Good, Clean Fun

An introduction to alpine climbing

I’ve tried lots of different pursuits--some I stick with and others I have picked over and left behind. Whether or not I stick with climbing remains to be seen. As long as it stays fun I’ll keep going out. The thing is, fun is a very subjective word. In the words of Cole Porter what one person considers fun is another person’s idea of nothing to do. Fueled by images of Lance Armstrong motoring through the French Alps and Pyrenees in the Tour de France a couple of friends and I pedaled 18 miles up to the observation area at Mount Rainier National Park. What we considered fun probably looked like a death sentence to a lot of SUV occupants who shared the road with us although I think most people would enjoy the ride down.

“If you’re off on Monday let’s climb the Tooth. It’ll be fun.” Toby, my friend and climbing instructor knows my abilities better than I so I agreed. This would be my first alpine climb, a grade IV, 5.4 climb with maybe four pitches and topping off at 5,604’. How could I say no to fun? Much like the Eskimos supposedly have 2,000 words for snow (I’m thinking 1,999 of them are curse words) so we have a lot of definitions for that one, little, three-letter word—fun.

How could this trip get off to anything but an inauspicious start when I only managed to get three hours of sleep before my ride called and said he was on his way to pick me up? Let’s just say that five minutes to pack, and I use that word loosely, on three hours of sleep isn’t recommended. I threw my pack in the trunk and we were crossing Lake Washington when I did a mental inventory of things I forgot. Leaving the rain gear at home in the Northwest at any time of year is just asking for it. I sweated out the low clouds ahead of us and hoped that I didn’t leave behind any other vital equipment. I could live without the rain parka. I live in Seattle. We ignore the rain, anything less than a total downpour we call humidity. You can always spot the tourists in Seattle when it’s raining—they’re the ones with umbrellas.

45 miles east of Seattle on I-90 and just before our exit, the Tooth should be visible from the highway, but the clouds covered anything much higher than the car antenna. We weren’t discouraged; the clouds had been lifting at around midday all this week. We left the car at the Alpental ski area (don’t forget to display your Northwest Forest Pass) and began our approach. Or so we thought.

Toby had done this popular Western Cascades climb earlier this spring but had made the approach on skis. After losing several feet of snow the terrain looked a little different, but we weren’t expecting any difficulties—how hard could it be to find a mountain? We found a path heading in the right direction. After a few hundred yards it disappeared. Following what looked like a path up the mountain we soon found ourselves bushwhacking through some pretty nasty cover. The trail had suddenly gone cold.

We found footprints in a steep mud wash,, and for some strange, unexplained reason, we found this to be encouraging. Other hikers will no doubt take comfort in our footprints and continue with their futility. I would have had a sense of guilt leaving behind a false trail except that I couldn’t feel sorry for anyone dumb enough to be this far off-course.

We were heading towards the peak even though it wasn’t in view but then we saw what looked like an actual trail on the other side of the valley. Was that the true path? It was time for my ‘can-do’ attitude to show the way for us. “I’m not one of those people who have a problem with quitting.” I was mentally sorting out my breakfast order.

Fortunately the story doesn’t end there as we backtracked to find the Source Lake overlook trail. After a little over a mile the trail dissolves into a talus slope, which must be crossed, and then up another, larger talus slope to the North base of the Tooth. Easier said than done doesn’t begin to describe this little walk.

The funny thing about this traverse, well not exactly funny, I didn’t laugh much although I swore a lot so funny isn’t the right word at all. The curious thing about this traverse is that from a distance the two talus slopes didn’t seem to be a very formidable trek--a couple of gravel paths to cross. Distance obscures the scale. A simple little matter of ¾ of a mile or so turned into more than an hour of billygoating across boulders ranging in size from basketballs to UPS trucks. There is a bit of a path marked by rather small cairns, a Gaelic word for a pile of stones of a monument or gravesite. I was hoping that in this case they simply marked the trail left by other climbers and not a tribute to the ones who didn’t make it. The only thing worse than crossing this minefield was knowing we had to come back the same way. I had to keep reminding myself that this wasn’t a pain in the ass. I was having good, clean fun.

The word ‘fun’, by way of intonation, was put in quotation marks during our hike.
“I wonder if the approach to Everest is this much ‘fun’,” I asked.
“ I’m sure Everest is a lot more ‘fun’ because it’s ten times longer and you can’t breathe.”

Hiking in the mountains provides the ideal environment to contemplate life’s big questions: why is man compelled to carry out pointless endeavors such as the current one, which type of climbing is the truest essence of the sport, and who is hotter—Mary Ann or Ginger? I always pick the old broad whom everyone else seems to forget. This peripatetic discourse was interrupted occasionally by muffled obscenities as my leg sinks up to the shine bone in mud or as mosquitoes swarm me.

From the base of the Tooth we still had a little bit of hike around Pineapple Pass (5,280’), a small pinnacle a few feet south. On our descent we would be able to rappel down between the two peaks. After a few bites of food and a drink of water we were ready to start climbing. The summit had been obscured all morning but now it seemed we were getting a bit of a break. The clouds were lifting some and I could see down the valley to Snowqualmie Pass (3,127’). At this elevation I-90 looked like a length of thread winding through the mountains.

The climb was really the easiest I have done since starting this sport and I was grateful for that on my first alpine climb. This was certainly more vertical than anything I had yet encountered in the gym or at the sport climbing crags where I had been practicing this summer. I was also thankful for the comfortable belay ledges and set anchors up this route. Maybe next time I’ll be ready for a hanging belay but I can only handle so much ‘fun’ at a time.

Toby is one of you people who seem not to see any difference between trying to find a finger hold a few hundred feet up a sheer rock face and stepping out of the shower. I am not one of you people. One of those two things just happens to make my heart pound a bit harder and it’s not the one where I have a towel around my waist. Fearless I’m not. I lie somewhere between fearless and screaming at the top of my lungs in panic requiring repeated face slaps to bring me under control. I’m working on it.

After I had followed Toby to the second belay stance I admitted that I felt just ever so slightly nervous. He didn’t understand me.

“Nervous? About what?”

I peaked over the side of the ledge and down into the valley 1,000 feet or more below to emphasize my point before yelling, “I’M AFRAID OF HEIGHTS!” I screamed as a joke and to hear the cool echo but the rapid expulsion of carbon dioxide from my lungs had an immediate calming effect. The only problem is that now I’m terrified of stepping out of the tub.

I kept asking, “How many more pitches?” like a kid in a car pestering the driver with questions of distance remaining except instead of sitting in the back seat I was hanging on a rope a few hundred feet in the air. The summit is a satisfying slab of rocks that would be a great spot for a barbeque and the view is spectacular. I should say that the view would be spectacular if this peak wasn’t in the Cascades of Washington meaning that more often than not what you are viewing are clouds. Clouds can be spectacular, I guess.

After a couple of snapshots it’s time for the rappel down. While standing on a small ledge sorting out the gear for the next rappel I comment on what a drag it would be to drop the rope this far up.

“It would be a pretty tricky down-climb,” Toby looks over the precipice as he double-checks that he has clipped into the rope.
“We could always use the cell phone. A pretty embarrassing rescue I would imagine.”
“I’d take my chances with the down-climb.”

We didn’t drop the rope and there wouldn’t be an embarrassing rescue, at least not on this trip. The hike back was certainly easier than the way in. We discussed the whole concept of ‘fun’ as we hopped from boulder to boulder. We started out the day in search of a bit of fun and as much as I complained along the way it was fun. No one had a gun to my head at any time, I did it all on my own volition. We had perhaps 100 yards of talus to traverse before we would meet up with the Lake Source trail when I threw out this debate.

“We both agree that we’ve had fun today so if it was so much fun why don’t we turn around and do it again?”
“You want to do it again? I think we’ll run out of light.”
“Hell no I don’t want to do it again. I’m not sure I wanted to do it the first time. That was rhetorical.”

I did it the first time for fun but you’d have to pay me a lot of money to do it again, at least right away. Give me a day or two and I’d probably pay you for the privilege. What is it about climbing that makes it fun? Perhaps the fun comes partly from the fact that it is difficult, humbling.