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| Page Type: Trip Report Location: Washington, United States, North America Lat/Lon: 48.77750°N / 121.8119°W Date Climbed/Hiked: Nov 30, 1999 | Page By: NoooB Created/Edited: Aug 6, 2007 / Aug 17, 2007 Object ID: 320697 Hits: 523 Loading... Page Score: 87.09% - 3 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
Why take a course?I'd been wanting to climb Rainier for some time. I'm not really into the whole thing with guides. Sam (my son) and I climbed Hood with a guide a few years ago. It was a good experience but I didn't want to go through the guide thing again. I just don't like the idea of being out there and just doing what I'm told. I've never been very good at that. On Hood, as much as I enjoyed the climb,I still felt a little helpless. Last fall I got into a conversation with another SPer who suggested that we just go and climb Rainier and not worry about learning crevasse rescue because if we were roped and followed the boot-track we most likely wouldn't fall in and even if we did there'd be zillions of people on the route anyway. I mentioned this to Rachel and she wasn't all that thrilled with the idea. On the Pacific Northwest Forum I asked: what do people think of climbing this way and the answers were uniformly negative. I got tons of good advice from SPers and it was all of the form: learn your skillZ. rob yang, etsynd, chief, sophiaclimbs, and many others gave us a lot of good advice. I really credit our Rainier climb to all these faceless voices out there in internet-land. Picking up glacier travel skills isn't easy since we live in the southwest. Rachel came across the AAI introductory alpinism course and we decided to do it. RachelR and I took the course while Sam went to snowboard school on Mt. Hood. The 6 day course was well worth the $1,000 each that we paid.Day 1We met at AAI in Bellingham and met our instructors, Mark and Angela, and our 8 class mates. Everyone in the class had experience roughly equivalent to ours. All had climbed a bit, but none of us really had glacier-travel experience.
We went through a gear check which was thorough and surprisingly fast and well-organized. We left the AAI shop after about 3 hours.
From Bellingham we went to Mt Erie for an afternoon of top-roping. We had 3 routes that were pretty close together. The easiest route was probably 5.4 or so. The second hardest was maybe 5.8/9. I didn't actually ask
what they thought the hardest route rating was but it was hard enough that none of us made it to the top.
The biggest thing for me on the top-roping session was doing a protected rappell. I'd rappelled a decade earlier in a "ropes course" that I was sent to by my employer to learn to love and respect my co-workers. That rappell was bullet proof. This one wasn't, except for the protection. In the AAI course I learned that I'll never like rappelling. Without the protection that would've been scary.
These guys were happy to have finished. Days 2-6 On BakerDay 2:
We left our campground and headed to Mt Baker. We left the trailhead (elevation 4000') and hiked to our camp spot gaining a few thousand feet. The camp spot was near the glacier (whose name I've forgotten). The hike took about 5 hours.
Day 3:
We spent our first day on the snow working on self-arrest and walking on moderate snow. Mark said that the slope we were on was about 40 degrees. I thought it was less at the bottom and more than that at the top.
The slope was about 80' high according to Rachel's barometer. We climbed it 20-30 times during the day.
In the morning, it looked very high and serious, but by afternoon we were clowning around falling off from the top trying to make our self-arrest practice realistic. We were taught how to make snow bollards for rappell anchors and rappelled off them. The biggest surprise for me on this day was that a 2' long snow picket buried about a foot deep couldn't be pulled out by 8 people.
Day 4:We spent day 4 on the glacier, front pointing up ice slopes, setting ice screws, etc . It was above freezing and rainy most of the time we were there. It rained a fair bit on this day.
Day 5:The forecast was for continued bad weather (for the remainder of the course) so at around 6AM Mark opted to make a summit bid. We sarted up at around 8AM. The rain quickly turned to snow with altitude. We travelled the heavily crevassed area in two rope teams. We made it up to the wall at 10,000' in heavy snow and whiteout. Mark was following the compass having memorized the settings the night before. He was probing for crevasses almost every step of the way. Visibility was about a rope length, or less. Mark said he didn't want to try to push on to the summit for fear that our tracks would be covered when we came back. So at about 10,000' we decided to descend. When we got out of the snow and whiteout the rain ended. We descended to camp uneventfully. At camp our wagbags had been raided by vultures. This happened to Rachel and I and to a few of our class mates.
I cleaned it up as best I could and packaged the shit into garbage bags. Still there was feces smeared on the snow that I couldn't reasonably pickup. That night it snowed and in the morning the snow looked pristine. From that I learned it's better to filter or purify ones water even in an apparently pristine setting.
Day 6:In the morning we did crevasse rescue. This was the skill that I had come for, although I learned a lot more than just this.
 Rachel preparing to "fall" into the crevasse.
 Rachel in the groove after falling.
Once she fell and I had self-arrested I transferred her weight onto an anchor. The amount of friction in the system was incredible. I've done tons of little pulley problems in college but I'd never actually played with real pulleys much. The CxZ system that we set up has a theoretical ideal mechanical advantage of 6 to 1. We used carbiners instead of pulleys which according to some calculations I did should result in the CxZ system being closer to 3 to 1. In fact I had to pull as hard as I could to lift Rachel's 130 punds plus her gear. In theory, I should have not had to pull harder than about 50-60 pounds to get her out. The friction where the rope cut into the snow and went over the ice axe was not considered in the theory and it was enormous.
Occasionally I had to rest. It took me an hour to get her out. Fortunately it was pretty warm.
Later it was my turn to jump in the crevasse. Rachel and two guys pulled me out.SummaryIt was a great experience and worth the money. I would heartily recommend AAI and this course. We made it up and down Rainier with some confidence in our abilities. They were well-organized and Mark was a damn hard working instructor. Funny thing is that he comes to my town to climb which is about 1,800 miles from where we met him in Bellingham. Once we finished the course we went over to Annacortis and took the ferry to San Juan Island so I could meet my future mother-in-law after 6 days without bathing. That's another story though. Images
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Cascade Volcanoes > Mount Baker > AAI course on Baker
