In anticipation of our upcoming Rainier ascent, Michael Burns, Alex Quezada, Chris Williams, and I drove up to Mt. Shasta to practice crevasse rescue. We left Berkeley Friday around 7:00 PM, and after a REI run, arrived at the mountain--if I remember correctly--around one in the morning. Our intent was to play on the Whitney glacier, which we'd each lusted over during previous Shasta ascents. However, the road to the trailhead had apparently been entirely washed out in a recent flood , and so after having driven up a wicked 4WD road for the better part of an hour (at various times we had to get out of Alex's jeep to manually remove the larger boulders), we decided to play on the more accessible Hotlum glacier (no large sacrifice; the Hotlum is the largest glacier in California) and so headed via the local railroad access road to the main north-side trailhead (7200') where we camped for the night.
The next day's hike up to the glacier was a bitch, and perpetually in our minds (thanks Chris) was that the four of us would have a far worse approach with far more weight, and far more at stake on Rainier in just over a month. We made camp around 10,600' along the Hotlum-Bolam Ridge and then climbed to about 11,000' onto a nearby snowfield to practice making snow anchors: pickets, ice screws, T-stakes (submerged ice axes), and bollards. Unlike most of the others, previous to this experience I had had relatively little experience climbing, and none lead climbing. The setting up of anchors and ropes and cordelettes and such like was therefore to my logistically and mathematically oriented mind an absolutely fascinating experience. After creating the anchors we roped up and pulled against them with as much force as possible, happily (possibly in that not altogether good way, given the false confidence perhaps has resulted) finding each to find each of them individually able to hold our combined load.
I'd been designated the trip's cook, and I'm sorry to say that Saturday's dinner was a bit of a disappointment. (A good way to get out of cooking in the future, I suppose.) We started with a rehydrating course of miso soup, tasty enough in that simple warm, salty way. The problem was the carbo loading course of rice and beans. I'd thought a rice based meal would be more nutritious than a pasta-based one, but while that's undoubtedly true, I forgot entirely about increased cook time at altitude, and in the future will need to make a point of finding more quick-cooking foods than rice. As for beans, especially when combined with the digestive peculiarities of high altitude, the problem is obvious, and can be attested to by poor, affixiated tent-mate Mike.
Sunday morning saw us up almost a half an hour after our projected 5:00 wakeup (Mike's and my fault), and we were not packed and fed and on our way until almost eight. After stopping for water at a snowmelt trickle, we made our way to and then up the glacier. About two thirds of the way to the bergschrund, the decision was made to rope up, in part because of growing crevasse danger, but also in part just because it was good practice for those of us who were green to the institution of glacier travel.
We found a nice crevasse to play in about 12,000'. The stated goal of the trip had been to learn how to deal with falling into such animals, and now after 36 hours of approach, we were ready to do so. We set up some anchors and set up to rappel down in. Having never rappelled on rock before, rappelling into a crevasse--especially an overhanging one such as ours--was new to me on a number of counts. Due to the overhang, there was nowhere for me to put my feet except on the lip itself as I let out rope and brought myself into a horizontal rappelling position. As we should have suspected, as I approached horizontal the force on rope was sufficient--165 lbs/ (sin Theta)--to pull the rope to the point that I could swing well past horizontal and--along with a bit of the overhang--I took a fall. Not a dangerous fall, of course--my brake hand on the belay device had caught my fall just as it out, and even if I'd somehow screwed matters up, Chris was ready with a second belay. Meanwhile, our anchor station consisted of three anchors which the previous day had individually been able to withstand the combined forces of the four of us. That is, the fall _really_ wasn't that big a deal by any objective standard, certainly not compared to compared to driving in Chicago traffic or eating processed foods. Nevertheless, this was my first fall outside of bouldering or gym climbing, and it was exciting as all get out.
Rappelling to the floor of the crevasse (well, to the false floor created by falling snow bridges), I took my first look around. I've remarked to many of you about the extent to which even in my mathematically-generalizing and University-of-Chicago-historical-contextuallizing mind certain indelled scenes stick out as having in an instant paradigmatically changed, perhaps defined, my life: the swirling lights of Chicago's Willowbrook Ballroom, the rainy Midway during an anagram discussion with Rachel, the sound emanating from Liberty Church when we arrived at the United Sacred Harp Convention. The knife-edge ridges of the Alaska Range at sunrise viewed from a plane, or Whitney Glacier bergschrund viewed from Shasta's summit are in that category, and my first look up giant turquoise ice walls to precarious snow bridges, down into ice caves, or out to an ice framed horizon will I think be there as well.
With far less drama than self-infatuated Mark encountered on entering the crevasse, Chris rappelled down to meet me and walk me through the various aspects of setting up a prusik system (a method of ascending a rope using prusik knots which slide one way but bite into the rope another) that I didn't already know. About the actual act of prusiking out of a crevasse there's not much to say. It works up quite a sweat, but doesn't make for particularly thrilling copy or impressive photos. And it really isn't particularly exciting, unless, of course, you're me, and are excited at just about anything. It does have this going for it, though: that it's a really good thing to know how to do if you want to play on mountains and be alive.
Well, I figured out this prusiking thing, and got myself to and then over the lip of the crevasse. After Chris followed me out, and Mike and Alex finished their own prusiking practice (in a much deeper part of the crevasse, I might add), we lowered Chris back in so that we could pull him out using the Z-Pulley system, a technique in which the folks who've not yet fallen into a crevasse haul out the one who has fallen (the preferable way to get out of a crevasse is to prusik out, but if the victim is unconscious, that's less of an option). Not much to say about the matter, except that apparently not being the most communicative or smooth of rescuers we just about broke poor Chris' arm on an overhang.
Well, we managed to "rescue" Chris in more or less one piece, and the others sent me down and did the same for me. That was it for our crevasse rescue training. It was already past our turnaround time and we should have headed back to Berkeley, but, well, here we were with all this beautiful ice, with our ice tools in our hands, and anchors already in the ground. It was obvious that there would be no other way down the mountain and back to Berkeley except by way of descending back in the crevasse once more for a spot of ice climbing.
Which we of course did. First Mike, who chose a nice overhanging route. Then me, who chose a somewhat easier route due to my not having particular good ice-climbing crampons, and--more importantly--not having the slightest idea as to what ice climbing was all about. And lastly Chris, who ostensibly went down not for his own sake, but only to retrieve the helmet I'd let drop down while I was climbing out (you're supposed to clip those things, eh?). Shitty ice, but a pretty good experience.
Time to be gone. Pack up ropes, get out of the crevasse field, slide down the glacier on our butts to camp, pack up camp, kill our heels and ankles on unending talus, hit our packs on the same tree branches as we hit them on the way in, and a bit after 6:00 on Sunday evening, find ourselves at the trailhead. Dinner under the big neon "Eat" sign in Anderson, which according to our waitress is finally coming into its own as a city having just staged its first wet T-shirt contest the day before, and then the always frustrating drive back to civilization, made bearable in large part to the comedic stylings and amateur physics theories of the still-frenetic-after-all-that-we'd-been-through Chris.
Final analysis: I absolutely cannot wait to do this again. Fortunately, I get to ice climb and camp at elevation in just two weeks time in the Palisades, and I get to play on a huge and hugely glaciated mountain three weeks after that on Rainier. But it's not until October that I'll be able to play in crevasses again, and I clench my fists in anticipation and frenzy.
Here are some pictures of the trip, which even if I weren't such a horrific photographer working with such limited equipment would fail to do justice to the settings.
Mark - /2000