Mt Shasta via Avalanche Gulch

[lizolas]

Mt Shasta via Avalanche Gulch attempted Sunday, May 27, 2018

In which I forget to take any pictures and leave my phone in my pocket the whole time.

I’m now 0 for 2 on Shasta summit attempts, and 0 for 5 on summit attempts with other people rather than alone. I think there are some things to learn from this. Not the least of which might be to consider that “if you’re summitting every time, you’re making bad decisions.” In actuality I think my A Long Day summits thus far were all on completely nontechnical stuff that posed very little risk since I had the correct clothing, food/water, and gear with me, but as I move into more technical activities alone it’s something to keep in mind.

I had the idea that I should try dayhiking Shasta again, via Avalanche Gulch this time, but didn’t want to spend all $150 for gas myself. I decided I should find someone who also wants to get better at this sort of thing and asked Joshua if he wanted to go. Memorial Day weekend was the first weekend that worked for both of us, so we planned on doing it over the 3-day weekend. Originally he’d wanted to backpack – in hindsight probably a better idea for anyone who isn’t committed to doing everything as a dayhike – but I wrote up two alternative schedules proposing trying it all in a day instead. I knew what I was getting myself into, but was cautiously optimistic when Joshua told me he realized he’d have to get up way too early in the morning for this to be feasible. I think the thing I neglected to make clear enough was that even if we had been backpacking, the standard start time from halfway up the mountain is still far too early by normal people standards.

Friday after work we got off to a bit of a late start – rather than a Taco Bell stop, I stopped to pick up an order Joshua had placed in Mountain View, then continued to pick him up. We didn’t leave Mountain View until about 8, but that allowed us to miss most of the heavy holiday weekend traffic. After a stop for gas and radiator checking, we continued straight to Shasta and arrived at 1:30…at the wrong trailhead. There may or may not have been a lot of silent gloating on my part this weekend. When we realized that Lassen, our intended acclimation hiking location, would be closed until Sunday, Joshua came up with an alternate plan for a Saturday hike that started from the Old Ski Bowl trailhead. While reading about the trailheads online, I came across a page indicating that the road was closed at Bunny Flat and Old Ski Bowl wasn’t accessible. I asked if he’d seen anything indicating that it was open, and he said no but he was pretty sure it should be, because the snow level was higher than the elevation of the trailhead. I thought he might be underestimating how long the agencies usually take to open roads after winter – most are long cleared of snow by the time repairs and maintenance are finally finished – but again neglected to adequately convey this. When we arrived, the road was indeed closed at Bunny Flat.

Saturday morning we got up at 9, took our time eating and getting things together, then started hiking at 11 intending to see how far we’d get by 1 or so. We made it just past Horse Camp and headed toward a moderate hill to practice snow skills. I practiced self arrest while wearing crampons to imitate having just fallen. Joshua took his off and practiced with less chance of things going wrong. After a quick reminder on how to properly hold the axe, he seemed to have the basics down fine. The snow at that elevation was soft and almost slushy in the early afternoon.

We started back and reached the trailhead again about 3. Later than we’d wanted for a 6 pm bedtime, but I don’t think we realistically expected to be sleeping at 6 anyway. I’d packed for the trip intending to eat mashed potatoes for every meal we weren’t on the trail, but we went into town for Joshua to get lunch for Sunday and had pizza for dinner instead. Probably more calories than I’d have eaten if I had potatoes. Back in the parking lot, we started organizing food and gear for the morning. Joshua was still trying to get me to take things with more fat and disapproving of my “carbs, mostly” approach to eating while moving. Eventually I’m sure it would be a good idea for me to learn to force myself to eat heavier foods while hiking, but for now, sugar seems to work fine as long as I eat enough of it consistently throughout the day. His impression that my eating method doesn’t work came from a trip where I ate all of about 200 calories the entire day (oops).

From what we overheard on the trail, Saturday had been extremely windy, and only one person was known to have summited. He was crawling on ice all the way to the top. Sunday was also forecast to be windy – the Rangers told us the forecast called for 40 to 50 mile per hour winds. Monday was going to be the best day to try to summit, but we didn’t want to wait around for that. We went to bed just after 7 with an alarm set for 1:30, then proceeded to not sleep for much of the intervening period.

Again I failed at communicating very well. I’m not experienced enough at anything to say definitively that I’m sure we need to wake up at a certain time to summit. I’m especially not experienced enough to predict weather. Having realized there was almost no chance of getting Joshua on board with my original “start hiking at midnight” idea, I went with his 1:30 alarm suggestion. In my head, since I had everything packed, that meant we’d be hiking by about 2. What actually happened was that it took 10 minutes for us to even be out of bed, then over an hour to eat and get our stuff together. I had my pack already assembled as I intended it to be used, with the exception of my down jacket I was wearing that morning and needed to pack. Joshua had left some smaller items til later and I think it was just a case of lots of little things adding up to total more time than you’d expected. “2:37, not great but not bad.” I didn’t think it was not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but I’d also decided at that point that mountaineering is really just a series of lessons you have to learn the hard way to really appreciate. I’d never thought about how early you had to start to try and avoid high winds until the Round Top trip where we were forced to turn around, knowing that it might have been possible with an earlier start. If you were just planning on needing to cover 12 miles and 7000 feet to be back to the car before dark, a 2:37 start would indeed be plenty of time.

Without me saying anything he did realize we were significantly behind everyone else’s schedule by the time we were at Horse Camp and could see a string of headlamps moving up from Helen Lake. A few skiers also flew past us up the trail – and we weren’t even at the hard steep uphill part yet. More silent gloating occurred at our first snack stop when Joshua said he regretted not taking more of the fruit snacks, because that was currently the only thing his stomach could handle the thought of. That’s the feeling I always try to be prepared for, because it seems to happen fairly often, but I’ve found that simple sugary stuff is almost always possible to force myself to keep eating.

I’d been somewhat optimistic about how fast we’d move on the lower part. It took us over 4 hours to reach Helen Lake, with our pace slowing markedly each hour. A few hundred feet below Helen Lake, the wind picked up. I decided that was a good place to stop and put in contacts. It was light enough to put the goggles on over them, and I didn’t want to get into even more wind that would blow them away before I could get them into my eyes. By the time we got to Helen Lake, I could see why a lot of people said they’d camped lower to avoid the wind there. After a stop at Helen Lake for boot adjusting, we continued up toward Thumb Rock.

After that, the wind got increasingly strong, blowing down snow and ice from higher on the slope. When we were at Helen Lake, there had been a few dozen people on the route, some headed up and some down. Gradually everyone but a few skiers started turning around. We eventually turned around as well, at about 11,500’ according to my GPS track and 11,200’ according to Joshua’s. It was somewhere near The Heart. He felt like he wanted to turn around because he wasn’t making fast enough progress and didn’t want to keep me from summitting. I wouldn’t have been going much faster alone than we were together, and I didn’t think I’d have made it much past Thumb Rock with the winds as they were anyway; it was better to turn around together and not split up. Splitting up would have been perfectly safe (for him anyway) as there were people on the route the entire way back to the trailhead, but neither of us had cell service to coordinate with each other.

I don’t like glissading. It just never works right. Everyone indicates that it’s supposed to be fun and efficient, but in my experience it’s rarely either and never both. This time wasn’t awful, but I ended up rather sore, bruised, and scraped up, and for how often I was stopping and how slowly I was going on the icy, hard parts, I could probably have walked down almost as fast. At one point below Helen Lake, Joshua wanted to glissade and I wanted to keep walking. He stopped while I kept going. For one thing, plunge stepping is a skill that takes some getting used to and can be hard on the knees; for another thing, I think “time it takes to switch footwear and other gear” is one of those lessons you just have to learn firsthand to decide how to be more efficient. We don’t actually know whose method was faster though, because according to him the reason he was over 10 minutes behind me was he kept stopping to ask people if they’d seen me. I was ahead of him the whole time and only paused briefly a few times to look back for him. I did get in a well-worn path and slide along for a short distance, but only where the angle was low enough that I could keep crampons on and be safe. Someone (presumably a guide and/or SAR volunteer) told me I’d break my ankles and didn’t believe that I was going slowly enough that I was actually having to pull myself along with my feet – not in danger of getting going too fast and snapping bones or spraining joints. It was for fun more than for efficiency. In his defense, I’m sure he sees all kinds of clueless idiots on Shasta and is just trying to keep everyone happy and healthy.

We made it back to the trailhead at noon, threw our stuff in the back of the car in a relatively disorganized pile, and were on our way to get ice cream. I think if I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have felt it was warranted with no summit, but who am I to argue? Leaving Shasta just before 2, we arrived in Mountain View at 6:30 and I was back home by 7.

Lessons Learned:

• If you want something done your way, you have to do it yourself. My way is certainly not the right way, but I like my early starts and long days approach to things. I should know by now that not everyone (actually almost nobody) shares my desire to push themselves for hours before and after daylight. I need to plan trips with other people accordingly. Camping would have been a much better option for this trip once I realized we weren’t likely to get started at midnight, like I originally intended, to make sure I had plenty of time to be slow and still summit.
• Use your words. There’s no reason anybody should inherently trust what I’m saying. I haven’t been at this sort of thing for very long. When I thought the road to the higher trailhead would likely be closed even if it were free of snow, I should have said so more clearly. I should have more clearly articulated how long I expected it to take from wake up to departure time, not just what time the alarm was at. I have a definite problem with getting too frustrated too easily when it doesn’t seem like someone is taking me seriously, and just giving up on conveying my point rather than trying to phrase it inescapably clearly. I had the same problem with Eric on After Six, when instead of saying that I’d just done the route 4 months ago, and we’d done 2 more pitches after the upcoming ledge, I kept saying “I think” there are more pitches, but he might be right that that’s the end. As much as I enjoyed “Liz, I might be an idiot” as Joshua realized we needed *two* sets of 5 $1s to pay for our permits, it seems rather juvenile to have refused to try to elaborate that exact thought I’d had in the grocery store while he seemed to think I was an absolute idiot for suggesting that his change might need to be broken down further than 2 $20s and a $10.
• Wraps are like sandwiches, but less squishable in a pack. Applesauce, yogurt, and oatmeal was a good breakfast, but applesauce, yogurt and granola would be just as effective and without cooking time.
• Learning to pace myself might make steep uphill climbs suck less.
• Being alone seems to be a good way to develop the ability to stay stoked while things suck, but then you have to learn to apply it to trips with other people. When I have someone with me to complain to, I often do. When I’m starting to climb from a belay, my partner has to talk me into trying 5.6 moves; when I’m out of earshot of my partner, I can easily tell myself to pause, breathe, and keep going. When I’m hiking late at night with a group, things turn into beating a dead horse about how slowly we’re going; when I’m hiking alone, there’s no use complaining because I knew to expect this, and all I can do is keep heading toward the car. Alone none of the complaining can happen. Alone, if I’m not spending the entire trip more excited to go up than I am to go down, I won’t get anywhere. The thing is, I almost always *do* keep going up when I’m alone. To some extent, with other people it just doesn’t seem fair to push them to continue past a turnaround time, or to keep going when they’re clearly miserable. That’s where the advantage of doing things alone comes in. But after this weekend where I realized how much it can suck the fun out of things to have someone seeming upset about the whole situation the entire time, I think it’s time to start making sure I’m never that partner in the future, even when I am scared, and even when things do suck.