Rainier, Part 1: The Prequel

I think I’m going to have quite a lot to say about my Rainier climb, so I’m going to make it a serial, starting from the beginning.

Actually, from a little before the beginning.  Mt. Adams! The requisite photo:

It was great, I had a lot of fun. We didn’t get close to the summit — only to about 10,700 ft for me — and we only had four of our six climbers, but still quite an experience.  A couple things I learned:

1. My boots were too small; they utterly shredded my feet with crampons on.  For Rainier, I took those ones back to Second Ascent, and rented the exact same ones in half a size up from Feathered Friends.  Fantastic!
2. I like poles.  I like poles a lot.  I wasn’t planning to take both of my poles up on Rainier; Adams changed my mind.
3. I prefer a more leisurely pace, involving camping midway.  I think if we’d had more time to take, we’d have summited (in fact, I’m practically positive), and I would’ve probably had more fun.  Not that it wasn’t fun…It was just really hard.  So if I did it again, I’d camp partway up.
4. I hate glissading.  Or more accurately, I find glissading totally terrifying.  I believe I’m doing it right, but I must be doing something wrong.  I’ve flipped over three times, twice during my Glacier Class, and once on Adams.  Both times in my Glacier Class, I was able to arrest.  The snow was nice and soft, and the slope not too crazy.  On Adams, neither of these was the case, and I could not arrest.  I lost control, tried to arrest, my axe flew out of my hand, and I ended up flying (sometimes literally) down about 200 feet of 50-60 degree snow slope, headfirst, on my back, with my ice axe chasing me on a wrist leash.  Truly frightening.  Somehow – and I still have no idea how – I managed to flip myself back around so my feet were facing downhill, and arrested using my feet and my pack, about 100-200 feet before the bottom of the hill.
   This was one of the scariest things that has ever happened to me.  Still, my luck remained intact.  All I came away with was a little snow rash:

I am one lucky, lucky girl, I tell you what.  Sure, snow rash is painful and obnoxious, but hey, no broken bones!  Barely any bruises!  I call it a win.

[Perhaps needless to say, I walked away less than anxious to do more glissading anytime soon...something that came back to bite me when descending Rainier...but I'll get to that in a later post.]

Going Up

I never did make it up Mt. Baker this summer, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to try to climb two volcanoes before the season’s done.  In fact, I’m going to be making 2 attempts this coming month, if all goes according to plan.

If you read my blog with any regularity, you know I’m doing Rainier in mid-August.  So what’s the second mountain?

It’s this one:

(photo by Starlisa on Flickr)

That’s Mt. Adams. 12,276 feet.  Just a few thousand short of Rainier – in fact, it’s the second-highest peak in the state of Washington.  The trail starts around 6,000 feet, and goes all the way up to the top in just 3.5 miles (that’s more than half again as steep as Mt. Si – sheesh). [Update 7/29: I got the map today, and now I see: there's a trail that goes up 2.1 miles, from 6300 ft to 8500 ft; then the rest of the climb looks like it's about 3.5 miles, from 8500 to 12,276.  So the incline isn't as crazy as I thought - just a little more than 1000 ft/mile, much like Si. (Phew!)]  It’s a non-technical climb, but still definitely not easy.

Six of us are planning to go, leaving Friday night.  We’ll sleep until 2 or 3 am down at the bottom, then head all the way up, and all the way back down, on Saturday.  Then a few of us are gonna camp out on Saturday night. (I, for one, plan to collapse into an exhausted heap in my nice cozy sleeping bag until late Sunday morning.)

Sounds like a good warm up, right?

Right?

Heh.

Wish me luck!

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26 Days and Counting

Until I start to climb Rainier, that is.

When I started training in February, I didn’t think I’d ever be ready.  I’m still deeply unsure.  But I feel a lot better after this weekend’s training hike.  See, I just did a boring little hike.  In fact, I did *the* boring little hike – the one that like half the Seattle metro area does every week – Mt. Si.  But the cool thing about Mt. Si is that since people climb it so much, it gets used as a benchmark for climbing training.  Here are the benchmarks as laid out in my Glacier Course guide binder:

Trip	Acceptable	Good	Excellent
1.5-2 months until climb, with daypack (10-15 lbs)	Under 3 hours	Under 2.5 hours	Under 2 hours
1-1.5 months until climb, with daypack (10-15 lbs)	2.5 hours	2 hours	1.5 hours
0.5-1 months until climb, with overnight pack (40-50 lbs)	Under 4 hours	Under 3.5 hours	Under 3 hours
0-0.5 months until climb, with overnight pack (40-50 lbs)	3.5 hours	3 hours	2.5 hours

Yesterday, with 27 days to go, I did Mt. Si – 3500 feet in elevation, 4 miles – with a 50-lb pack.  There were lots of other people on the trail (many of whom, in true PNW fashion, asked how heavy my pack was, and then cheered me on), but I was hiking alone, with my iPod (something I usually eschew in favor of nature sounds and the conversation of my companions).

And I did it in 2 hours and 20 minutes.

For emphasis, that’s the bolded corner of the table:

Trip	Acceptable	Good	Excellent
1.5-2 months until climb, with daypack (10-15 lbs)	Under 3 hours	Under 2.5 hours	Under 2 hours
1-1.5 months until climb, with daypack (10-15 lbs)	2.5 hours	2 hours	1.5 hours
0.5-1 months until climb, with overnight pack (40-50 lbs)	Under 4 hours	Under 3.5 hours	Under 3 hours
0-0.5 months until climb, with overnight pack (40-50 lbs)	3.5 hours	3 hours	2.5 hours

So, in theory, I’m there!  Yippee!

Now all I need to do is keep it up…

(A little motivational vista from yesterday’s hike.)

Small Countries

When making a map like this, I always think it sucks that most of the countries I’ve visited are really, really small.  I mean, dude, Western Europe, exert your presence!

Heh.

visited 12 states (5.33%)
Create your own visited map of The World or determine the next president

Eek

Ok, given that I bike to campus via exactly this route a couple of times a week, this freaks me out:

My Ballard reader Benton says he saw a road rage incident involving a pickup truck and a bicyclist along 45th St. near Fred Meyer today. That stretch of road (map below) is known as the “missing link” in the Burke Gilman Trail — a confusing, dangerous stretch of roadway. “I was on a scooter and watched in horror as a frustrated driver in a pickup truck raced to come up next to a bicyclist and then proceeded to swerve into him, running him onto the railroad tracks,” Benton writes about the incident. “Thankfully, the agile rider jumped his bike to avoid being snarled by the tracks.” Benton says the incident underlines the need to find a solution for the stretch of roadway.

Having had my own issues with cars along that stretch (particularly ones coming out of the Fred Meyer parking lot’s eastern entrance), I find this profoundly troubling.  I can’t tell you how often I repeat, like a sotto voce mantra, “please don’t kill me please don’t kill me please don’t kill me” when I’m riding around here.  Thing is, before reading this, I always figured the big risk was from accidents, not insane road-rage-induced assault.  Sigh.

Full Circle

It’s a rough life I lead here, lemme tell you.  That picture?  That’s me working on one of my RAships last Wednesday.  I needed to read some policy reports, so I figured, why not read them at the beach… And the weather?  I don’t think people necessarily realize it, but that’s what it looks like just about all the time in Seattle in the summer (today’s totally uncharacteristic thunderstorms notwithstanding).

It’s strange to think I’ve been here for an entire year — a little more, actually.  I arrived here June 11, 2007, after an amazing roadtrip, and shortly after that, I started working two research jobs, just like I am this summer (I even posted about most of this a year ago this week).  In fact, one of the research jobs is actually one of the jobs I was working last summer, just bigger – and it’s going to be my job for all of the next year (thanks to Paul Allen and his library endowment – heh). [If you're curious, I'm going to be working on helping to define and promote library roles in university cyberinfrastructure/e-science initiatives for ARL and the UW Libraries.]

Going to meet with my boss for that job last week felt like total deja vu.  Same week of the year, same little office in the engineering library, same issues under discussion. Except now I know where the heck I am, and a little more about what the heck I’m doing when it comes to research and supporting research (thanks in no small part to my other RA-ship, I must admit – as of this moment, I’ve conducted 60 qualitative interviews [yikes!], each 30-90 minutes long, and I’m currently working on data analysis for that too).

It’ll be interesting to see how much like last summer this summer actually ends up being.  So far, it’s pretty close, except with 10 more hours of work per week.  Lots of working at home, at coffee shops, and sometimes at the beach; a few meetings on campus every week; not as much human interaction as I might like, which forces me to go to the office…

But then, of course, I’m still supposed to climb a giant mountain in about six weeks.  So that should make it different, I guess… Eesh.

CC-Flickr Photo Diffusion

N.b.: Given a fairly open Flickr account and a broadly applied Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license, it is interesting to see where one’s photos end up appearing online.

(I especially like the Chinglish Wiki. )

Navel-Gazing and Bloggy Numbers

1. That protected post I put up earlier? Yeah, that was my 100th post. Just thought that merited recognition.

2. The blog’s gotten 50 hits already today, all since I put up that post this morning (that’s about 48 more than usual).  This leads me to believe that if I want people to read my blog, I should make it harder to do so.

3. I added a blogroll, just to folks what I be knowin’.  So now, when you get bored reading my inane ramblings, you can click over to be entertained by them!  (Dance, monkeys!)

OK, that’s all.

Private Posting

I’ve decided to take a page out of Noor’s book and keep some of my posts protected from the wider Internets.  However, like Noor, I’d be happy to credential any of my friends who’d like to read them – just leave me a comment here or send me an email at notlizz [at] gmail [dot] com.