Timberline Lodge, Oregon. Sunday, May 12, 2024
It’s all very well to bask in this Coast to Hood thing, but the reality is I’m only halfway up the mountain. And as I’ve alluded to in the past, this mountain and I, we have a history.
Today was Sunday, a day of rest, I took my time checking out of the Government Camp motel, chatted, web surfed, wished Jane a happy Mother’s Day, drove the 7 miles to Timberline Lodge, and waited around for early check-in to my room at 2 PM. Retrieved the big box from Jane, sorted out my gear, and didn’t really get going until four. In the lobby was a detailed contour map, you can zoom in if you like.
More vivid was the view from the parking lot, looking uphill the perspective is foreshortened, and doesn’t appear as steep as it actually is, but formidable enough.
That’s the clean view, and here are my annotations:
So we’re at 6,000 feet, with 5,249 left to go. To maximize chances of success, the guides insist on starting halfway up—at the top of the ski lift—and since they don’t run at night, that means taking a snowcat, a noisy, lumbering, carbon-spewing beast. Not too compatible with my whole sea-to-summit shtick. But we’ll get to that later.
Like on Rainier, they want you at the summit at 7:30 AM. Snowcats leave at 2 and 3 AM and when they drop you off, you rope up to your guide, with helmets, ice axes, and crampons, and start climbing.
I’ve done all this before, exactly 6 years ago, on May 14, 2018. I met my guide Brad, an affable, competent mountaineer, the day before for an ice climbing clinic. I appreciated the refresher although I just climbed Gannet Peak the year before. This May, like most Mays, I wasn’t in the best of shape, still carrying my winter weight, having been comparatively sedentary over the previous months. Brad remarked that my footwork could be better, and he was right, balance has never been my strong suit.
By the luck of the draw I got a 3 AM snowcat. Here I am looking hopeful at 2:45 in the ski lodge.
And here we are at the Hogsback, five hours later. A grinding uphill slog, uneventful but slow. We had just passed the Devil’s Kitchen, a sulfurous vent that reminded us Hood, like most of the Cascades, is a semi-dormant volcano. I felt tired but OK, but Brad recommended turning around. We only had 700 feet left to climb, but that included the treacherous Pearly Gates, a chute where most of the fatalities occur. You can see it at the top center, with climbers (mostly boyz, of course) strung along a rope.
They want you on the summit by 7:30, Brad said, because the risk of avalanches after that is higher. He didn’t insist we turn around, but he recommended it.
This is what BJ said at the Football Field, 19,500 feet, on Denali 20 years before. Then as now, we were just 700 feet from the summit. Then as now, we were slow, tired, but otherwise feeling fine. Then, I prevailed upon BJ to let us go on, and he reluctantly agreed. We made it without incident, but it wasn’t until we were halfway down, when the oxygen got back into my brain, that I realized the enormity of what I had done. I had gone against the guide’s recommendations. I had done the very thing I promised Jane I would not do. Done the very thing that led to most of those deaths depicted in Into Thin Air. I gotten away with it, but vowed never to do that again. Indeed, subsequently on Longs, Granite, and Gannet Peaks, I turned back, able to succeed later.
I raised my axe in “victory”, posed for a mug shot with Brad, and headed down.
I consoled myself that if I had gotten the earlier snowcat, I might’ve succeeded. Who knows? But this time I did snag a reservation on the 2 AM cat, and my guide is not one of the boyz, but Laura. I’m six years older, my balance still sucks, still overweight, but I’ve lost 20 pounds with my recent activities. And I’m still full of beans. We’ll see.
About the snowcat thing. I have gotten here a day early, so I can snowshoe up to the top of the ski lift, continuing the “old man with a walker” metaphor. The guides are right, if I had to do that the day of the climb, I almost certainly wouldn’t make it.
Today I took a dry run, climbed 330 feet in half an hour, about an eighth of the total. If I can maintain that pace, I should be able to get up in four hours, and down in three tomorrow. We’ll see.
I passed a group of guides as I started up the slope, one of them was a woman, could that be Laura? I think I heard them snickering at me and wondered why. Then I got a look at the selfie I had taken just before.
Yep, nobody can do dork like I can. Then I zoomed in on my face and thought OMG, I look like the Unabomber.
Snowshoed 2 miles, 641 total. Time 1 hour. Elevation gain 330 feet
©️ 2024 Scott Luria
The Ends of the Earth 