base of the summit pyramid but as we began to climb we realized you basically have to free solo the climbs on lead because gear placement was few and far between and the route is really exposed. We ended up in a dicey spot that we either had to figure out how to climb over without dying or rappel down into the gully and basically scramble up a bunch of somewhat vertical pitches. There were some nut cases actually coming down unroped, which I thought was a death wish - everyone has a different idea of comfort and risk in the mountains and frankly that's not my idea of fun.
We made it about 100 feet below the summit. I'm fine with that. As far as I'm concerned I made the summit. I don't think I'll go back unless it's really early season and a lot more of the rock is under snow to make it easier to get to the top. There were some really dicey areas to get through and we were climbing in mountaineering boots. Had I brought my rock shoes I probably would have free soloed the section to get us up but the fact is that I left them in the car and no one else had any. Not to mention we were leading on 30 meter glacier ropes and one had a crampon hole...greaaat. All dumb ideas in my mind. We decided it was time to bail if we were going to get out before dark. We didn't get home until midnight.
As Ed Viesturs says, "Getting to the summit is optional, getting down is mandatory." This is his mantra in the mountains and it is now mine as well.
Maybe next year I'll give it another go....
http://picasaweb.google.com/erinrifkin/MtShuksan
No comments:
Post a Comment