Shasta New Year

Adrian Crane, leader of our merry band of middle aged adventurers, said to form our thoughts as well as we could and write them down right away, so we could capture the moments for our book: Aconcagua: Bicycles Not Recommended . The title of our book comes from a fax from the Argentine embassy in response to our inquiry about any restrictions on the use of bicycles on their mountain, Aconcagua. The embasy replied to the inquiry about bicycling from the summit to the Ocean with the short sentence, “While bicycles are not specifically prohibited, bicycles are not recommended.” Actually we had surmised that for ourselves, since only one other person had taken a bicycle to the 24,000 ft summit, and then he carried it down.

Here is what I remember about the Mt. Shasta shake down training climb to check gear and endurance in the most absolutely miserable conditions we could come up with to help us simulate what we thought we might encounter on our primary adventure [It turns out that a law was passed a week before we arrived in Argentina specifically prohibited bicycled in the Aconcagua park. We did not know about it until we applied for our climbing permit days before our climb so we had to change our project when we arrived half a world away from our starting point.]

After taking most of Thursday morning to pack and then finishing all those activities that go along with leaving on a three day near death experience, I left the house with what I thought I needed or at least a quixotic vision of what I needed. My van was filled with my “stuff” even before I picked up Joann and Tom. Tom was Joann's current love of her life and was willing to attempt this climb even though he had never climbed higher than the roof of his house to put up the Xmas lights. Joann was a 38 year old 5th grade teacher who runs ultra marathons. Tom had just turned 43 and was just starting to move from marathons to ultra marathons. He is considering accompany us to Chile and take photos for the first 5 days or so while we get permits and figure out how to climb to the highest point in the Western Hemisphere carrying bicycles then ride them to the ocean in less than 24 hours. Some people doubt our sanity, but then adventure defies sanity. Tom and Joann somehow crammed their stuff into the van and wedged themselves into the remaining space for the drive back across town to Adrian’s house.

Our fearless leader, Adrian, was next to be picked up. Mr. Adrian Crane, a 39 year old, red haired British citizen, lives permanently in, California with his wife and two children. This god of adventure has a business resume, which says he is a “system analysis” and teaches computer classes at the Junior College from time to time. No one is quiet sure what a “system analysis” is nor, has anyone ever seen him teach a course in computers. Come to think of it I don’t think anyone has seen him go to work. Adrian is amazing. He runs ultra ultra marathons (like 2,000 miles through the Himalayan Mountains in 100 days, climbed all the highest points in the US in record time 60 days, ran over 500 miles in a six day race, holds the world two day run record of 248 miles...). He is also an adventurer, a guide for climbs on Mt. McKinley, has bicycled UP Mt. Kilimanjaro, and held the world altitude cycling record for cycling down Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador some 21,000 feet. His altitude cycling record stood until someone else carried a bicycle to our mountain Aconcagua, sat on it on the summit and stole the record away. Adrian at least rode his bicycle down Chimborazo while the other guy packed his up and carried it down the hill.

Adrian, of course, had not only had backpacks, but also had boxes and bags of gear all of which were yet unpacked. He tends to do things on the fly, which usually means getting all the gear he can out of town and just doing it with what he has when he gets there. Apparently earlier in the day a bank of lights and the corresponding electricity went out at his house and he checked the circuit breakers and found one tripped. About five minutes before we arrived two more banks of lights in the house went out and it wasn’t just the circuit breakers that failed. Tom and Adrian scurried around trying to figure out what was wrong with the electricity at the Crane household. The final solution, I think, was to string an extension cord from an outlet that worked directly to the television and then to give a reminder to his wife of where the flashlights were located if anyone needed to go into that parts of the house without electricity. A kiss for luck from his stranded wife and the first four adventurers were on the road to Brian's house 30 miles toward Mt. Shasta. Joann and I had thrown all the stuff that Adrian had set out into my van, an easy task since none of it was packed and we could just stuff it anywhere we wanted and fit it in here and there and we all packed in for the ride.

Brian Sarvis is 44, but a few weeks older than me (the old guy). He is a psychologist, with a doctorate in something. Currently Dr. Sarvis works for Modesto City Schools and is the Director of Curriculum and Testing, or something equally impressive and nondescript. Brian runs a little bit, but doesn’t really like to run, I think he has done a marathon, but he does some kind of jazzercise aerobic workout at a health club. He is the most positive and happy person I've ever met and the one I expect to keep up the spirits on the trip. Brian is along because he can keep us going when things get tough. The good doctor is the only administrator in the Modesto City Schools that has kept their job in the last couple of head slashing that have happened in the last couple of years. I think it is because no one can quite figure out what he does so they don’t quite know if he is doing a good job or not or if he can be replaced or not. Brian keeps it that way.

At Brian’s house he greeted us with "down boys, down!" as his rotwilers and a German Shepherd acknowledged our intrusion on their turf with sniffs and implied, if not gutturally uttered, snarls and growls. My mini van now full to beyond overflowing was unloaded into Brian's monster van and our stuff filled it nicely with Brian’s neatly packed labeled, inventoried, cataloged and indexed goods already loaded. By six thirty in the evening we were a merry band of five heading for the hill, Mt. Shasta, discussing everything except the climb and the challenge ahead. Five and a half hours of time to kill while we drove north along I-5.

It seemed like we rolled into the parking lot of Bunny Flat (a parking lot at the end of the plowed road on Mt. Shasta), about 12:00am. It was an incredibly clear night as I stepped out of the van. The stars absolutely filled the clear Northern California sky at this 6,500 foot snow filled parking lot with enough light to almost read by. Brian said “Wow, there it is!” and I looked to where he was staring. There was nothing there, only stars and nothing. Staring longer, I realized that the nothing blocking out the stars was the silhouetted mountain. No details were visible, only the mass of this giant rock standing alone right in front of me: Black nothing. Tomorrow we will be looking back at this parking lot from our base camp somewhere up there, and the next day we will look back from where the stars meet the black of the nothing in front of me, at the summit.

About then I realized that everything was covered with snow or ice and the temperature was about 15 degrees; far too cold to stand around with thin cotton socks, one layer of thin polypropylene and a gortex wind shell. I was freezing and I hoped it wasn’t a prediction of things to come. Within 30 minutes of arrival the four of us were snuggled down and sleeping inside the van. Adrian, in true adventurer’s spirit bivouacked outside to see if he brought the right stuff. I was pretty toasty inside my bag inside the van with four other people and so I slept pretty well, so I brought the right stuff for sleeping in a van.

By 6:30 a.m. after about 6 hours of sleep, we were all dressed and looking at the detail in the hill (mountain) in front of us. With little fresh food eaten from bags of prepackaged food stuff, we drove back down the hill to a bakery shop to get some real food and get some climbing equipment from a rental store to round out our bellies and our gear. At the rangers station we filled out the wilderness permit and noted that we would be alone on the mountain for the weekend: everyone else had cleared off for New Year’s Holiday. I guessed it would just be less crowed for the climb. With pastries in our stomachs, newly rented snowshoes, crampon, and climbing permits in hand, we cruised back up the hill back to Bunny Flat. On the way up the road we even picked up a hitchhiker who was riding his snow board from the Bunny Flat parking lot down the mountain to the road below, a distance of three miles or so. (That is a whole other story of close encounters between the longhaired 20-year-old hitchhiker and the gray haired 40+ year olds about to climb Mt. Shasta to watch the New Year arrive). The Bunny Flat parking lot was hopping now with the lot three quarters full of tubers (not potatoes) and cross-country skiers. The sun was high, the sky clear, and the temperature in the mid 30s. Ice was turning to slush.

Beside the van we spread out two tarps and dumped out all our stuff to see what we had arrived with from home with to see what we needed to leave behind in the van. By 11:30am, we had packs packed, hooked on crampons and ice axes secured in non-lethal reposes, and had snowshoes fastened to booted feet. Off we trekked with snowshoes.

The beginning was slow with all the strange snow gear, multiple layers of polypropylene and gortex, fifty+ pound packs and an almost complete lack of knowledge of how to use the snow shoes (at least by Tom, Joann, Brian and I). Most of the first hour was spent adjusting clothing and snowshoes, including stripping off or adding layers of clothes as we moved in or out of the sun, adjusting straps on the packs, and fixing the snow shoes which seemed to secure to each of the 10 feet in the group differently.

By 1:30 in the afternoon, we were at the limits of the x-country skier who venture up the hill along with us. Our group had also reached the tree line at about 7,500 feet. The tree line is where the avalanches stop. The day was still bright and sunny, absolutely clear and beautiful. The mountain was awesome in front of us. The names I had studied on the topo map were real and rising above me. Casaval Ridge: a dark rocky outcropping standing like towers on a castle, above the snow, too steep for snow to stick to, all pointing towards the summit. The Heart: a large red wedge of rock that marked the end of the Casaval Ridge. The Red Banks: the edge of the snow, which lead the way to the upper slopes, a vertical wall of red volcanic rock that we were going to climb over tomorrow. This feature defined the upper end of Avalanche Gulch. The Thumb: standing higher than Red Banks, with it’s a dark spire of rock at the end of the East Ridge that defined Avalanche Gulch. And here we were on snow shoes, about to enter the famous Avalanche Gulch, an inverted “U” a mile and a half wide and more than 6,500 vertical feet high from the tree line to the Red Banks. Snow builds up here and avalanches down to the trees below. Pretty cool. (What the maps don’t show, but climber’s guides describe, is a moraine in the gulch that shunt the avalanches to one side and this “safe side” is called Climber’s Gulch. We opted to move along this side, the one along Casaval Ridge, and the Western side of the gulch where the avalanches’ don’t usually come).

At the tree line the route up steepened like a parabolic curve: the farther we hiked, the steeper the hill became. The snowshoes that had large crampon embedded in them. The person breaking trail was sinking in six to eight inches through the crust and spilling more snow on the snowshoe which had to be picked up with each step. Each step required lifting a one and a half pound boot (now closer to two pounds with snow, ice and water soaked in), a two pound snow shoe, and about two pounds of snow on top of the snowshoe, all lifted up 6 to 8 inches out of the hole, swing it forward, then dropped back down again through the crust of snow. It wasn’t a cakewalk for the one breaking trail. Going up the slopes was kind of remarkable for me, the novice snow shoer. No matter how steep the route was the snowshoes didn’t slip back because of the crampons or ice spikes on the bottoms. The strangeness of this activity, traveling up a hill that seemed to too steep to walk up, brought muscles never before known into action. Killer pain began in places I didn’t know had pain sensors. No one complained so I stayed quiet about my personal misery. I knew that every one had gone to the point I was.

We crested the only “flat” spot on the mountain as the sun was setting behind the clouds that were bring the storm we had heard about in town. Our night’s resting place was called Helen Lake on the map. The “lake”, which wasn’t to be seen because of 20 feet of snow, couldn't have been much bigger than a swimming pool because that was about how big the “flat” spot was. Stuck directly in the middle of Avalanche Gulch, out of Climber Gulch, about a half a mile above the tree line, under god knows how much snow; Helen Lake really didn't fulfill my expectations of an idyllic lakes side campsite. A little slip from above and there was a literal mountain of snow to drop down and wash us two thousand feet into the trees beneath us in a tsunami of an avalanche. The only campsite was dead center in the path of the main avalanche chute. But the view was great.

As the temperature dropped from the balmy 40 degrees of midday to the 20's of the early evening, we excavated a camping pit. This camping pit is a hole as deep as can be dug in the waning light to be filled with the tents and a cooking area protected from the wind and incoming storm. When the hole in the snow was dug and tents were set up using ice axes, ski poles, and snow shovels as stakes, we fired up the stoves and had a hearty meal of broccoli and cheese sauce over Top Ramen with instant chicken soup. Yum! The sun was long gone by this time dinner was underway and the clouds had replaced the stars in the previously blue clear sky. The temperature was soon in the teens and dropping as the breeze was beginning to blow into a regular wind dropping the wind chill to something outrageously low. The stars also disappeared replaced by the clouds and snow that fell from them.

The time for bed was approaching with dinner out of the way. My self-inflating Thema- Rest sleeping pad had frozen and would not inflate: frozen spit inside the pad bummer! I put the pad inside my sleeping bag and laid on it for about an hour before it thawed enough to inflate somewhat. Inside the tent it was “warm” (no wind and in the mid twenties). When it started to snow right after getting the therma rest inflated, Brian and I discovered that the rain fly was being pushed against the tent and thus not allowing the moisture to escape from the tent. Moisture from our breath in the tiny tent condensed on the top of the tent and either froze or ran down the tent. Along the sides of the tent along the floor there were ice puddles. Icicles were hanging from the ceiling that had now pulled down to nearly touching my bag and my face. Because of my body heat, my sleeping bag was soaking wet on the outside from the moisture that could not escape because the wet tent was touching my bag. There was one place where there was not wetness but the wetness had frozen and that was around my feet. My feet did not produce enough heat so moisture formed a sheet of water around my feet and froze a solid sheet around them. I got up with frozen socks, got dressed and fixed the tent while Brian slept (or pretended to sleep, bastard, he was as wet as I was and had icicles hitting him in his face. I knocked the icicles down on him when I got back in making sure they got into his sleeping bag. ). With the snow falling, the temperature outside had kind of gone up to about 25 degrees or so, but the wind made it seems colder. After finishing the repairs on the tent, I gathered all my clothes I planned to wear to the summit and put them inside my sleeping bag to trap air, absorb moisture and provide more insulation since my bag was now frozen in a block of ice and not much of an insulator. I actually slept well, and warmly, the rest of the night.

Late, after the sun should have come up, Saturday, we got up, ate oatmeal and other caloric snacks, and, of course, repacked for the assent (everyday needs a repack for something). The snow had stopped, but the clouds were still drifting at all levels over, under, and around the mountain. With full bellies and light packs we trekked off about mid morning, on snowshoes, up the hill headed for the summit at a leisurely pace. It soon became obvious that what we had thought was steep yesterday was normal now and what was steep now, was REALLY steep. Now the snow shoes would slip or churn up the snow without making progress. By 12:00 noon the snow started to fall lightly. Eventually we were making so little progress with the snowshoes that we left them by one of the few exposed rocks on the face so we could find them on the way down. Our group continued on, “post-holing” up the hill. “Post holing” is stomping into the snow and making a hole big enough to put a leg down to firm footing, the next person lifts up their foot and breaks down the sides of the hole a bit and steps in the hole compressing it a bit. Each step went in up to the mid calf or deeper and it seemed to toke forever to pull the foot out swing it forward and punch it down to solid footing. The top of the Red Banks didn’t seem to get any closer despite the huge expenditure of effort. By about 3:00 in the afternoon, we were not so much stepping as kicking steps on the snow wall heading to the Red Banks cliffs. A constant rhythm was set up: breath in, kick, kick, kick, step up and breath out, rest a breath, then start over again with the routine. Machine like movements with no regard to the energy or the top of the mountain. This was the routine for hours, kick, kick, kick, step up breath out and rest a breath, … Nothing got closer or further away it just was there in front of us and we did what we did for hour after hour.

Adrian kept saying that we would just “go through” the Red Banks and reach the upper ridge. From the bottom, the base camp, the place where we left the snow shoes, and most of the afternoon, the Red Banks looked like a solid continuous vertical wall of red volcanic rock with no way through, just up and over requiring some good rock climbing abilities. Finally, there it was, an ice shoot through the cliffs. The shoot was about 10 feet wide, with cliffs about 30 feet high on each side and sloping up about 100 yards at an angle I couldn’t believe a human could stick to. I thought we were going to put on crampon, but again Adrian said we could just kick steps and scramble up the shoot . He was right. At the top of the shoot was another few hundred feet of climb to reach the next ridge. The Thumb ridge fell off from the Red Banks cliffs and on down the mountain forming the side of Avalanche Gulch and our camp site 2000 feet below. Higher up behind Red Banks the ridge ran up to the next objective on the mountain. On the Thumb ridge there was a steep slope we had just ascended, but on the other side it fell vertically into the clouds a few thousand feet straight and vertical below. It was now about 4:30pm and getting dark, the was wind rising, the snow was falling faster, and the bottoms of the clouds were kissing the mountain where we were making it foggy and here we were, exhausted with a slippery slope on one side and a sheer death vertical cliff on the other.

Joann and Tom were at their limit (so was I, but I didn’t want to bring it up). We decided that they would go back and the whole group would descend to the bottom of the Red Banks shoot where we could see camp almost 5000 feet beyond us. At that point we would see if we felt like climbing back up and making the summit by midnight on the East Coast (The original plan was to sit on the summit as the New Year came in, but we were constantly modifying the plan as conditions dictated). When we descended the Red Banks shoot with Joann and Tom, Brian, Adrian and I decided we would give it a shot and we scrambled back down to the base of the ice shoot then back up the shoot to the thumb’s ridge again. Shit climbing back up that shoot was not easy after all those people had scrubbed all the snow off the ice on the rocks. It was very tough to get up to the top the second time. The combination of snow, fog, and dark made looking down the cliff on the other side of the mountain impossible which was all right by me, since I really don’t care for heights. It also made finding that cliff a bit difficult so falling off the cliff a bit easy. Adrian stressed the importance of moving in straight compass lines along ridge lines and memorizing approximate distances between changes of direction. Right!!! I was so wasted of energy and fogged by altitude I couldn’t tie my shoe. Memorize shit in the fog and dark and snow and so tired and when did I eat last? Who brought a compass? What are you talking about Adrian? How can anyone remember their name? Where are you leading us in this fog, dark, and snow?

About 6:00pm, three quarters of the way up the last push called Misery

Hill, Brian discovered the NiCad batteries he tried to charge with his solar charger, wouldn’t fit in his light and we stopped to conference. Misery Hill leads to the crater, which is just a 3/4-mile from the flat plain. On the other side of the plain are two piles of rock. One is about 250 feet high and the other is about 300 feet high and is the summit. All navigation would have to be done with compass, straight line walking and Adrian's memory (he’s been up this thing 5 times). Clouds had moved in making it a complete “white out”, “fogged out” except it was totally dark because the clouds above the fog were dumping snow and blocking out any starlight making it totally dark too. The wind was now blowing about 15 miles per hour in the dark fog and our tracks we had just made were nearly invisible just seconds after we had just made them. There was no way we would find our way back by following our footprints in the snow: they were long since blown clean. The temperature was in the low teens and seemed to be dropping. Besides that, I was tired and wanted to go home (but I didn’t tell anyone that). I didn’t know if I could keep going for another hour and a half it might take to cross the plain and make the summit, AND THEN turn around and try to go back down. Most deaths in mountain climbing happen coming down. We voted: three for going back and none to go on. About 400 vertical feet from the summit, 13,900 feet up, in the dark, fog, snow, dark and wind with two barely working head lights, we turned around and started to find our way down. Wrong turns are vertical drops of thousands of feet or trails to nowhere. We have to find a ten foot gap in a piece of red volcanic rock or we have to do some fancy rock climbing.

The trail we made in the snow along the Thumb's ridge on our way up became harder and harder to detect and there was no other visible land marks in the nighttime “white-out” conditions. Adrian kept checking the compass and leading and I kept thinking about the precipitousness of the north face of the thumb’s ridge. We had been standing near the edge of the face looking into the clouds below, so our track went right next to edge. About all we could see now were a few traces of tracks ahead filling with blowing snow. If Adrian screwed up a bit in his navigation or tracking it would be unforgiving. Fortunately going down got us out of the worst of the fog so visibility in the dark was only limited by the snow and the light put out by the two waning head lamps. We avoided the cliff and eventually located the ice shoot in the Red Banks. The shoot looked differently from above in the dark with more new snow.

The shoot had now been used twice going up and once going down so most of the “good” snow was gone and the base of ice was what was left. Adrian got down no problem. I started out ok, but was so physically exhausted I slipped and slid down the shoot. (Earlier in the day Adrian dropped a Hostess Fruit pie he was about to open and eat. I thought it wouldn't stop until it hit the tree line 2000 ft beyond, but it slid for a ways and did “just stop”. Adrian said, "Now look, that pie fell and slid down the hill and stopped. You are certainly smarter than a fruit pie, so if you slip and fall remember you'll probably just stop too even if I don’t do anything. You are at least as smart as a fruit pie.") I had just turned over to stop myself with my ice ax as I had practiced when I just stopped. I remembered that fruit pie and thought, “Yea, I am at least as smart as a fruit pie.” Brian followed me down with a much more controlled slide, but he found one of my crampons in the snow which had been tied to the bottom of my backpack. The other one seemed to be missing. I didn’t really care. I looked up the shoot, didn’t see it and said, “Oh well, too bad about the crampon.” Adrian, however, wouldn’t have a lost piece of equipment and he dropped his pack and climbed back up the shoot, now glistening with polished ice. He went all along the thumb’s ridge to look for the wayward crampon, but didn’t find it because it was still tied to my pack and Brian hadn’t noticed it. Oh, well. Sorry about that Adrian.

Most of the rest of the trip down to the base camp was a combination of post holing to the snow shoes, then slipping and falling through the constant falling snow in the absolute dark towards the tents tucked in a hole somewhere on this side of the mountain. The tracks of the snow shoes were gone as far as I could tell and the head lamps didn't illuminate any significant landmarks. If we missed the tents on our walk down, it would be a tired walk back up to find them or an all night walk down to the van parked in the parking lot and the keys were in the tent.

We arrived at the tents, thank God, to find Joann and Tom in one of the tents and the other tent, my tent, flattened from the snow that fell throughout the day. While I rebuilt the tent, Adrian cooked some Top Ramen and made tea. Brian helped with both activities and by 10:00 P.M., I was crawling into my still frozen sleeping bag (I mean frozen, like hard and cold frozen, not just frozen like a little cold). The tent also had four inches of ice in it built up along each edge. It snowed all night. The condensation inside the tent just added itself to last night’s layer of ice on the inside of the tent. I slept well because I was so tired and the cold of the bag was lessened by all my clothes inside the bag, so they wouldn't freeze. (I was also dehydrated which was actually a blessing: getting up in the middle of the night when it is snowing, windy, and cold outside to go to the bathroom is a very major thing to do if you do not want to die. You need several layers of polypropylene, wind pants and top wind shell, hat, boots that are frozen, mittens, wind shells over mittens AND this all has to be put on in a tent that is barely big enough to sit up in just to go outside and pee. The first night I seriously debated but just addi to the ice puddles along the inside tent wall. People get up to dust the dew from their lily and end up hypothermic and die before they get back to the tent.)

Sunday morning about 7:00am with the snow still coming down, Adrian said lets get out of here! We all agreed. How deep can the snow in Avalanche Gulch get before it lets lose. No breakfast except cookies, and trail snacks. My frozen sleeping bag went into the bag. The tent with ice pools along the walls and the icicles hanging from the ceiling was stuffed into the bag as is. Clean clothes, dirty clothes, pots, and pans everything was thrown in like we were packing to escape with the Barbarians banging on the door. Every time something went into the back pack, so did snow that was still falling. By 8:45am we said good bye to our lake side campsite and we set off down the hill. Even though it snowed a lot, the snow was like little pellets not like flakes, it did not seem to be build up much. These pellets blew around and filled in holes or drifted up on ridges. The depth was about the same going out as it was coming in. By 12:30 we were in Jerry’s restaurant in the town of Shasta, ordering real food and drinking real coffee. I know that we were there but what went on? That is the real question. It was a savage trip. There was an avalanche after we left. Three weeks later we were in Chile ready to