Learning to mountaineer on Mt Baker

Alpine Skills Course,  Mt Baker.

June 2014

Mt Baker, visible from the sea. It is 10,780 feet tall and 30 miles inland form my boat.

I came into the 6 day course with a good background of climbing on my own and with the school. I hoped to learn some basic mountaineering and that is what the course offered, glacier travel, rope teams, ice ax and crampon work, and snow camping. I had a good amount of snow camping, climbing and rope work down, but I felt it would be good to go up an easy glaciated peak with a guide on my first time round.

I met the members of the course, many of them had never climbed on a rope on their own before, but that is what this course is about.

Laura is a doctor, but she hates her job and wanted a career change, she had been guided by RMI up Ranier.
Evan is an excellent skiier from MT but he is deathly afraid of heights.
Douval is a father in his 50's he too had been with RMI on Ranier.
Brett the nomadic mountain guide started out as a ski guide but eventually moved into climbing and also guides rock and other alpine peaks.

My tentmate Dr. Laura from Golden CO

Evan a college kid from Montana

Douval a medical equipment monger from SC

Our strong and quiet guide Brett

We get on some easy top rope routes and practice our knots, belay, climbing, and rappelling skills. I know the knots and techniques already, but Its good to review and help the rest of the class remember the methods.

Day 2. We woke up at around 8 and got a leisurely start up the mountain, its about 5 miles march with my 65 pound pack. This is one of the largest loads I've carried. Yeah I'm a wus ultralighter.

We establish a comfortable Low Camp(see above map).

I learn a new skill.  Brett calls it a boot box. Its where you dig a hole under your tents vestibule storage space for your feet so you can cook and sit in your tent at the same time.

Day 3 . Brett the instructor tells us that since bad weather is moving in we are going to cover basic crampon ax and rope team procedures and make for high camp than summit the day after.  THEN we learn more skills. This sounds completely backwards to me, but I can't turn down the chance to make a big summit on this trip.

Next we learned how to tie into part of a rope team, and mainly how not to trip on the ropes tied between each member of the party. Brett said it was to help protect against falling into a crevasses in the glacier and we would learn more about that later.

The group is taught several ways to use our crampons, I was already familiar with the basic flat foot and front point techniques from ice climbing, but we learn a bit more about it.

Flat foot technique requires all points to contact the ground for more security.

 We then established a cramped little high camp. The skies were clear and the air was hot. Winds blew in from the sea incredibly strongly. A storm was coming.

A calm evening before the alpine start.

Day 4. Alpine start. I have a love hate relationship with getting up at 3am. I zipped open the sleeping bag and got the stove going and put a pot of coffee on before rolling back into bed for about 10 minutes. The sound of the Svea rumbling is music to my tired ears.

As we approach the Roman wall which is the steepest part of our climb the only way we can walk up is sideways using the flat foot or french technique.

Other than the slog and the difficulty of breathing our team made it up to the summit in beautiful weather.

I had been saving pieces of Kendal's Mint Cake, which had been snacked upon the summit of Everest by Hillary. Baker is no Everest, but you have to start somewhere. Cheer's to my Oklahomie Chris Stoval for introducing me to this snack.

Day 5. I woke to the wonderful sound of rain pattering on our tent. At around 8am Brett came and told us through our tent fly, that lessons were to be postponed today due to the rain.

The entire morning and afternoon was spent lounging in the tent, cooking, making tea and coca and Laura and I exchanged stories from our college days about pre-med. We really got a chance to bond and I thought our backgrounds of attempting to get into the medical track were very similar. She wanted to get into politics instead of doctoring. Laura remembered she had brought her Kindle and read aloud the first few chapters for Game of Thrones. She had never watched the show but got the book to know what everyone was talking about.

I love the sound of rain on a silnylon fly. So listen with me.

A good tentie dosen't smell too bad, a GREAT tentie reads you Game of Thrones with accents.

Sometime around 6pm with a few hours of light left the sky completely cleared. I was excited to get out of that tent and learn what I had paid for. Evan matched my enthusiasm but Laura and Douvall just wanted to go back into the tent and go to bed.

We learned about how to haul a person out of the crevasse using our rope team and how to use snow picket anchors.

6: On our final day we broke camp and on the way out stopped by some glacier ice and had a little fun.

All in a weeks work.

While I won't see the rest of the crew again for a while, Evan the acrophobic mountaineer and I would set our sights on Ranier that next week.

Snow O Part 3

Colorado Mountain College Snow-O 2nd Weekend

The next week the weather changed dramatically. It was much warmer in the high 20s at night and probably in the high 40's during the day. To make things worse there was alternatively hot sun than wet snow falling on us.

The wet conditions caused a condition known as glopping which severely affected our group's Kifaru sled. Since the sled was not waxed and well maintained it glopped every 100 yards of uphill progress. About a 4 inch cake of wet snow built up under it and it had to be overturned and scrapped. The only remedy would be to fully dry the bottom of the fiberglass sled, than spray on wax and let that cure for a few minutes. No one had brought wax or was patient enough to dry the sled. So our progress consisted of dragging the 80 lbs sled a hundred yards than scrapping it clear and repeating. It took all 4 of us our best effort to get that thing to our Quinzee village.

Here Vic is supervising the drag, and providing helpful comments like "That sled is probably too heavy."

I had though that the digging of the quinzee was enough hard manual labor, but I was mistaken. After we had hauled our sled 5 miles to high camp. We had to excavate the monstrous snow pile that all 15 of us had created the week before.

Brady inside a nice cave.

Since it was much warmer this week than last digging into the pile was wet drippy, soaking work. About 8 hours later a bit before dinner it took the 4 of us all day to dig it out but it was done.

Me, Emily, Donald, and Phil. A job well done.

We move our gear inside and find out there is actually room for 6 people. We had done too good a job. Phil had gotten the most soaked of all of us from sweat and was starting to shiver uncontrollably in his wet layers.

I set up a qulliq inside to commemorate our move in and to save Phil from more hypothermia. A qulliq is an Inuit fat candle or lantern that is used inside their igloos to warm and cook. It is made from a stone bowl, with arctic grass and cotton as the wick and the fat of whale or seal. Other groups use a candle or two, but I want us to be extra warm. So I brought 2 bacon quilliqs' and a candle lantern.

We boiled water over these little lanterns!

It was so warm inside after I light up the fire. We hung our clothes up to dry them on our avalanche rescue probes, and many of them were dry in the morning. The 12 oz of bacon fat I brought was about just enough for the weekend to light fires after dark inside our huge quinzee.

Normally a Quinzee is about 32* exactly inside if it is built right to keep out the draft. With the warm fires going inside and the outside temperatures rising, it actually melted a big hole in our snow palace. Boo.

Lucky for us it was our last night. The weather was getting warmer and warmer yet it was dumping wet snow flakes on us.

Our second kitchen was much less elaborate than the first. It was a simple pit with counters and cubbies on the sides no seats and benches this time round. Kitchen liquid waste was dumped into a sump pit in the corner.

Frozen eggs for breakfast. Some one forgot to keep them inside the Quinzee.

The Descent

Skiing was the best part of the trip! It involved a lot of powder and tree manuvering. The first weekend we all let loose and went down with no plan, so an hour long round up was needed to find all the members of the course after we descended but on this second weekend we went down in small groups and stopped every few hundred yards. The big Kifaru sled glumped up again on the way down but with enough momentum it still went pretty fast down hill.

Things learned

• A quinzee will never beat a nice stove heated tent. A candle and quilliqs are better than nothing but not better than a nice wood stove. A wood stove is a luxury that can be had in woodland winter camping, but if we were to go on an alpine trip or out into the arctic circle nothing or a simple quilliq is all that we may get.
• Skiing downhill with a sled even in green treed glades makes for quite the adventure. 
• Bacon and cosmic brownies rule.
• Always keep snacks on hand at all times, even in bed.
• We used about 8 oz of fuel per person per day each weekend to melt snow and cook. Thats a bit under a liter per person that weekend.
• Most importantly, if its warm out don't light the qulliq up all night and melt your shelter.

Snow O winter camping part 2

Colorado Mountain College Snow Orientation Part 2

Sorry for the late post, its damned past summer now and this post is about skiing. How I miss the snow.

Our Instructor is an experienced ski mountaineer,  Her name is Vic Kerr she is small statured Scot. Serious in her manner, she had been on Denali and apparently peaks in South America, she didn't talk so much about herself. 

Vic in my beaver gauntlets. The gloves became our team mascot.

Despite the vague course description in the catalogue and vague stories of snow camping form the instructors, we find out after we mount up our ski sleds this course was to teach winter expedition camping and ski hauling as if we were on a big snowy mountain expedition. The course would be conducted on 3 days on two weekends in February.

Our 4 person groups' Kifaru sled.

Each other 3 person group had sleds made from children's plastic sleds.

Emily and I were mounted up on Alpine Touring skis. She had Marker Baron bindings, which were heavy and gunked up with snow and often jammed in freeheel mode. They were  a huge pain in the ass. Poor Emily. I used DynaFit bindings, which worked without a hitch. The Markers would probably hold up to hard skiing better in the long run, but for multiday trips like this, the simplicity of the dynafit design set it up for ease of use.

Dyanfit bindings.

Marker Bindings

On the first weekend route finding to establish our base camp and our next camp was part of the lesson. Hiking trails easy to find in the summer became impossible to follow in winter. This problem was compounded by the dozens of tracks left by other skiiers.

Our big ski and splitboard convoy.

On the first weekend we were shown basic skills such as setting up our shelters in the fluffy Colorado Snow. This involved stomping and more digging and extensive use of deadman type anchors. They are where you pack down a spot and bury a stick where a stake would go. They are awful. Our 4 man group slept in Emily and I's Titanium Goat tent with stove.

Titanium goat tent and stove.

Members of other groups suffering from cold and fatigue would stop by to warm up their feet and have tea. 

Other groups used the North Face V25 expedition tents.

The second major set of skills we learned was setting up our kitchens and privy areas. The kitchen was a big square shaped trench dug out and piled in the center. The trench would become the standing area and the mound in the middle was the storage and cooking counter tops.

The Svea chugs on!

Each group had 2 or 3 MSR Whisperlites. Each weekend we had about a 25% failure rate.

Cooking outdoors at 15*. We would have prefered to cook in the tipi as we normally do, but people kept getting on to us about fire safety.

After we stuffed ourselves with bacon, cosmic brownies, and other fatty foods. We learned how to use WAG bags, and to pee in designated locations away from camp.

Contains a double mylar bag full of deodorant and desicant, TP for 1 or two uses and a saniwipe. This is all packed out and trashed.

On the last day of the first weekend we scouted out sites for our second weekend which would involve building snow shelters and caves called Quinzees. The quinzee design was selected by Vic because it was the only design that worked for large teams using Colorado winter snow. This type of snow is not nice "snow ball" snow where it can be packed by hand. It is like trying to pick up and pack dry sand or feathers. To combat this we stomp out a platform big enough for our 4 man group and than pile snow and pack it simultaneously. We ended up making our pile to large, so all 15 people in the course after they had finished piling snow had to come help pile our for next week.

Digging is the worst. Piling and packing snow is a close second.

Team effort.

Things learned

While Vic's method of tent platform set up which involved extensive boot and ski stomping created a very bombproof sleep surface, but was very labor intensive, it broke through several strong and weak layers of snow and required us to stop down maybe 3-4 feet.  Emily and I would previously just do a cursory stomp  of about 1-2 foot and our body heat inside the tent and the heat form the stove would thaw the surface snow and freeze it again creating an adequate surface to sleep on. We would not do such an extensive platform building process again.

The wood burning stove provided excellent warmth and comfort for all, as usual.

WAG bags are a major improvement to pooping in the snow especially in the future on a big mountain expedition where there are many many people pooping at base camp.

The  camp kitchen we made was very nice, if it was sunny. However, in windy cold conditions such as this first weekend we would have stuck to cooking inside the tent.

The Quinzee we began to build was incredibly labor and time intensive, it is not fit as a survival shelter or even as a multiuse shelter on any sort of trip. If the snow was better like in the maritime climates it would be more appropriate for a fast shelter.