Helens? I admit I gave the pic only a glancing look...
**Looks again
Nope, not Rainier. Still pretty though.
No, I've never been up Liberty Ridge. Not yet. Lately I've been catering to my father's wishes on the mountaineering front and he's not going to go up Liberty Ridge.
I've been up the DC and the Emmons. I was going to try the Kautz but yeah... So the plan with the Kautz was my bro and I were first going to ascend Little Tahoma and then traverse around to the Nisqually Glacier and Camp Hazard. First we missed the summit of Little T due to heavy packs and shared psychological issues. So we decided to continue the traverse. The Whitman Glacier takes you up Little T, right next door on the west is the Ingraham. Between the two is a moraine that features cliffs. On the map, we found a notch at around 8000' that looked like it's take us nice and easy down onto the Ingraham. In a guide book we had, it was written that you could actually use this notch if you wanted to climb Little T from Camp Muir or the Ingraham Flats. The ranger we talked to when we collected our permits said it was a go. So we get to the notch, shorten up our rope, and start picking our way through the rocks only to encounter a drop off that is, at it's shortest point, ten feet. Too small to show up on a map, but big enough to be a problem. There was no way around this thing. So we started to position ourselves to set up an anchor and lower our packs and rappel down. Or something. We never made the anchor. Rainier's rock is rotten, and it crumbled under my brother's feet. I heard him curse, tried to grab the rock for soem reason, and then did a backflip off the edge right after him. If not for helmet, I would be dead. If not for the huge pack that covered my neck and back, I probably would not have walked again. As is, I smashed my face twice into the rocks on the way down, breaking my nose and losing my contacts. I then slid on my back, too stunned to really do anyhting to stop myself, until I came to a stop on top of my brother who for a touching moment thought I was dead. Then I sat up, waited until my nose had sorta stopped bleeding, and we ascended and traversed to Camp Muir. It was poretty broken up. My bro almost took us both intoa crevasse at one point. We were walking between two huge crack 0 there was nowhere else to go - and he slipped. He caught himself in time, but if he'd kept going there was no way I could have held him because there was nowhere to put my axe. And then there was the crevasse we couln't end-run, find a bridge over, or jump. We did find a fake floor, so we lowered down and climbed out. I'd gashed open my elbow in the fall that morning and for some reason my arm decidedf that this menat it could have the day off so ice climbing wasn't working too well for me, so I prussiked out and we made it into Muir twelve hours after the fall. The Kautz route was now out due to blindness on my part. The ranger was kind enough to clean me up and let me use the satellite phone at Muir to call Mom so she could come get us. Ten days later I went back with my dad, who wanted to do the DC and no one was talking him out of it. I hate the Cleaver, but mentally I needed to go back to Rainier, so away I went.
I hate the Cleaver. I want to do the Kautz.
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"He attacks. And here I can kill him. But I don't. That's the answer to world peace, people."
-Stickles Shihan