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.

if you recall the last time that I tried to climb Moosilauke, you’ll note that I failed. Yesterday, how­ever, I set out for attempt two and succeeded.

I drove up to Concord on Saturday and then, bright and 6:30am early Sunday, I drove to Cambridge, grabbed Max and drove up to Lincoln, NH. In Lincoln, we grabbed break­fast and some snacks before dri­ving out the the trail­head. Our hike finally set off at 11am.

Moosilauke starts our rea­son­ably flat, with a slight rise over easy ground for a small frac­tion of a mile. After the very brief illu­sion of ease, comes the Hell that is going up approx­i­mately 2000 feet in about a mile, which for the math­e­mat­i­cally inclined is about 22° aver­age incli­na­tion. This rise is flanked, most of the way, by a series of very beau­ti­ful water­falls and con­sists pri­mar­ily of rocks. It should be noted that the steep part of the path begins and ends with signs warn­ing that it is very treach­er­ous and should be avoided when wet or icy. After using most of our ini­tial energy on the steep por­tion, we were happy to find that it became grad­ual and had a bit of soft dirt for a while, pro­vid­ing a very wel­come respite. After the grad­ual por­tion, we hit a num­ber of up and down por­tions, nowhere near as severe as the ini­tial por­tion of the trail, before begin­ning the final ascent to the sum­mit. We reached the sum­mit at about 2pm.

The sum­mit of Moosilauke is essen­tially a very large grass hill, with a great many blue­berry bushes and some rock shel­ters, reach­ing a max­i­mum ele­va­tion of 4802 feet (trail­head is at 1800 feet). The sum­mit pro­vides fan­tas­tic views in all direc­tions, unob­scured by trees or any of the smaller sur­round­ing moun­tains. The sum­mit pro­vided a nice cool­ing breeze, a good place to have lunch and a whole bunch of gnats. So far as I can tell, I prob­a­bly ate about a dozen of those gnats as they landed on my fin­gers and food. All in all, Moosilauke has a beau­ti­ful sum­mit that is rather pleas­ant to hang out on. We left the sum­mit at about 2:30p for home.

The upper por­tions of the trail were just about as easy to go down as they were to come up. The steep por­tion, how­ever, was not so pleas­ant or easy. Initially, the only prob­lem get­ting down the steep por­tion was that we were quite exhausted by that point and steep rocks are not easy to descend. Shortly after the steep por­tion began, our real trou­bles began, rain. At first it rained lightly, just enough to make all the rocks slip­pery and treach­er­ous, which makes for a won­der­ful addi­tion to a trail listed as to be avoided when wet or icy. The light rain was rather annoy­ing but then when it was fol­lowed by a rain heavy enough to drench us to the bone, it felt as though the moun­tain were spit­ing us and try­ing to make me fail once more. Eventually, we made it through all the slip­pery rocks and mud to the bot­tom, reach­ing trail­head at 5:30pm. From the bot­tom, we drove to the Ashland Burger King, The Burger King of New Hampshire moun­tain climb­ing, had some din­ner and pro­ceeded home. By the time I arrived back in Woods Hole, at 10pm, I felt as though I was going to col­lapse. Shortly there­after, I did col­lapse, thank­fully in my bed. Today, I still feel as though I am going to col­lapse, but I can prob­a­bly hold myself together until the afternoon.

Before I get into the meat of this post, right now I’m eat­ing a Beef Stick and sharp ched­dar omelette and let me tell you, it’s fan­tas­tic. I’m mak­ing this stuff for break­fast next time I go camp­ing with the guys.

Anyway, yes­ter­day, I decided I’d set out to climb one of the White Mountains today. Taking a hike struck me as a good way to spend some time and try out my new snow­shoes (Xmas loot, kind of). I was look­ing through my list of good hikes that I want to take and I decided to try to get up Mount Moosilauke (there’s debate between whether it’s pro­nounced to rhyme with rock or rocky, but I pre­fer ponounc­ing it as though it ends in uh). The plan was to set out around 7a today, get to trail­head around 10a, reach sum­mit before 5p, turn around, camp at sun­set and fin­ish up tomor­row. That I’m writ­ing this now means I obvi­ously didn’t succeed.

The prob­lems began when I pressed snooze until 6:40a, then I had to go get some food for my trip so I ended up with set­ting out at the equiv­a­lent of 8a which put me at the trail­head around 11a. 11a was still a pretty rea­son­able start time by my fig­ur­ing but then between there being a whole bunch of snow, the trail up Moosilauke being really steep and me being plenty out of shape, I hiked woe­fully behind sched­ule. By 2:00p, I had made it up 2/3 of the ele­va­tion and 3/8 of the dis­tance, which gave me 3 hours to make it the rest of the way and find shel­ter. Figuring I wouldn’t make sum­mit before sun­down, I fig­ured I’d turn around, so as to be able to sleep in a proper bed tonight. Also, it was really cold up there (def­i­nitely <20°F, maybe <10°F but cer­tainly >0°F), which had me a lit­tle con­cerned that my 0°F sleep­ing bag might not cut it. So I took the safer approach and turned back.

Coming down, as is always the case, was mighty quick, tak­ing under an hour to cover the pre­vi­ous three’s dis­tance. Seeing as there was a whole ton and a half of snow, going down was a mix­ture of glis­sad­ing and ass slid­ing almost the whole way. Also, the steep­ness that had been a bother on the ascent made the descent fan­tas­ti­cally keen. I almost wish I’d brought a sled with me, though that’s prob­a­bly the sort of bad idea that would have tossed me off a cliff.

In sum­ma­tion: I’m fat and slow; Moosilauke is really steep; I like my new snowshoes.

Afternote: The high­light of the hike was the won­der­fully amus­ing sign on a privy by the shel­ters where I took lunch that read some­thing very nearly, ‘THERE IS NO “P” IN THIS RIVY USE THE WOODS’.

Our camp­ing trip ended up being two days long instead of three and while parts of me are dis­ap­pointed, other parts are sore and glad to have woken up in a real bed. All in all, it doesn’t really mat­ter too much to me whether we went for one night or two, it just mat­ters that we went; I was glad to have some time rough­ing it and hang­ing out with some good friends.

The trip went pretty much like this: We left Sunday morn­ing at around 8:30a from MIT’s Random Hall. Taking I-93N to Ashland where we got onto US-3, which took us to NH-113, which in turn led to NH-113A, which led to Whiteface Intervale Road, off of which we found trail­head park­ing. Incidentally, the frost heaves on NH-113A are atro­cious (go too fast and you will likely kill your car). From trail­head, we took Flat Mountain Pond Trail up and into the Sandwich Range Wilderness. Hiking in was mod­er­ate at first with a packed trail but as the trail split, with one fork head­ing to Mount Whiteface and the other head­ing to Flat Mountain Pond, we were left with untouched snow. Snowshoeing on the unpacked snow is not bad at all but the trail started to gain in incli­na­tion and was mod­er­ately steep for a long while. At the end of day one, we were exhausted and camped a few hun­dred feet from the trail, near the north­east­ern shore of Flat Mountain Pond. After a night that got colder each of the three times I woke up, I found myself to be the first one awake after sun­rise. Being the first one awake, I decided to go about mak­ing a fire, which was fun and I man­aged with one match. Smalltime was the sec­ond per­son awake and he helped me gather some fire­wood. Eventually, every­one woke up, we gath­ered our stuff and set out. We were plan­ning to con­tinue along the Flat Mountain Pond Trail until what point as we felt like stop­ping, camp and fin­ish the next day but we ended up mak­ing it all the way back down on the sec­ond day. Making it down, we hopped in our vehi­cles and headed back, stop­ping at the Burger King in Ashland, NH as is tra­di­tional for these trips (and any­time I do any hik­ing in north­ern New Hampshire). Such was how the third annual spring break camp­ing trip went.

Now for the rest of spring break, I will spend a few days at home and then some time work­ing on my thesis.

This spring break will mark the Third Annual Misogynistic Camping Trip. Sam, Max, Hippo, Ian and I are going up to New Hampshire to be cold and “be men”. We will leave late Saturday, spend the night at Sam’s grand­par­ents’ place in North Conway and begin our hike early Sunday morn­ing. We will be in the moun­tains through late Tuesday and should be back in Massachusetts before Wednesday.

The rest of y’all can plan your lives (or vaca­tions) around that (or not).

Max and I have been mean­ing to go ski­ing this IAP and we finally got around to it today. So, this morn­ing at about 7a, Max, Bryan, Gus and I set out for points north. By 10:30a, we had rented skis and were get­ting on the ski lift at Waterville Valley in New Hampshire. It’s worth not­ing the costs asso­ci­ated with get­ting to this point: $34 for a lift ticket (with col­lege ID) and $32 for equip­ment rental; totally $66. We then pro­ceeded to ski, with a brief lunch break, clear through about 4p. The drive is not that bad, the price is pretty good and, over­all, it’s totally worth it for 5 hours of decent ski­ing with my friends.

Taylor and I went up to New Hampshire and climbed the three Tripyramid peaks on Saturday. The Tripyramids are quite nice and the whole trip was very pleasant.

It being Tuesday (myself hav­ing been away from the Internet since Saturday) I have for­got­ten many of the small details, but I will give you the key points. We started hik­ing at 10:30a. The trail begins as a dirt road from the park­ing area and con­tin­ues as such for at least a mile or so. We ended up tak­ing the route up the south­ern peak first, which con­tin­ued as a smaller dirt path for quite a while after diverg­ing from the road. The dirt path was small and had a mod­er­ate grade which pro­ceeded for quite some dis­tance before begin­ning to get rocky. Shortly after the dirt path had tran­si­tioned into a rocky dirt path, it decided to drop the dirt alto­gether and became the south­ern slide. The south­ern slide was steep and con­sisted entirely of exposed rock, gravel and sand. Proceeding up the south­ern slide was a great deal of fun and we encoun­tered a num­ber of other hik­ers going down (as well as a num­ber of hik­ers with dogs). The views from the slide itself are quite spec­tac­u­lar and one ends up paus­ing to turn around and look rather often. Some of the other hik­ers we encoun­tered strongly encour­aged us not to take the north­ern slide down as it was, reput­edly, much worse than the south­ern; it was rec­om­mended that we take the Scaur Ridge Trail down. Eventually we made it past the south­ern slide and the trail lev­elled out once more. The mod­er­ately graded dirt path had started to become a lit­tle bor­ing before the slide, but to see sim­i­lar after­wards was a very pleas­ant respite. There were some decent views from the south­ern peak but we decided to pro­ceed to the mid­dle peak before stop­ping for lunch as a num­ber of hik­ers whom we had passed made men­tion of the spec­tac­u­lar views from the mid­dle peak. The mid­dle peak was not far beyond the south­ern peak, per­haps another ten or fif­teen min­utes, and the views were, indeed, quite spec­tac­u­lar. We took lunch on the sec­ond peak, and I was reminded once more of how tasty a briney pickle is after los­ing plenty of salt to a sweaty hike. Also, insects are a real nui­sance. The hike from the mid­dle to north peak was rather fun. The Scaur Ridge Trail from the north peak was a mod­er­ate down, fol­lowed by a grad­ual down, which even­tu­ally spat us back out on the afore­men­tioned Livermore Road and we reached the car at around 4:30 mak­ing for a 6 hour hike.

All in all, the hike was quite nice, the views were great and the south­ern slide was a heck of a lot of fun. Also, the cus­tom­ary trip to the Ashland, NH Burger King for din­ner was not neglected.

Sam, Max and I went up to New Hampshire and climbed Mount Osceola and East Osceola today; great fun, good company.

I set out at about 8:15a and grabbed Max at about 8:30a. From Max’s, we pro­ceeded into the city and picked Sam up from Chi Phi at 9:00a. From here we made the ardu­ous trek deep into New Hampshire, grabbed some food and sup­plies in Waterville Valley. We then pro­ceeded onwards and got to the park­ing area at about 12:30p. From the park­ing area, we began our storm­ing of the Osceolas. A major­ity of the early part of Osceola is rather rocky and some­what steep. Eventually, the rocky bits calm down a lit­tle and then it’s just steep. Since we were storm­ing the mountain–not too actively, just because we’re all in our early twen­ties and in decent shape–we made really good time and weren’t too con­cerned with the steep­ness or the rock­i­ness (it’s more fun that way). Up at the top of Osceola are two old fire tower foun­da­tions, one at the top of Osceola’s big cliff at the sum­mit thing and one a lit­tle ear­lier. At the ear­lier fire tower foun­da­tion there is a side path to the west that leads to a great out­look to the Northwest. After tak­ing a diver­sion to the afore­men­tioned out­look we made our way to Osceola’s big cliff at the sum­mit thing, which hap­pens to be a big cliff at the sum­mit. The big cliff is pretty spec­tac­u­lar, espe­cially if you’ve got a mild fear of heights, and allows for a great view off to the Northeast and East. Since we’d already planned to hit up East Osceola before stop­ping for the sand­wichs that we’d pur­chased in Waterville Valley, we only stopped for a short while. After Osceola sum­mit, there is a steep and rocky descent for a bit, which is then fol­lowed by a really steep, rock descent for another lit­tle bit. It then pro­ceeds to smooth out and start to rise to East Osceola sum­mit. East Osceola sum­mit, is rather unim­pres­sive and mostly cov­ered in trees. It still being rather early, we decided to head back to Osceola sum­mit before eat­ing. The really steep, rock descent became a really steep, rock ascent in reverse and was quite a lot of fun. Having made our way back to Osceola sum­mit, we ate, sat around for a while and then pro­ceeded down. Incidentally, pick­les taste really good when you’re elec­trolyte depleted from exert­ing your­self. We made it back to the car at 5:00p, giv­ing us a 4:30 hike time in com­par­i­son with the AMC guide­book esti­mate of 6:40, which I found quite impres­sive. I was still feel­ing pretty good about myself when we got back to the car, as though I could have kept going for a bit longer. We then pro­ceeded back to I93 and headed south. We, of course, stopped at the Burger King in Ashland, NH, as is cus­tom­ary for hik­ing in the White Mountains (as far as I’m con­cerned), for din­ner. A nice greasy, salty burger with salty fries is like ambrosia when you’ve been exert­ing your­self stren­u­ously for a large part of the day. It was at the Burger King that I real­ized I was quite fatigued, appar­ently going all fast like is tir­ing and it just had a bit of a lag so as not to let me feel it while hik­ing. From there we returned Sam to Chi Phi and I returned Max to his home. Osceola’s got some nice views and the path between it and East Osceola is pretty fun.

Well, that’s four four-thousand-footers down and forty-four to go.

This week­end I went and did a bunch of camp­ing and hik­ing and such with my good friends Max, Riad, Sam and Hippo. I could go into an incred­i­ble amount of detail as to all the stuff that we did, but I’ve been writ­ing other things for a while and I am all writinged out. Suffice it to say that a good time was had.

I set out yes­ter­day to climb Mount Whiteface and Mount Passaconoway up in that New Hampshire state thing. I planned it as a two day hike where I’d get as far as I could, set down with my sleep­ing bag, sleep and then fin­ish. I had myself loaded out with alto­gether too much gear because I wanted extra weight such that I can go about beat­ing myself into shape faster.

At any rate, I got to the park­ing area at around 11:30a yes­ter­day and got going on the Whiteface bit. Along the way there were a few places where the melt­ing snow/ice was flow­ing down the trail (some­times under ice sheets) and it was absolutely beau­ti­ful; pleas­ant sound as well. The path had a fairly low grade for a while and then nearer the top it got pretty steep. The steep bits were pretty icy at times and I had to use trees to haul myself up a cou­ple of times. There are a num­ber of rocky ledges on the upper parts of Whiteface that afford some spec­tac­u­lar views of the region. I could see Washington at a few points and that’s an impres­sive look­ing moun­tain (well, not just look­ing if you know any­thing about it). Eventually I reached the south­ern sum­mit of Whiteface, which has a great view south and is mostly just a rock face (prob­a­bly where the moun­tain name comes from). From there I pro­ceeded across the real sum­mit and over to Passaconoway. I started up the last bit of Passaconoway at about 4:30p and then stopped at Camp Rich (just a snow cov­ered tentsite) at about 5:00p. I dropped anchor, so to speak, and hopped in my sleep­ing bag for a long night. I’m not quite sure why but I wasn’t able to sleep and at around 2:00a I decided to go on. It was a full moon so there was plenty of light to go by, and I had a flash­light for the hard bits. I fin­ished up Passaconoway, which has a pretty dis­ap­point­ing sum­mit, and headed down. I made it back to the car by 5:20a, an hour before sun­rise, and then got home just a lit­tle after 8:00a.

I would rate Whiteface as pretty good with some fun scram­bles and some great views. Passaconoway would likely get a rat­ing of not really that great unless you just want to hike in the woods uphill. Also, hik­ing by moon­light is really quite nice.

That’s two four-thousand-footers down and forty-six to go.