gwax's rumblings

This past week­end, Memorial Day week­end ’08, a cou­ple friends and I set out to climb Mount Shasta; we did not suc­ceed. Mount Shasta is the sec­ond high­est of the Cascade Mountains, the fifth high­est moun­tain in California and the fifti­eth high­est in North America. Shasta is note­wor­thy for being by itself; Shasta pops out of oth­er­wise mostly flat land, mak­ing it a rather impos­ing sight. Driving down I-5 on the Seattle to San Francisco leg of my move from Greater Boston to the Bay Area, I passed Shasta and was absolutely blown away by the sight of such a mas­sive moun­tain pop­ping up out of nowhere.

Myself, Hippo and John, set out from the bay area Friday evening. Stopping at Chipotle’s en route, we got to Finlandia! Motel in Mount Shasta City, California some­time around 1 or 2AM. Repacking lightly and get­ting to sleep, we woke up rather early so that we could pick up our rental gear and meet up to take a basic moun­taineer­ing course with Shasta Mountain Guides. The rest of Saturday was spent at low ele­va­tions of Shasta learn­ing how to moun­taineer, includ­ing climb­ing steep snow/ice, self-arresting with an ice axe, etc. Personal, I felt the course was really infor­ma­tive, leav­ing me both glad to have the knowl­edge for the climb and glad to have the knowl­edge going for­ward. Saturday night, we dined in Shasta City, which, I might add, is an incred­i­bly pleas­ant lit­tle town with very friendly people.

Sunday morn­ing, we woke up bright and early at 7AM, get­ting to the trail­head at Bunny Flats by about 9AM. Bunny Flats is at an ele­va­tion of 6,800′, already more than 500′ higher than the high­est thing I’d ever climbed pre­vi­ously, Mount Washington. From Bunny Flats, we obtained the nec­es­sary per­mits and set out. We reached, the first notable way­point, Horse Camp at 7,800′. When mak­ing a two day trip of climb­ing Shasta, one usu­ally makes camp at Horse Camp or Lake Helen; our ini­tial plan was to camp at Lake Helen but the weather com­bined with the advice of the Horse Camp care­taker con­vinced us to camp at Horse Camp. Horse Camp also pro­vided the ben­e­fits of out­houses (climbers are oth­er­wise required to bag and carry out feces from Shasta) and a flow­ing spring. The spring water avail­able at Horse Camp is reputed to be the best water on Earth and, hav­ing tried it myself, I must admit that I have not encoun­tered bet­ter water to date. We took a short hike fur­ther up Sunday after­noon, leav­ing all of our gear behind, turn­ing back when it started to snow heav­ily. Sunday night we cooked var­i­ous din­ner stuffs, repacked our bags with essen­tials and went to sleep around 7 or 8PM.

Monday, we woke up at 1AM, got ready and began climb­ing by head-lamp light around 2:15AM. The climb up from Horse Camp, is slow and rather ardu­ous. The climb­ing was mostly up big, steep snow fields, which had nice fresh snow from the heavy snow that caused us to cut short our hike of Sunday. Thankfully for us, there were two guided tours that left around 1:30AM and had blazed the trail for us, mak­ing things a lit­tle eas­ier. By around 5:15AM, we had reached Lake Helen at 10,400′. Although, Lake Helen is 2,600′ above Horse Camp, it’s only about ¾ of a mile lat­er­ally, in case you wanted a sense of the dif­fi­culty. By Lake Helen, I was start­ing to feel a lit­tle off, get­ting exhausted and los­ing my appetite, at the time uniden­ti­fied early signs of alti­tude sick­ness or, if you pre­fer, acute moun­tain sick­ness. The sun started to rise while we were at Lake Helen and we set off for points higher. After Lake Helen is one of the steeper por­tions of the entire moun­tain and it’s really steep. From Lake Helen up is when the alti­tude sick­ness really kicked in.

Altitude sick­ness is when the lower pres­sure of the air pre­vents your body from get­ting as much oxy­gen as it nor­mally needs, which poses rather sub­stan­tial prob­lems for your brain and body. Subjectively, for me, it felt as though my brain was falling asleep. I wasn’t tired, my body and mus­cles felt like they were in fine shape to con­tinue but I couldn’t shake the feel­ing that I was so exhausted that I was going to col­lapse. It’s some­what like the sen­sa­tion of being on the edge of pass­ing out after you’ve been awake for a cou­ple days, minus the being tired part. Altitude sick­ness, being alti­tude dri­ven, gets worse pretty much every step up you take, which made con­tin­u­ing pro­gres­sively harder and harder. We were fol­low­ing a hike one hour, rest a lit­tle, hike one hour, rest sched­ule and when we next rested, my GPS, which we were using as an altime­ter read 11,242′. As we rested, I drank water and tried to eat but the alti­tude sick­ness was in pretty full swing. I was so worn down that chew­ing a gra­nola bar took most of the effort that I was able to muster from myself. Imagine, if you will, the level of inca­pac­i­ta­tion that goes along with a very high fever but with­out the fun of delir­ium or the secu­rity of being in bed. Noting that I was in pretty poor shape and felt on the verge of pass­ing out, it was decided that turn­ing back was the best option. Another thing about alti­tude sick­ness being alti­tude dri­ven is that as soon as you get back below your ceil­ing – mine is appar­ently about 10,000′ right now – you tend to start feel­ing bet­ter. By the time we got back down to Lake Helen, it was as though some­one had lifted a great weight off of my brain.

It was a lit­tle frus­trat­ing to be at Lake Helen and feel mostly fine to go on but know that the alti­tude would make it too dif­fi­cult. From Lake Helen down, it was mostly wading/jogging/trudging/hopping through a few inches to a few feet of snow, of which enough was pow­der to make me really wish that I had skis. Very soon after we started down­ward, it started to snow rather heav­ily with white­out lev­els of vis­i­bil­ity. The rapid drop in weather qual­ity made it almost for­tu­nate that my alti­tude sick­ness had forced us to turn around when it did as con­tend­ing with white­out con­di­tions at higher ele­va­tions and greater exhaus­tion would have been rather haz­ardous. The weather events of the week­end seem to have pre­vented most, if not all, peo­ple from sum­mit­ing Shasta over this memo­r­ial day week­end, so we may not have really missed out on too much. We got back down to Horse Camp by about 11AM, the bizarre result of start­ing at 2:15AM and all decided to take a nap. Unfortunately, when we got up from our naps to pack and leave, it was rain­ing. It took us rather a while to accept the rain, get up and pack every­thing. From there, it was a cou­ple hours hike out down the slow path from Horse Camp and we were done.

Ultimately, it was a gru­el­ing, some­times unpleas­ant endeavor and I’m immensely pleased that I did it. I would very much like to try Shasta again some­time; per­haps I’ll try to do some alti­tude train­ing or get a doc­tor to give me some Acetazolamide. Shasta aside, methinks that this whole moun­taineer­ing thing is a thing that I should be doing more of.

P.S. For those of you who are not Shadowrun geeks, Mount Shasta is the home of the great dragon Hestaby. For those that are, while I was hik­ing beyond Lake Helen and feel­ing the effects of alti­tude sick­ness, I got myself to keep going by telling myself to roll willpower.