I hope you enjoy.
Am I still a climber?
I spent a total of 31 days in the mountains on different trips last year, from rock climbing, to mountain climbing. This year I have done a total of 1, yes you read that right, 1! The one day I spent out this year, and may I remind you that it is now the end of July, was for a day hike! It had a total elevation gain of aproximately 500 feet. That is quite a bit less than the average 5000 feet of gain on my trips last year.
My question for you is this: Is a climber still a climber if he no longer climbs? How long must I go without a climb before I cease to be a climber?
I have wonderful, exciting memories of all the different trips I went on last year. My main climbing partner, Rick M., and I climbed as much as our jobs and families allowed. If I remember correctly we were on one mountain or another every weekend last August and September! Boy, my wife was not happy about that one! I had to stop spending so much town in the hills, and start spending a little more time with my family. I guess I may have gotten a little carried away. I had no clue that would lead to me not climbing for a few months. Actually, it has now been about 9 months, 15 days since my last climbing adventure!
The last trip we did was an attempt on Mt. Adams in Southwest Washington state, on November 15th, 2008. This is the second highest mountain in the Cascade range, only Mt. Rainier is higher. Mt. Adams sits at 12,276 feet at the summit. We attempted the south ridge route, considered the “easy” route up this giant volcano. I use the word easy very lightly, as this is not the easy people seem to think it is! Although this trail can be “hiked” (there is a trail most of the way to the summit in summer!) it is not an easy one. Once you leave your car and start climbing, you don’t stop. With the trailhead at 5600 feet, that makes an amazing gain of ove 6500 feet to the summit in under 6 miles! Better have comfortable boots, and lots of water for this one!
If you noticed, I said we “attempted” to climb it. There were three of us on this trip, and only one of us made it (not me). Josh R., Rick M. and myself both worked all day on Saturday and left right after work for the trailhead. We arrived at the mountain at about 10pm on Saturday night and started hiking immediately. Well as you can imagine, by about 2 in the morning we started to get a little tired, and we weren’t even to the halfway point yet! Climbing at night causes you to go a little slow as it is, plus Josh and I weren’t in the best shape, and we had all been up for about 21 hours at this time. We stopped at a popular camping spot called “the lunch counter” at about 9500 feet to get a little rest. After about an hour we put our crampons back on, grabbed our ice axes, and started to climb. What beautiful views!
By the time we made it to 11,000 feet Josh was done. He stopped, found some rocks, and went to sleep. Rick was long gone from view, deciding he didn’t want to wait up for us slow guys any more, and I kept going on my own. After another hour and 400 more vertical feet I called it quits also. I sat on my butt and slid back down to meet up with Josh. After waking Josh up we slid on our butts a little over 1000 more feet to the top of the lunch counter area, found some rocks and went to sleep (well we rested, you can’t really sleep well on volcanic rocks with the sun beating down on you) and waited for Rick to come back down.
From car to car this is normally a 12-14 hour trip in the snow. For us it was an 18 hour trip car to car, and a total of 39 hour day for us. Even though we did not all make the summit thought we were going to die of exhaustion, this was a great trip. I think about it often now that I am not climbing anything. Dreaming of the day I get to return and try it again!
Im still a climber. I can tell because I have climbing gear all over my garage! And we all know it is the gear that makes a climber, not the act of climbing!
