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December 22, 2002
Snow, Snow, More Snow, and Ice Climbing
Well, its been snowing. Not just a little either. Biggest storm in 5 years or so. More snow then I've ever seen. On Monday, the busses stopped because they couldn't keep up with the snow. 4' in 48hrs! The town almost stopped. The street I lived on was plowed into a narrow 1 lane street with 6' burms on either side. Getting out of our own parking lot required plowing the truck through 2' of snow. And it kept snowing, with a brief break on Thursday, then snowed again on Friday, and finally stopped today. You know what all this snow means right? Fresh powder on the mountain before the vacationers get here. I got 4 days on the mountain this week. Thanks to my work schedule I was able to ride before or after work. Not everything was open due to avalanche danger and wind, but what was open was amazing! So much fresh powder! I was riding through hip deep powder, almost more than I could handle. The only way to keep going was to go on REALLY steep stuff. Thursday and Friday were basically powder, blue bird days. Sunny skies and more powder than you could shake a snowboard at. By the end of Friday I was feeling really tired and sore. Luckily, I had Satuday off to rest... or...To ice climb! Bruce and I decided on Fri to go ice climbing out in Lee Vining Canyon (near the entrance to Yosemite), no matter how bad the weather was. Well, the weather was perfect! Light snow in the morning, which died off by 1. The hike is normally a steep 45 minute hike. This time, however, it took us 2 hrs. That was because we had to blaze a trail in 2-3' snow. The 800-1000' vertical gain to the ice fall took a lot out of us. Even though we were wearing snow shoes, we'd still posthole a couple feet into the snow.
The ice climbing was fantastic. Bruce lead a 120' blue ice waterfall and set up a toprope. It took me some time to get used to the different motions, and my crampons weren't ideal for vertical ice climbing, but it was still amazing. While I was being lowered off my first climb, my left crampon came off and I smashed my knee into the wall... still hurts, but at least its just bruised.
Ice climbing is such an absurd sport. Most of the approaches are heinous. Its VERY cold and VERY strenuous. You don't REALLY know whether you're tools will hold or you're front points will fly out. You're constantly being pelted in the face by ice chunks while you climb. And you're constantly dodging small to large projectiles of ice, while you're belaying. You can literally hear the missiles whiz past you.
In the end I didn't do bad for my first time really ice climbing. I need to get comfortable with it though, because Bruce and I have decided to do Denali in May of next year. So I have 18 months to train. Bruce has attempted Denali twice and never summited. Third time's a charm! If you didn't already know, at just over 20,000 feet, Denali, in Alaska, is the highest summit in America. To be honest, this is just the kind of goal I need to kick start my training. Its hard to train without a goal.
I haven't forgotten all the other stuff I need to write about. Its still in my head, but with all this powder keeping my busy, can you blame me?
Posted by wonko at December 22, 2002 03:04 AM
Comments
Yes :)
Posted by: kasei at December 22, 2002 11:02 AM
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