Mt Shasta Weekend

***[warning: contains scatological content some people (probably most people) may find offensive... don't say I didn't warn you]***
Mt Shasta was great. After arriving on Saturday, we packed up and headed to the base camp at Horse Camp (these first two pics are from our hike into the base camp). It’s a Sierra Club camp, complete with a spring and cool stone hut built in 1922. After setting up our tent and eating a little something, we tried to get some sleep.

We started from our base camp at 11:30pm after a too-brief nap. The first few hours of the climb was actually pretty easy. It's all a gradually graded hike up to a place called Lake Helen. Then, the real climbing starts. This is the reason you bring the ice axe and cramp-ons.

This section is the main vertical climb and I didn't think I'd make it to the top. By now, it's 3 am and this tough part is called Avalanche Gulch; we've been climbing for about two hours, and I am visually hallucinating every four steps. Head is aching. Feet are starting to hurt. It feels like someone has punched me in the stomach after eating rotten eggs. My friend Patchen looks at me and asks how I'm doing. I reply, "Multiple system failures."

As the sky starts to lighten, we are near the top of the gulch at about 12,300 feet, just below a recognizable feature called Red Banks. And I feel like shit. In fact, I feel like I need to take a shit. Which is a lousy thing to have to do in 30 mph winds on a steep slope at day break in front of, oh, a dozen other climbers (yes, it's very busy on Memorial Day weekend).

I find a relatively flat spot above a drop off on the side of the climbing route. I'm in plain view of the others, but if they feel half as bad as me, they don't care that I'm 20 feet away trying to drop one into a little brown lunch bag (yes, you have to carry all your waste off the mountain). And success! I manage to score a hundred percent on the target portion of the event, then make sure to pee away from the bag (no one wants a soggy brown paper bag filled with poop). I've been on this climb on Shasta with students about six times and never once had to poop like that. I can now say I have had the Total Alpine Experience.

By now, it's day break, sun is up and it's ridiculously colder than an hour before. I cannot explain this except by the fact that for ten minutes or so, I had my pants around my ankles and my ass hanging out. Perhaps that's related, but I must go on. Stop for a little food, but appetite is shot. High altitude does that to you; you don't feel like eating, but "he who eats most wins" applies on the mountain so I try to shove down something. Of course, that only makes my nausea worse, but so far, I haven't puked. Yet.

The next section is called Misery Hill. Oddly, though, after all that came before, it felt sorta good. I was going along at my own pace and the pain seemed tolerable so long as the brain stayed okay. Let's just say that the brain was no worse than normal.

All along, the summit is out of view (it is set very far back, so you don't see it until you come over the last rise). After a few more smaller hills from Misery, I came over the last one and see the summit. I also see my friends, Patchen and Nikole, who were about 30 minutes ahead of me. They are sick endurance bike riders and are incredible athletes. Our turn around time was 9am -- that means if you are not on the summit by 9, you turn around no matter what. I was at the base of the rocky crag that is the top at 9, so I booked up to the top, snapped a pic and smiled. It was lovely to have made it, especially when I thought that it was not going to happen a few hours before. In fact, as we headed up through Red Banks, we climbed in silence, but Nikole would just blurt out occasionally, "We are going to summit today, we are going to summit Mount Shasta." I think it was as much for herself as me, but it seemed to get through my thick head and, well, it worked.

Coming down is somewhat anti-climatic. It takes you 9+ hours to get up and about three to get down. Along the way, if you are crazy, adventurous, don't care about your body, or some combination, you can glissade. Glissading: basically, you sit down, use your ice axe as a rudder behind you, and slide. Mostly it is where others have already made chutes for this. Think of it as a luge on your ass. You don't get to place to do this until avalanche gulch, just below Red Banks. It was great fun, but extremely tiring as you cruise along pretty fast, trying to keep in the chute, stay under control and look out for spots where the chute is damaged or has a big bump in it (makes for painful butt slammers).

Without the glissading, you are stuck hiking down the hill, which doesn't sound so bad, except by 11am, the snow is so soft that you sink right in past your knees. It gets crazy exhausting just trying to walk down through all that snow. And by now, I'm totally out of water. Even though Nikole and Patchen had hiked down with me, they decided to run the last mile (like I told you, sick endurance people). So, I'm on my own. Oh, one point of good news, despite the hours of nausea, I didn't have to re-experience any of my food (aka Giving Back to the Mountain).

I got back to the tent at 1pm, about 13 hours after I left, working myself pretty much the whole way. I will usually say that climbing like this, especially without any time to acclimatize, is the hardest thing I've ever done. We crashed for about an hour, got up, packed, and hiked the hour out to the trailhead with our gear. After an amazing fajita dinner near Redding, we drove home.

ps don't know why the font size is screwed up, so sorry!