Sanguinity

Just to pull it all together into one place, so I can find it later. The only thing in this list that's new is Marcia's trip report.)

First Thoughts: Oh, the high glaciers!

Trip Report:
Part 1: I Want to go Home
Part 2: Ghost Climbers
Part 3: Summit Day
Marcia's Trip Report

Photos

Final Thoughts

Random observations about the Rainier trip:

• It took me a while to get back into the swing of life in the lowlands. Someone cut me off on Woodstock Blvd, and I thought, "Wow, they must be having a bad day." Then someone else did. And yet another person did. And suddenly I remembered that it's different down here...
  
  
• Given the amount of physical exertion I put out, I think I'm in outlandishly good shape. Altitude sickness cleared up very promptly, with only some lingering distaste for very fatty foods. Muscle sorness was pretty mild, excepting my calves. My feet are in the worst shape, battered by my boots, and otherwise things look and feel pretty good.
  
  
• Coming out of it in such good shape, this trip has been motivating me to get to the gym. Usually I come out of these things so battered that I spend several weeks recovering, and eventually lose so much momentum that I never quite want to start again. This time, though, I want to hit the weights and rediscover what else my body can do.
  
  
• I'm still dreaming of the glaciers every night.
  
  
• Other people's reactions to this trip are startling me. One woman is nearly not speaking to me, convinced that I took absurd risks in going. (She hasn't even heard any details: she heard the word "Rainier", and that was enough.) Some of the guys at work got punchy, making nasty little comments about "The Great Mountain Climber". (Whatever. And it's not like I had been bragging to them -- they stumbled across me showing the photos to someone who had asked to see them.) But most people are reacting in a "Really? Rainier? Can I touch you?" sort of way. Which seems just as weird as any of the other reactions. Rainier is an icon, I know that, but I guess I didn't register it fully.
  
  
• Not surprisingly, the trip means something very different to me than it seems to mean to others. A year and a half ago, when I told my Mazamas Basic Course instructor that I had signed up for a Shasta climb, he encouraged me to sign up for the three-day trip instead of the two-day version. "If you take the two-day option, they're just going to ramrod you through to the top as quickly as possible, and you won't have any fun. They'll make it be about bagging the summit, and you'll probably get there, but you'll be too tired and grey to remember anything. Give yourself four days. Take the time to enjoy the climb."
  
  That shifted the way I had been thinking about climbing trips -- changed their primary purpose from 'challenge' to 'recreation'. Even though the rest day on the Flats was planned to give us a better chance at the summit, "better chance" means "better rested" means "more time to have fun."
  
  The summit on Rainier was hard and far away, and people are spending lots of time pouring over my summit photos -- but for me, the high point of the trip was discovering the high glaciers. Everyone wants to know if I summited or not, and I want to tell them, "Yes, yes, yes, but that was just a summit. Listen: the glaciers!"
  
  I could see going back, just to hang out at the Flats, maybe climb the Cleaver. Not even make a summit attempt, necessarily. Just visit the glaciers again. And the list of mountains that seem interesting to me has shifted a little. Baker is on the list now, for example.
  
  
• This trip has been wonderfully focusing for me. I came home in immense good cheer, and so far there's no sign of PMS (Post-Mountain Syndrome). I'm still half-expecting PMS to hit at some point, but this high is different from the high I've had after other trips. This isn't the ecstatic celebration of a victory, but more just being generally pleased with myself, what I learned, how I performed, and having a clearer sense of what matters to me. All the trivial crap down here that typically bothers me so much hasn't set my teeth on edge since I've been back -- that petty crap is clearly just a side-effect of living soft lives in the lowlands, where you can afford to be petty over nothing. And if that sentence reads like I'm looking down on "soft lives in the lowlands", I'm not -- life down here is pretty darn good, with time and energy to spend on art, love, friends, and jaunts off to the mountains. Petty crap is just one of the things that you get when we live lives with that sort of space in them.
  
  I'm smiling a lot more. I'm looking over my shoulder a lot less. I'm happy and content in a way that I haven't been for a long time.

(Continuation of Part 1, below.)

( Thursday: Ghost Climbers )

I'm back, and it was an amazing trip. I've never seen glaciers up close like that -- especially high up, where they're still growing. I'd be standing in some high place looking down at them, feeling suitably impressed, and then I'd suddenly realize the scale of what I was looking at, and... well, I suddenly got why people who write books about geology rave about the power of a glacier. The things are stunning.

And it's not just power, either. They're gorgeous. Dramatic. You know those calendars of mountains and Antarctica and dramatic thrusts of ice? It was like that anywhere you looked. Everything was a calendar shot, if only you knew your way around a camera well enough to capture it. (Which, of course, hardly anyone does.) We had a lot of lounging time on the mountain, resting up for the next phase, and I would just sit and gaze, soaking up the glaciers and the rock, letting it sink into my memory.

I have no photos of the glaciers to speak of. They're too massive to fit into the camera's viewfinder, and the places that might have worked as close-ups usually required us to be on ropes with ice-axes in hand, and no free moment to click off a few shots. I'd have to be with a group that came expressly to take photographs, and even then it'd be beyond my ability. But it'd be fun to try. And then to go back and try again. And to keep trying until I figured it out.

The glaciers didn't just sit there, either. They were active. We camped on Ingraham Glacier, a bit below (and sheltered from) a massive icefall of crevasses where it came down the mountain. All day long we'd hear it calving and groaning: a crack, then a rumble growing into a roar, then the sound slowly dieing away. Even in the early part of the night before things refroze again it would still be going on, and each time I'd open my eyes and listen to it, imagining just how big it was, and then I'd look across to see that John had opened his eyes and was listening, too. "Wow..." I'd mouth at him, and he'd soberly nod in agreement.

Rockfall, too. Ingraham Glacier was bounded by two great ridges of rock, and they would give off massive falls of rock throughout the day, too. You read about all this, about how the mountains form and are worn down, you see the cracks in the rock above and the scree below, but you don't see it happening in real time. Once an hour or so, something would boom and rumble, and you'd look up fast to see if you could see where it was, to catch the dust cloud or the snow flume. And then you'd look away to see that everyone else on the glacier had turned to look, too, and then the rumble would die away and everyone would stand in reverent silence before going back to what they were doing.

Oh, I know I'm rambling, but this was fundamentally cool in a way that no trip I've been on before has been. Seriously. I mean, it's swell to go to the top of a peak, and to work hard to get there, and to see really far out and realize exactly where you fit in the world... And we did that. We had a successful summit, and I got to see the Puget Sound, and Mount Baker, and Mount Jefferson, and and and. But this trip was something else again. This was about raw power and beauty, inevitable, inexorable, happening whether we were there to notice or not. Now I get why people are addicted to climbing, and why they keep going back to attempt heavily glaciated snowpeaks, even though such peaks can be terribly frustrating to summit. I get it now. You do it because you get to be there in the middle of all that.

Yowza.

Marvelous weekend camping at Tilly Jane. Hiked up to the foot of Cooper Spur, had marvelous views of Eliot Glacier.

Came home to find some "good luck" messages from my mother. On the phone message she sounded a bit stressed -- she's personally fearful about climbing, and has a hard time not getting anxious about my doing it. I think Rainier feels more threatening to her than some of the other peaks I've done, too -- she lives nearish to Rainier, and has heard three decades' worth of climbing-disaster news stories.

She, Dad, and I talked a bit. Dad was curious about the details, and pumped me for information -- schedules, routes, gear, weather -- and I think his satisfaction with the answers reassured Mom. She sounded much better at the end of the call, and I think she might have arranged to have Dad on the phone just so she could turn over the is-this-okay?-judgement to him.The only time I understand why their marriage works is when one of them is scared or worried about something. The rest of the time they're a cipher to me.

After that, I spent most of the afternoon packing for Rainier. I was trying clothes on as I went, making sure that everything still fit in various layering combinations. Picture me in the eighty-five degree heat this afternoon, wearing simultaneously a turtleneck top, a fleece jacket, a down jacket, and a rain shell. (Hot! Hot! Gasp! Gasp!) grrlpup laughed, and called me the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Girl.

Mostly packed now, excepting the last of the food and whatever group gear I get to carry. Finally figured out how to attach a snow-picket to my pack. Need to rent my crampons tomorrow morning. The pack still feels reasonably light, but there's an awful lot that needs to go into it yet.

Jenny arrived in the middle of all that. It's good to see her. She's a friend of Grrlpup's that dates back to kindergarten -- when she and I first met we hated each other, but we eventually got to the point of being friends. When she moved away, I was sad to see her go. This evening, though, I felt a little bit of the old jealousy, and had to keep setting it aside -- I'm used to Grrlpup and I having more history with each other than either of us have with anyone else, and it felt oddly threatening to see how easy she and Jenny are together. We'll all go out for breakfast tomorrow, though, and it'll be fine.

Marcia and John arrive tomorrow. It'll be a very, very full house tomorrow night.

This seems to be requests week. grrlpup asked me to post my shopping/to-do list for the Rainier climb -- it seems that she likes lists. (She also wanted me to post my packing list, but that's not done yet -- too many things I have to figure out first.)

( Lists, lists, and the ever elusive Count of Carabiners )

At some point, I'm going to have to do a count of prussiks and runners, too...

It's funny how an idea that sounds great a year in the future suddenly turns into something awful that you're doing tomorrow morning.

    -- John Bingham, "Strength in Numbers",Runner's World, Sept. 2004.

He's talking about a local running relay, the Hood to Coast. It's an especially cool event because it has an associated judged racewalking relay, the Portland to Coast. Although because you can't effectively judge that distance -- it's barely possible to judge a marathon! -- it's peer-judged. Odd arrangement, but racewalking is an odd sport. Someday I'll do it.

I read the quote out loud to grrlpup, interrupting her web-browsing, and she howled. "Cycle Oregon Weekend was like that!"

"Yeah, and Rainier is fast becoming that, too."

Two minutes later, still browsing, she said, "I'm going to do the Blue Lake Triathlon next summer."

"Yeah? What did I just read to you about 'becomes something awful tomorrow morning?"

"I know...!"

"Even knowing is no proof against it, is it?"

The Mazamas bulletin came today, announcing Intermediate Climbing School. Even knowing that it would dominate the coming academic year -- life would be scheduled around ICS -- I was still tempted. I'm not entirely sure I qualify yet. Technically I've got four rock peaks -- Unicorn, Whitney's Mountaineer's Route, and Eagle-Chutla -- but Unicorn is the only one where we actually used ropes to ascend or descend. We needed ropes on Eagle, but the leader was doing an exploratory and didn't know to bring them; he gave us official credit for the summit, but credit doesn't equal experience. Whitney probably counts, even if it was nearly all scrambling. So I dunno...

La Cruda reopens today, so we'll go see what the new management is like, and I'll stop off at ClimbMax to replace my trekking poles and belay device. And perhaps buy a new headlamp. If it's anything like usual, I'll walk in with a small shopping list and the list will grow while I'm there.

The summer is flying so quickly. Grrlpup bought fresh blueberries yesterday. Lazy summer Saturdays are so very sweet.