Part One – The Mt. Hood Assault
Well the team is back from conquering the second leg of the Extreme Adventures 2009 Summer Summit tour safe and sound. This portion of the tour involved the Oregon and Washington state high points, both epic mountains each with their own personalities and challenges. Below is our day by day report along with pictures. I should say that even if you don't plan on climbing either of these peaks in your life you should go check them out as they both have lots to see and do in their surrounding areas. For those that are familiar with the mountains we took the Hogsback South Side route on Mt. Hood and the Ingraham Direct route on Rainier. Anyway, here's the report and pics. I divided this up into two parts so that this doesn't take all day for me to type and for you to read. Be sure to check back for the Mt. Rainier portion of the report as it's just as awesome. Enjoy.
Wednesday 6/3/09 – The Mt. Hood team which consisted of Z, Rochelle, Hammer and myself met up at the WinCo parking lot at 8am and set off for Oregon. The trip went pretty quick and before I knew it we were at our campground about 15mins from the mountain. We headed up to Timberline lodge, read everything we could on the recent conditions of the mountain and got our climbing passes. Then it was back down to camp.
Thursday 6/4/09 – This was our prep day where we got everything packed up and ready for the climb. We went to the base of the mountain and practiced our self arrest, rope travel, knots and everything else we'd need to know for the climb. Once we felt good with our skills we took all the gear back to camp to dry out and went to grab a brew and a bite at the lodge as well as talk to the mountain guides to see how the conditions were. Then out of nowhere a storm rolled in, black clouds, hail, rain and wind so we beat feet back to camp to get our drying gear out of the rain. Luckily nothing was to soaked to bad and we got to bed around 6pm planning on getting up at 11 and being on the trail at midnight.
Friday 6/5/09 – Got on the trail at 12:15 (Timberline Lodge 6000ft), basically right on time. It was raining but unusually warm (we would have preferred about 20* colder to help harden up the snow and ice, but you take what you get sometimes). Thankfully the rain quit after about 2 hours and the skies started to clear up some. We were making great time up to the Hogsback but a fog rolled in making navigating challenging. The fog combined with snow from the day before had covered up the boot trail we were looking for. We knew there should be a trail to the left of the Hogsback but we just couldn't see it. When you get to this point the climb becomes much more technical so we roped up and strapped on the crampons. We ended up traveling nearly all the way up the Hogsback looking for a trail with no luck. So back down the edge we went where we just happened to see a faint trail to the left, yeah! At this point we let Rochelle off the rope, her shins had taken a beating wearing the plastic mountaineering boots so she wasn't in good enough condition to head up from there. The cool thing is that even though she couldn't see us due to the fog she could hear everything we were saying…even our triumphant shouts and hollers from the summit.
We marched straight up the mountain and began a dicey side hill on a very steep slope. At this point we are breaking new trail again and still not sure if we were on the right track. Visibility is a whopping 50ft or so which means we feel like we were climbing in a giant grey bubble. We stopped to assess the situation when we hear voices below so it was decided that we’d go back down yet again to the base of the Hogsback to see if any of the other climbing teams knew the route to take. Luckily there was one team of three that assured us we had been on the correct route and that it was indeed a very steep ascent to the summit. After a quick food break we hit it once again…this time all the way to the summit. We had let another team lead the way for a bit on that last push figuring we had done enough breaking trail for the day and needed to let someone else enjoy that for a while but ended up passing them when we got to the knifes edge. This knifes edge was about 200 yards from the true summit and could really pucker a dude up. Just imagine a 3000ft drop on your left, 1000ft drop on your right and your path is only about 18” wide. Yeah, totally sweet! Anyway we reached the summit of 11,240ft at 09:52, hung out for a bit and then began the down climb.
Knifes edge:
Summit!!
Down Climbing
Glissading…the best way to drop elevation!! We were able to drop about 1000ft this way, at that point in the day you're very appreciative of how fast and effective it is.
Getting a sweet sunburn on the way down
We got back down to the lodge at 2pm and had a victory burger and brew. Total time on the mountain was 13.5hrs.
Stay tuned for the Mt. Rainier report, I will probably post that either later tonight or tomorrow and will update the title of the thread.
Thanks
JollyRoger
