Tammi’s Brother Scott was in town for a couple days on his way back up to Alaska, and wanted to get out for a quick adventure. I had already made plans and agreed to help Greg with a BCEP climb up Hood on Monday.
But what the heck two back to back days on the mountain can’t be that bad, right?
Scott and I decided on the Leuthold Couloir route up the West side of the mountain. The standard South Side route just gets too busy on nice weekend, and plus that was the plan of attack for Monday with Greg.
I’m never able to get any quality sleep the night before a climb. I’m not sure if its nerves or the fact that I’m trying to force my body to sleep before it’s ready. Last night was no exception; I crawled in around 9pm and tossed and turned until 1:30am when the alarm went off.
After an uneventful drive up to Timberline lodge we signed in and left the parking lot at 3:30am beneath a clear star filled sky. Now I knew that Scott’s a fast climber and should be since he does this shit on a regular basis. No sooner had we left the parking lot we were at the top of the Palmer Ski lift.
“Holy shit” I thought we just left the lodge an hour ago.
I definitely had to push myself to keep up with Scott but I was feeling great, and at least I was staying warm. We donned our puffy’s and sat on the helmets while we took a break and re-fueled. We left Palmer and started the Westerly traverse to Illumination Saddle where we would drop down onto the Reid Glacier. It was still reasonably dark when we reached the saddle and we took our time harnessing up and getting the rope to give the sun time to light our way across the Reid.
Once we got onto the glacier we found the snow conditions to be less than ideal, knee deep powder covered by a thin crust. I had done this route back in February with Brain A., and we had a hard time finding the right couloir to start up, since neither of us and been to this side of the mountain before.
Not this time though, we found the Leuthold without incident, and began climbing up the Couloir at 6:45 with Scott breaking the trail the entire way (Thanks buddy). We topped out on the Queens Chair at 8:25 and traversed along the knife ridge, and were on the summit by 9:25.
We basked in the sun enjoying the cloudless panorama that the highest peak in Oregon has to offer.
We packed up and were headed down by 9:50. We planned on down climbing the Pearly Gates but ended up find a nice chute just to the West that had a nice rappel anchor that we poached. We found good glissading below Crater rock getting us back to the car by 11:30.I have a feeling there won’t be a problem with me sleeping before tomorrow’s climb.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment