A Climbing Story
Mid summer several years ago my climbing buddy and I went to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming for 8 days to try and climb the Grand Teton (13,370 ft) of which about 1400 ft of it is actual rock climbing. It’s about a 6.5-mile hike up with about 6000 ft of elevation gain before the climbing starts. It rained for the first 2 days so we just hung out at a campground and got our gear together. My regular backpack weight is around 28-32 lbs and I had to add about 25 lbs of climbing gear (rope, carabiners, protection, etc.) so I was humping 55+ lbs up the mountain. We finally got some good weather and the report for the next 5 days was good so we started. The first day we hiked 4 miles in (and up) to a place called Petzoldt Caves. This might have been the most exhausting hike I have done at the time. We had to cross small rivers, boulder fields and lots of elevation to get there. The next morning while we were packing for the rest of the hike up we ran into a ranger who said a massive storm was moving in but there was a small chance it might miss us, so we continued up. It took us 5 hours to hike 2.5 miles up to the base of a small cliff that must be climbed to get to an area known as the Lower Saddle where you camp before starting the 1400 ft rock climb to the summit of the mountain. By the time we got 3/4 of the way up it started raining and sleeting and by the time we got to the small cliff it was raining ice. We decided it would be too dangerous to try and climb the cliff with our backpacks because it was icing up really bad. We hiked down a couple hundred yards and made a bivy next to a huge boulder and had some hot food and drink (I was freezing my ass off). By the time we were done eating it started to clear up so we decided to climb the small cliff (without gear) to the Lower Saddle and check out the start of the climb. From where we were you could see into Idaho and what we saw was a giant black sky so we decide to go back down to the tent. By the time we got to the bottom of the small cliff it started sleeting again. We looked back up the cliff and like out of a movie you could see the black cloud roll over the cliff. As we raced back to the tent we ran into two more groups and recommended they pitch camp now. We continued to the tent and dove in cold and wet. During the night a terrible storm raged. There were lightning strikes so close that you could see the bolts through the tent walls, rock slides with boulders the size of cars rolling down the mountain and 60+ mph winds. Needless to say I didn’t get much sleep wondering if one of the rockslides would take us out. In the morning when I decided to brave opening the tent and we found that it had snowed over 10 inches and there were snow drifts several feet deep. It’s the middle of summer, WTF. The mountain had decided not to let us up. So, we packed our stuff and headed down. The narrow switch back trail was hidden beneath the snow so we had trouble finding the safe route down. However, the fact that I can write this means we did ok getting down. It was amazing because after we got below 9000’ it was very nice. Along the way down we passed several groups going up and told them about the conditions, however it was so nice down low that they didn’t believe us. It ended up snowing for the next 5 days and we did not get to summit that year.
I learned a lot about mountaineering on this trip. The only thing I messed up on was I didn’t bring good gloves so my hand kept getting numb from the cold (I haven’t made that mistake again). We went back the next year and made the summit via Lower and Upper Exum. We also did Petzoldt ridge as an extra climb.
Nobody gets killed climbing pussy mountains like Mount Hood.
