Training Log Archive: BorisGrIn the 11 days ending Jul 25, 2011:
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Monday Jul 25, 2011 #
Running 1:10:34 [2] 7.2 mi (9:48 / mi)
shoes: Red Asics 2011
Ran with Becky at Maltby Lakes after getting off the redeye from Portland. Felt ok when running and enjoyed the company and the relatively cool temperature. We saved the lives of two kids who managed to get themselves lost while out for a walk. The run was followed by excellent burgers at Becky and Rob's. The devilcats won this round by making me cry.
Sunday Jul 24, 2011 #
Hiking 1:00:00 [1]
A day hike with Amy in Portland's Forest Park. Very cool wilderness right in the city, complete with a great view of Mt.Hood and a visit to a raptor rescure center, where we saw a beautiful raven and an evil-looking horned owl.
Saturday Jul 23, 2011 #
Event: Swedish O-Ringen
Running 45:00 [1] 4.5 mi (10:00 / mi)
shoes: Red Asics 2011
Easy recovery run with Amy in Portland, mostly on streets and paved paths.
Friday Jul 22, 2011 #
Event: OO.cup/2011
Thursday Jul 21, 2011 #
12 PM
Hiking 11:01:23 [1] 7.46 mi (1:28:39 / mi) +2847m 40:34 / mi
Climbing Mount Rainier with Kat and two people we found over the Cascade climbers mailing list, Lindsey and Jared.
On day 1 we walked up from the Paradise visitor center to Camp Muir. It was overcast and raining lightly the entire time. The weather forecasts from the top did not seem very promising, and we were pretty skeptical about our chances of summiting. Snow cover started from the very beginning at 5000 feet. It took us 4.5 hours to hike up to Muir (10200 ft). It's pretty much straight up a snow field for the last couple of hours. I was happy that the visibility was bad - otherwise it would have been somewhat demoralizing to keep seeing the camp from below for hours. On the way up to Muir, I was in the front most of the time, kicking steps in the snow. Jared and Kat kept up just fine, and Lindsey would fall back a bit, but never far, and so I thought that the pace was pretty good. At about 9000 ft we broke through the clouds, and it was gorgeous and sunny up above. We set up our tents at Muir and boiled a bunch of snow for our awesome freeze-dried meals. We tried going to sleep around 7pm, but immediately a large group of military-looking climbers showed up and started talking loudly to each other and shouting. This went on until about 10pm, when I finally fell asleep.
Alarm went off at 12:40am, and I slowly got ready. Clothes: underwear, trimtex tights, gore-tex pants, gaiters, polypro top, soft shell layer, rain jacket, sock liners, heavy wool socks, red ski hat, medium gloves, helmet, plastic boots. At one point I would switch to heavier gloves, but otherwise I stayed in this outfit the entire way up.
Equipment: crampons on boots, ice axe in one hand, trekking pole in other, my new dinotte headlamp on my head, snow picket attached to my pack, foot and waist prusiks attached to the rope, plus six carabiners, four lockers and two non-lockers.
Food: two liters of water, four gus, four packs of sports beans, four clif shot blocks, three protein bars, twelve normal granola bars, small bag of plantain chips. Almost all of this would get eaten by the time I got back down to Muir, so in the future this is the minimum amount I need.
We had prepared the rope before going to bed, and roped in about 30ft apart once we got up. It was decided that I would be first, which was a surprise to me. Normally, the strongest/most experienced climber goes first in a rope team, and I was expecting myself to be the weakest and least experienced in the group. Kat was behind me, then Jared, and Lindsey at the end.
We set off at 1:20am, and I tried setting a steady pace, walking slowly enough that I never felt out of breath. There were lots of other rope teams out there, nearly a continuous stream of headlamps and rope. Almost all the other teams were guided groups, with a guide in front and two or three clients in a line behind him (I say him because I only saw male guides on the mountain.) I would say there were about a dozen other teams just in our immediate vicinity. I took our first break pretty early on to assess how everyone was doing and what they thought about my pacing. As other teams walked by, I noticed that all of them were much closer together on their rope than we were. I suggested that we re-rope and shorten the gaps between us for ease of travel through steep, rocky areas, but no one else wanted to do it.
The next stretch of the climb went ok, and we had a pretty good pace going until the steepest part of the route, the Disappointment Cleaver. This has a short, exposed rocky section with fixed ropes and then a very steep stretch that goes from about 11400ft to 12400. Here we struggled a lot because of the long gaps between us, and wasted lots of unneeded effort and energy. The rope kept getting tangled in the rock or chunks of ice, and we had to stop and pull it loose over and over. The more experienced teams that were stuck behind us were clearly unhappy, and I was getting stressed each time a team would force their way past us and the guide would make some comment to me. This section is very steep the whole way up, so even taking breaks was a bit stressful, as you have to dig your feet hard into the snow to avoid sliding down the slope, and constantly watch all your equipment so it doesn't run off into a crevasse. During one of the breaks, I saw a woman from a guided group lose her axe (once you let it go, it's gone). She turned to her guide with an embarrassed smile and said "oops, sorry!" I also saw a water bottle flying past, as well as a glove and assorted granola bars over the course of the climb.
When we took a break at the top of the cleaver, it was starting to dawn over the eastern skies, and we could see the silhouette of Little Tahoma peak appearing just below us. At this point it was clear that we had a problem. Kat and I were freezing (the 40mph winds did not help) and felt like we were moving too slowly. Jared was doing ok, but did not want to speed up, and Lindsey wanted to slow down. This was a new situation for me, as on Cotopaxi we had the guide set a pace that worked fine for both me and Kat. Since I was in the front of the rope team, it was up to me to set the pace, so I said that I would slow down a bit but try to keep the progress steady so that we could stay warm.
From here on it seemed like we were crawling, but I obviously needed to set a pace that worked for everyone. I would take two shuffle steps, then stop, count to three, then continue. Over and over and over. At around 12800 Jared said he was feeling really weak, and Lindsey said she was getting a headache. I slowed us down some more and kept trying to encourage them and also taking more breaks. It was demoralizing to my and Kat's competitive selves to see every other team on the mountain pass us, but I kept trying to remind myself that this wasn't a race. I think getting a nice rhythm towards the end helped, as we were making slow, but steady progress.
Just after 8am we reached the crater, where gusts of wind were blowing in the 50's. We put down our stuff, unroped, and celebrated a bit. I realized that Jared had barely been eating anything, so I got him to force down some GUs and water (I had to keep breaking the ice off the mouth of my Nalgene with the adze of my axe), and he seemed to get re-energized a bit. I stopped my GPS watch in the crater because it was running out of batteries, but from here it was another half-hour walk up to the true summit, where the winds made it very difficult to stand up. Still, it was gorgeous. The crater is very nicely shaped, the occasional plumes of smoke from the fumaroles let you warm up a bit in a few places, and the views of the pacific northwest "skyline" were stunning. Through the steady layer of clouds, you can see the solitary volcanoes breaking through in their own distinctive ways: Mt.Adams, the biggest and closest, with a bulk that rivals Rainier's, the unmistakeable Mt.Hood, coming to what looks like a sharp point at the top, and the ominously broken cone of St.Helen's to the south.
We spent about an hour on top, taking pictures, feeding, and preparing for the way down. This time I insisted that we re-rope, and we cut the gaps between us down to 10-15 feet. This made the descent much smoother, and the beautiful sunny weather lower down made it pleasant to sit down and relax during the rest stops. In daylight we could now see the massive crevasses that we walked past obliviously during the night, and I was glad that we had climbed up at night. We managed to get down to Muir without much incident in about four hours.
After breaking camp we headed back down to Paradise. Everyone was tired, and the solution to this was to make me carry as much stuff as possible, which also made me tired. That's what I get for having an enormously large backpack. I had felt totally fine on the way up and down - not really feeling the altitude, and never feeling like I was working particularly hard - but on this last leg of the trip, I really struggled. A heavy and poorly-packed backpack made me stagger in the soft snow, and it felt like it took forever to get back to Paradise.
Overall, we were on our feet for about 15 hours on summit day after 4.5 hours the day before, and we went about 9000 feet up and then back down. As always, I was extremely impressed with Kat's strength and perseverance. I love having a wife who is tough as nails. The mountain was beautiful, and I am really glad that we managed to climb it, even if it didn't go exactly as planned. This was a really good experience for me in managing a rope team, and I think I learned a lot about trying to come up with something that works for everyone involved and getting them up and down the mountain safely. There are also some mistakes that we made, and that I will try to avoid in the future. A big thanks to Jared and Lindsey for being willing to climb with us despite our limited experience and for being tough enough to make it up and down Rainier!
I'll put up some pictures shortly, but Kat has most of them on her camera, and she is still up in the mountains, taking another mountaineering course.
On day 1 we walked up from the Paradise visitor center to Camp Muir. It was overcast and raining lightly the entire time. The weather forecasts from the top did not seem very promising, and we were pretty skeptical about our chances of summiting. Snow cover started from the very beginning at 5000 feet. It took us 4.5 hours to hike up to Muir (10200 ft). It's pretty much straight up a snow field for the last couple of hours. I was happy that the visibility was bad - otherwise it would have been somewhat demoralizing to keep seeing the camp from below for hours. On the way up to Muir, I was in the front most of the time, kicking steps in the snow. Jared and Kat kept up just fine, and Lindsey would fall back a bit, but never far, and so I thought that the pace was pretty good. At about 9000 ft we broke through the clouds, and it was gorgeous and sunny up above. We set up our tents at Muir and boiled a bunch of snow for our awesome freeze-dried meals. We tried going to sleep around 7pm, but immediately a large group of military-looking climbers showed up and started talking loudly to each other and shouting. This went on until about 10pm, when I finally fell asleep.
Alarm went off at 12:40am, and I slowly got ready. Clothes: underwear, trimtex tights, gore-tex pants, gaiters, polypro top, soft shell layer, rain jacket, sock liners, heavy wool socks, red ski hat, medium gloves, helmet, plastic boots. At one point I would switch to heavier gloves, but otherwise I stayed in this outfit the entire way up.
Equipment: crampons on boots, ice axe in one hand, trekking pole in other, my new dinotte headlamp on my head, snow picket attached to my pack, foot and waist prusiks attached to the rope, plus six carabiners, four lockers and two non-lockers.
Food: two liters of water, four gus, four packs of sports beans, four clif shot blocks, three protein bars, twelve normal granola bars, small bag of plantain chips. Almost all of this would get eaten by the time I got back down to Muir, so in the future this is the minimum amount I need.
We had prepared the rope before going to bed, and roped in about 30ft apart once we got up. It was decided that I would be first, which was a surprise to me. Normally, the strongest/most experienced climber goes first in a rope team, and I was expecting myself to be the weakest and least experienced in the group. Kat was behind me, then Jared, and Lindsey at the end.
We set off at 1:20am, and I tried setting a steady pace, walking slowly enough that I never felt out of breath. There were lots of other rope teams out there, nearly a continuous stream of headlamps and rope. Almost all the other teams were guided groups, with a guide in front and two or three clients in a line behind him (I say him because I only saw male guides on the mountain.) I would say there were about a dozen other teams just in our immediate vicinity. I took our first break pretty early on to assess how everyone was doing and what they thought about my pacing. As other teams walked by, I noticed that all of them were much closer together on their rope than we were. I suggested that we re-rope and shorten the gaps between us for ease of travel through steep, rocky areas, but no one else wanted to do it.
The next stretch of the climb went ok, and we had a pretty good pace going until the steepest part of the route, the Disappointment Cleaver. This has a short, exposed rocky section with fixed ropes and then a very steep stretch that goes from about 11400ft to 12400. Here we struggled a lot because of the long gaps between us, and wasted lots of unneeded effort and energy. The rope kept getting tangled in the rock or chunks of ice, and we had to stop and pull it loose over and over. The more experienced teams that were stuck behind us were clearly unhappy, and I was getting stressed each time a team would force their way past us and the guide would make some comment to me. This section is very steep the whole way up, so even taking breaks was a bit stressful, as you have to dig your feet hard into the snow to avoid sliding down the slope, and constantly watch all your equipment so it doesn't run off into a crevasse. During one of the breaks, I saw a woman from a guided group lose her axe (once you let it go, it's gone). She turned to her guide with an embarrassed smile and said "oops, sorry!" I also saw a water bottle flying past, as well as a glove and assorted granola bars over the course of the climb.
When we took a break at the top of the cleaver, it was starting to dawn over the eastern skies, and we could see the silhouette of Little Tahoma peak appearing just below us. At this point it was clear that we had a problem. Kat and I were freezing (the 40mph winds did not help) and felt like we were moving too slowly. Jared was doing ok, but did not want to speed up, and Lindsey wanted to slow down. This was a new situation for me, as on Cotopaxi we had the guide set a pace that worked fine for both me and Kat. Since I was in the front of the rope team, it was up to me to set the pace, so I said that I would slow down a bit but try to keep the progress steady so that we could stay warm.
From here on it seemed like we were crawling, but I obviously needed to set a pace that worked for everyone. I would take two shuffle steps, then stop, count to three, then continue. Over and over and over. At around 12800 Jared said he was feeling really weak, and Lindsey said she was getting a headache. I slowed us down some more and kept trying to encourage them and also taking more breaks. It was demoralizing to my and Kat's competitive selves to see every other team on the mountain pass us, but I kept trying to remind myself that this wasn't a race. I think getting a nice rhythm towards the end helped, as we were making slow, but steady progress.
Just after 8am we reached the crater, where gusts of wind were blowing in the 50's. We put down our stuff, unroped, and celebrated a bit. I realized that Jared had barely been eating anything, so I got him to force down some GUs and water (I had to keep breaking the ice off the mouth of my Nalgene with the adze of my axe), and he seemed to get re-energized a bit. I stopped my GPS watch in the crater because it was running out of batteries, but from here it was another half-hour walk up to the true summit, where the winds made it very difficult to stand up. Still, it was gorgeous. The crater is very nicely shaped, the occasional plumes of smoke from the fumaroles let you warm up a bit in a few places, and the views of the pacific northwest "skyline" were stunning. Through the steady layer of clouds, you can see the solitary volcanoes breaking through in their own distinctive ways: Mt.Adams, the biggest and closest, with a bulk that rivals Rainier's, the unmistakeable Mt.Hood, coming to what looks like a sharp point at the top, and the ominously broken cone of St.Helen's to the south.
We spent about an hour on top, taking pictures, feeding, and preparing for the way down. This time I insisted that we re-rope, and we cut the gaps between us down to 10-15 feet. This made the descent much smoother, and the beautiful sunny weather lower down made it pleasant to sit down and relax during the rest stops. In daylight we could now see the massive crevasses that we walked past obliviously during the night, and I was glad that we had climbed up at night. We managed to get down to Muir without much incident in about four hours.
After breaking camp we headed back down to Paradise. Everyone was tired, and the solution to this was to make me carry as much stuff as possible, which also made me tired. That's what I get for having an enormously large backpack. I had felt totally fine on the way up and down - not really feeling the altitude, and never feeling like I was working particularly hard - but on this last leg of the trip, I really struggled. A heavy and poorly-packed backpack made me stagger in the soft snow, and it felt like it took forever to get back to Paradise.
Overall, we were on our feet for about 15 hours on summit day after 4.5 hours the day before, and we went about 9000 feet up and then back down. As always, I was extremely impressed with Kat's strength and perseverance. I love having a wife who is tough as nails. The mountain was beautiful, and I am really glad that we managed to climb it, even if it didn't go exactly as planned. This was a really good experience for me in managing a rope team, and I think I learned a lot about trying to come up with something that works for everyone involved and getting them up and down the mountain safely. There are also some mistakes that we made, and that I will try to avoid in the future. A big thanks to Jared and Lindsey for being willing to climb with us despite our limited experience and for being tough enough to make it up and down Rainier!
I'll put up some pictures shortly, but Kat has most of them on her camera, and she is still up in the mountains, taking another mountaineering course.
C • awesome 11
Tuesday Jul 19, 2011 #
Running 20:38 [2] 2.81 mi (7:20 / mi)
shoes: Asics 2011
Running around Green Lake Park in Seattle.
Monday Jul 18, 2011 #
Hiking 2:00:00 [1]
More glacier school. Learning crevasse rescue, then hiking around some crevasse fields, and being thrown into a crevasse and prussking out. Finally, hiking back down to the parking lot. Glacier school was awesome. I feel way more confident in my ability to safely get up and down a non-technical glaciated mountain.
Sunday Jul 17, 2011 #
Hiking 1:00:00 [1]
Glacier school on Mt.Baker. Lots of self arrest training, learning to build anchors, and so on. Very cool.
Saturday Jul 16, 2011 #
Hiking 2:30:00 [2]
Hiking up the north side of Mt.Baker in a downpour, up until about 5400ft.
Friday Jul 15, 2011 #
Note
Traveling to Seattle all day, then driving to Bellingham, WA.