It's been quite a while since my last update because a lot has been going on. I can't remember the last time I spent a weekend at home! I've been packing as much as possible into my weekends before the the weather in the PNW turns south (it's been gorgeous here since June).
In the middle of August was the Santiam Alpine Club's (the club I took climb school through this spring) annual Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue class. The class was on Elliot Glacier on the north side of Mt. Hood. We climbed up to the glacier early Saturday morning and spent the day practicing traveling in rope teams on ice, snow, and rock, learning and practicing crampon and ice axe technique and rope management. We also learned and practiced installing ice screws and setting up climbing and rappelling anchors in ice. We spent the night up on the glacier. I didn't use a tent and just slept in my sleeping bag inside a bivy sack. As opposed to the last freezing night I spent on a glacier, when climbing on Mt. Hood in the spring, I was plenty warm that night. With the exception of a little bit of rain and having to cover my head with my jacket, I slept pretty well. Here's our camp. My bivy is the dark green one on the far let of the picture.
We woke up with the sun on Sunday (I have more, incredible pictures of the sunrise on flickr). Here's the view from my bivy sack.
We spent Sunday practicing using pickets to set snow anchors and learning and practicing how to setup rope and pulley systems to pull fallen climbers out of a crevasse. I got to rappel 30 feet down into a crevasse and relax as my team members pulled me out. Here's one of my teammates rappelling into the crevasse.
I have a GoPro video of me rappelling into and being pulled out of the crevasse that I'll upload as soon as I have a chance to edit it.
Check out the picture of our camp above, then take a look at where Gabe's tent (the orange and gray one) was when we returned to camp Sunday afternoon. Luckily there was no damage.
I learned a lot that weekend and had a great time. I was looking even more forward to the Ice Climbing class a couple weeks later!
The last summer climb I got in before the rain started was Mt. Washington, two weekends ago. Mt. Washington is another technical peak with a couple of good pitches to climb and pretty significant exposure. Here's a view up the ridge toward the summit.
The hike to the ridge went through a significant recent burn area. I didn't take any pictures while we were hiking through it, but this picture from the summit gives you an idea of the extent of the burn. I'd estimate that more than 60% of the trees all the way around the mountain, within a 10 mile radius were burned. Click here for the full size. You'll see smoke on the right side of the picture from a fire that was burning in the Three Sister Wilderness while we were on the mountain.
The climb up the ridge toward the summit block was a lot of fun, and a good warm up, with a lot of scrambling and exposed rocky sections. When we finally reached the saddle beneath the summit block, Our first team already had all the ropes set up, and had already summited (SAC had a large group climbing, so we split into three smaller groups and staggered our departure times to avoid congestion on the summit. I was in the middle group).
He's a view up the most technical section of the climb.
You can see one of our climbers roped up and about to climb. The rope generally follows the route and you can see the heads of the belayers at the top of the pitch.
Here's a picture of me, just past the crux on my way up. The people below me are where the above photo was taken from.
Below and to my left, the mountain drops away for a couple thousand feet.
Here I am after summiting, rappelling off the edge of the pitch in the picture above.
I got a bunch of video climbing up and rappelling off of the summit block and I'll post it as soon as I have a chance to edit it.
We had great views of Three Fingered Jack (on the left, which we were planning on climbing this weekend, but cancelled because of the rain) and Mt. Jeffereson. They're both on my list to climb.
Here's a picture of a couple of fulgurites on the top of the highest rock on the summit. Fulgurites are glass tubes that form when lighting strikes the rock.
Even though we split into three groups, the last two groups ended up summiting and descending together. Having so many people on the top of the mountain slowed us down a bit and we ended up descending just before sunset, hustling to get off the mountain proper and back on a trail before dark. We had to hike the ~5 miles back to the car after sunset, but the full moon lit the trail well enough to hike with our headlamps off.
I did get some amazing pictures of the sunset. Here's a couple, but check out the rest on flickr.
The last stop I made with my family before we had to part ways was Crater Lake (after Crater Lake on Monday, I had to return to work and my family continued up to Bend for the rest of the week). I've seen pictures, heard about it, and even have it on my license plate, but I wasn't at all prepared for how incredible Crater Lake would be. For those that aren't familiar with it, it is basically a giant lake in the crater of what was once a very active volcano. It's five miles across and six miles wide and over 1900 feet deep, the deepest lake in the US and one of the deepest in the world. Since it's in the top of a mountain, no streams flow into it (none happen to flow out, either) so the water is amazingly clear and deep blue.
We drove and hiked to different areas around the caldera to get different views of the lake (it's so big, you really do need to see it from different places). Here's a pretty good picture of my parents at our first view of the lake.
This is one of two islands in the lake, known as the phantom ship. It may look small, but it's actually 170 feet tall and 500 feet long. This picture gives you a sense of how blue the water is.
Trey, Carsten, and I hiked down from the rim to the lake (there's only one trail that goes down to the lake, about 700 vertical feet). We went for two reasons; 1) to see the lake from up close, and 2) to jump in. The water was freezing, but we wanted to be able to say we swam in Crater Lake. Here's Carsten taking the plunge.
Here's the view we had standing on the rock before we jumped in.
Check out the large version to fully appreciate it.
Because Crater Lake is in a volcano, there are many other cool geologic features around it. The Pinnacles are large, hollow columns where steam vented up through and solidified ash on the mountain. As the surround ash eroded, only the Pinnacles remained. The one in the middle of this picture is over 160 feet tall.
The rest of the pictures we took at Crater Lake are definitely worth checking out on my flickr page.
Since our rafting trip was in southern Oregon, we decided it was well worth the drive to northern California to see the redwoods. We spent a day in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park and were absolutely in awe at the size of the trees. Trey, Carsten, and I went on a hike through an area that the park ranger told us contained the tallest trees in the world. They were impressively huge, some well over 300 feet tall and 20 feet in diameter.
We also went swimming in a tributary of Smith River, with water so clear you could see the rocks on the bottom more than 30 feet below. We didn't get a good picture of how clear the water was, but my dad got a picture of me swinging off of a rope hanging from a bridge over the water.
Below is a video of a little adventure we had in the redwood forest. My dad joined Trey, Carsten, and I for the first couple miles of our hike. He was supposed to meet up with my mom at a campground by crossing a bridge over the Smith River. When we got to the right location, though, we discovered that the seasonal bridge wasn't there. There happened to be a small raft on the beach that a family had used to cross the river then left while they went for a hike. Trey and my dad commandeered the raft to cross the river, hurrying to finish before the owners returned. My favorite part of this is how hard Trey was laughing after they got into the raft.
My mom and dad, Trey and Carsten came to Portland last week for the family's summer trip. The first stop on our trip was a four day rafting trip on the Rogue River in southern Oregon. It was an awesome trip and everyone had a lot of fun. We saw a lot of wildlife, including a mink, otters, bears, deer, and many more.
There were 19 customers in our group and five guides. We had four oar boats, where we could just sit in the front and relax while the guide rowed, and one oar boat, where customers could paddle as well, and seven duckies (individual rubber kayaks) with us, so there was a good mix of relaxing and paddling through the whitewater. I've got tons of video from the trip and I'll post more as get them edited.
We also had incredible weather for the whole trip. It was sunny and in the 80s and 90s during the day, then cooled off at night. The water felt great to swim in. Trey, Carsten, and I slept outside under the stars all three nights.
The food was also amazing. We had fresh fruit at every meal, incredible camp cooking, and delicious dutch oven deserts every evening.
I won't go into a play-by-play of the entire trip, but here are some of the highlights:
We stopped at a few jumping rocks along the river, but the first one stands out a little more than the rest. Our mother, who is terrified of heights, jumped off of it. It took a little coaxing (ok, a lot of coaxing from a lot of people), but after several minutes near the edge, she did it. We even have video proof.
I cut out the first five minutes of the video while she's nervously looking over the edge, terrified to jump.
Though the video didn't turn out great from this incident, it was one of my favorites of the trip. Carsten and I were in duckies when one of the guides told us where a large hole was in the rapids. We both headed straight for it. I watched as Carsten got tossed out of his ducky, then the wave swallowed the bow of my ducky, flipping me forward and out of it. There was enough force involved to rip the rubber strap from my sunglasses. You'll see them dangling from my neck before the water pulls them away from me and I lose them completely.
(Video to come soon. I haven't had a chance to edit it, but I wanted to get the post up, since it's been a couple weeks.)
There was also a pretty scary moment on the trip. Before we entered Mule Creek Canyon, one of the guides had warned us about a few of the rapids in it. For the first one, we were told to go to the left of two rocks that mark the entrance of the canyon, known as Jaws. We were warned several times not to go to the right of the rocks. Carsten and I were in duckies and listened closely to the instructions.
In the last set of small rapids a few hundred yards upstream of Jaws, one of the men in our group flipped out of his ducky. I grabbed his boat and flipped it right side up for him while another duckier helped him over to where I was. The swimmer struggled to get back in his ducky and didn't get in until just above Jaws. I was the furthest down stream in the group of duckies, and by the time the man had gotten back into his ducky, I was too close to the rocks to get around to the left of them. I pointed my ducky to the right of jaws and started paddling aggressively, hoping I could power through whatever might lay beyond the first two rocks. As I passed around to the right of the two large rocks, I saw another medium sized rock about 15 yards down stream of the first two. I knew I couldn't make the sharp left turn to stay above the rock and rejoin the main flow, so I headed for a narrow channel of water (about three feet wide) to the right of the lower rock.
The strong current forced the left side of my ducky against the rock, lifting the left tube and forcing the right tube down. I threw all my weight to the high side, trying to keep the ducky upright, but the force of the water was too great. it quickly swallowed the right tube, pulling it and me under an undercut rock. The tubes of the ducky sandwiched against legs, pulling them with it under the rock. The huge amount of force from the water rushing around the rock had wrapped my ducky around the rock, beneath the water, pulling me under. I managed to keep my head above the water by grabbing onto the top of the rock.
While all this was happening, I had seen the rest of my group float by. I knew there were no good places to stop in the canyon and that the steep walls would prevent anyone from being able to make it back up stream to me. Self rescue was the only option. I pulled hard on the top of the rock and wrestled my trapped legs out of the wrapped ducky. The water flow pressed my torso hard against the rock and pulled my legs under it, but I was able to hoist myself on top of the rock and to relative safety.
I was no longer at a risk for drowning, but then came the question of what to do with the ducky. It was sandwiched and wrapped around the undercut rock, almost completely submerged. I braced my back on another rock and push with my feet against the stern of the ducky, but it wouldn't budge. The force of the water hitting it was way too high.
Carsten and another duckier, Alex, had managed to stop on a rocky beach 40 yards below where I'd been stuck. They worked their way to near where I was and Alex crossed over to the rock I was on. The two of us were able to push the back of the ducky out from the rock enough for the water to flow behind it and force it out from under the rock. Carsten stayed down stream to catch it when it floated free. My paddle was trapped under the rock by the rushing water, too, but after the ducky was freed, the paddle gradually moved downstream until Carsten was able to reach under the water and pull it out.
I paddled the rest of the mile long canyon very conservatively, avoiding any large waves and holes. I'd had enough excitement for the day.
We all managed to survive the rest of the trip with little more than lost sunglasses and sunburns and I think everyone had a great time. Check out the rest of the pictures from the trip on flickr.
