July 17th
I drove over to Geoff's house bright and early around 8am and piled into their Jeep with his family. I had never spent any significant amount of time with Hilary or James so it was a great chance for us to get acquainted with each other as well. We took I-5 to Salem, OR where we picked up Hwy 22 and 20 that followed pristine North Santiam River southeast bound via Detroit and Sisters to Bend. The weather was gorgeous like it had been ever since the summer finally arrived in the Northwest and the drive through the Cascade was absolutely beautiful. Every time I saw something like this, I could not help but appreciate how lucky I was to be able to actually live here. As expected, there were a lot of weekend warriors on the road equipped with RVs, boats, etc. but we never hit a traffic surprisingly.
We arrived at Erin and Chris's house around 1pm. After exchanging hellos, we headed out to one of their favorite microbreweries for lunch. One of the benefits of living in Oregon - you would never be short of great breweries to go to and food was fantastic. It was only several blocks away from their house so we just walked over to the restaurant.
The climate in the central Oregon east of the Cascade was dramatically different from that in Portland area. It was more typical of high desert - the sun baked us during the day time to push the temperature to mid 90s but the extremely dry air made it comfortably tolerable. At night, the thermometer reading plummeted to low 40s but nothing like a layer of jacket could not take care of. Ever since my wife and I moved to Oregon, I had always felt this was like a place where somebody just took the best parts of what this country had to offer and threw them all into this area. All within few hours of driving distance at most, we had mountains, rivers and streams, ocean, and deserts.
After the lunch, Geoff and I borrowed Erin's pickup to run some errands in preparation for our climb the next day. The first stop was REI to pick up the liner gloves Geoff had had put on hold along with few other things. After that, we went over to Mountain Supply of Oregon to rent climbing boots and an ice axe for Geoff. They carried Koflachs which I had heard a lot of good things about in terms of comfort. (Even here, there was a sign that read "Free Beer" :D) The last stop was Trader Joe's. I had a standard list of food that I had fine tuned down to the ones that worked well in climbing situations. I was a bit disappointed that they did not carry the kind of salami virtually all other TJs carried. But not a big deal.
After we dropped off the stuff at the house, we went back out again to go check out the trailhead. It was located right on Cascade Lakes Highway about 28 miles west of Bend, directly south of South Sister by the lake called Devils Lake. And it was a good thing we decided to scout it out too. All the information we had led us to believe that it would be on the north side of the highway but, in reality, the sign for it and its parking lot was on the south side. So we ended up passing it and found it after we made a U turn only because we happened to decide to check out the signed entrance into the parking area on the "wrong side" of the highway. I would have hated to have to do all this super early next morning.
By the time we returned to the house, it was already 7pm and they were getting ready to throw a BBQ dinner in their backyard. Sweet! Geoff started a nice fire in the pit in the mean time. That was when we truly realized how dry it was there. It almost instantly caught fire and we had a blazing flame shooting out of the pit only within few minutes. And the food was great!! There was nothing like cooking and eating outside. Beer flowed generously and we quickly settled around the warm fire under the starry sky.
July 18th
I woke up around 4am to get ready and leave for the climb. Geoff was already in the kitchen cooking up some breakfast burritos for us. Our goal was to leave the house by 5am so that we'd be able to start our approach by 6am. Once again, we borrowed Erin's pickup and started driving to the trailhead we scouted out the day before.
About a half way there, we realized that it looked like the pickup was burning more fuel than we expected. We had a quarter of a tank when we left the house but the fuel gauge was already showing less than a eighth of a tank! But we were at a point where, even if we decided to turn back, we may not make it back to any gas station open at that hour anyway. Oh, well.. So we just decided to continue to the trailhead and not worry about it for the time being. There were about a couple of dozen cars in the trailhead parking lot.
By the time we got everything together and started hiking in, it was already 6:40am. Once we crossed the highway to the north side, there was a well established trail that led to the bottom of South Sister. It took us through a beautiful wooded area typically found in this region where tall evergreen trees were common and vegetation were lush. The approach itself was much harder than we expected and there were a lot of sections that were quite steep. It would have made a great Reach The Summit training hike if it were in the Portland area actually. As usual, the first fifteen minutes was the toughest when I wondered what I was doing there. But then that went away, also as usual. The trail followed a gully between the Devil's Butte and another hill next to it so there was no way we could get lost but somehow we kept finding ourselves veering off the trail several times.
There was a sign for the summit of South Sister that seemed to point straight ahead from where we were standing. (By the way, at the time, we did not have the map drawing at the top of this posting which would have made things a lot more straight forward for us.) And it made sense as what we thought was the summit of South Sister was straight ahead of us as well. So we decided to strap on our crampons and pressed on straight ahead heading for the right side of Clark Glacier. At 9:40am, we ran into another sign buried deep in the six foot snow and only the top of it was showing but confirming that we were going the right way.
We also had a spectacular view of Broken Top to the southeast throughout the whole time we were climbing. The terrain was progressively getting steeper as we pressed on and it was becoming necessary to kick step up the snow field. When we reached another plateau, it was becoming very apparent that Clark Glacier we were aiming for was a lot steeper than it looked from the top of the approach. And something was not quite right here either. Where were all those climbers who supposedly got here by the two dozen or so cars we saw parked in the lot anyway?? Earlier we saw a couple of hikers as well as a couple of snow boarders but they were nowhere to be found. After looking around carefully, we spotted far to the right and above us some people going up more or less towards Lewis Glacier. They were those snow boarders!! Obviously they knew something we didn't know.
So we decided to traverse climb to the right in order to join the route they were going up on. We were still kick stepping up the snow field. By the time we took another break around 10:30am, we had gained quite a bit of elevation and we had an incredible view below of the rock mesa and what appeared to be an eruption crater. From here, the plan was to continue up towards Teardrop Lake, which was the highest lake in the state of Oregon.
But before we even got there, we had to negotiate a couple of steep moraines separated by a small patch of snow. The rocks and the scree were incredibly unstable and we had to be extremely careful of our footings. This definitely was a no-fall zone where sliding down over the cheese grater below us would have been rather unpleasant.
We reached Teardrop Lake at about 9,000' around 1:25pm. It was starting to get very questionable if we would be able to reach the summit by our hard turn around time of 3pm. From there, we had a bird's eye view of the path we took and also the "standard" route everyone else seemed to have taken. Geoff guesstimated that we probably lost about two hours of precious time before we changed our course. This would become even clearer later on our way back to the top of approach. Mt. Bachelor was looking mighty pretty to the south.
Since we were there, we decided that we would go as far as we could. There was a trail on top of the moraine/ridge that lead straight to the summit. We could see other climbers coming down on it and it looked like the trail was well developed. So we opted to take off our crampons a this point and climb the rest of our way without them.
About another hour into it, at 2:26pm, it became very obvious to us that there was no way we would make the summit by 3pm. Rather than climbing for another a half an hour only to prolong the agony of descent, we decided to call it our summit for this climb. We were around 9,800'. (In this picture, I might look like I was wearing a diaper but that's because I had my fleece jacket tucked in my shell pants...)
Now we had to reverse our course and go down the way we just came up. The only section that was very tricky was the moraines just below Teardrop Lake. It seemed to us that it was even more unstable than when we climbed it for some reason. I went down first and, despite my careful stepping, a small debris fall almost started at the top of it. We were careful not to be on each other's fall line as we made our way down this very precarious area. Once we got back to the snow field below, we were pretty much home free from there on. We were able to glissade down most of our way.
We kept running into people who were rather, say, out of place. For instance, there was a group of guys and girls who appeared to be college students. Some of them were glissading with only athletic shorts on. And then there was this guy we saw almost two thirds of our way down around 4pm. He was dressed only in a polo shirt, a pair of athletic shorts, and a pair of moccasins. He was not carrying anything either. Not even a bottle of water. We asked him where he was going and he said he was going all the way up to the summit!! Geoff had to tell him that he would freeze to death if he got stuck up there and convinced him to turn around. What the ....???
Once we got back to the bottom plateau area, we stuck with the "standard" trail that took us by Moraine Lake. Actually, it was more of a well maintained narrow road than a mountain trail. Like Geoff was saying earlier, it definitely would have saved us a couple of hours had we gone this way when we saw the first sign. Much faster than walking over the sun cupped snow field for sure.
But this "standard" trail seemed to go on and on forever. It should take us right back to the first sign we saw at the top of our approach. However, the sign was nowhere to be seen and we were starting to think that maybe we somehow strayed off the trail somewhere. So much so that, we decided to take a compass bearing off of a prominent land mark, Devil's Butte in this case, to make sure that we knew where we were going. Geoff also pointed out the unique foot prints he had been tracking and we were quite certain where we were. Sure enough, after walking another ten minutes or so, we found the sign in question.
Because of the time pressure, we were yet to have our lunch. By then, we were so hungry that we had to stop to have some meal before we started down on the approach trail. And what a diffence it made!! we felt so much better now.
It was a hell getting back to the parking lot. We almost got eaten alive by thousands of huge mosquitoes quite literally. It was dusk and the worst time of day to be in the woods too. Because I kept my fleece jacket on, I was not as affected by them as Geoff was. By the time we finally jumped in our pickup and drove off, he must have had at least a hundred mosquito bites all over himself. This was something to remember for our RTS overnight training the following weekend as well as for our Mt. Adams climb two weeks later - I made a mental note to myself to email Jennifer, the Reach The Summit head honcho, about bringing bug sprays. It was about 7:30pm.
We were so thankful that there was just enough gas in the tank for us to get back into town. Running out of gas was the last thing we needed. We were utterly exhausted when we finally made it back to the house. Erin and Chris offered to crank up their BBQ grill and cook up some burgers and franks for dinner. Hilary made fantastic potatoes to go with them. Like the night before, we sat around the fire for the rest of the evening enjoying hanging out with beers in our hands.
July 19th
All good things must come to an end. We all went out for a breakfast together before we thanked and said good bye to Erin and Chris. We took a different route going back to Portland - we headed north towards Smith Rock State Park to pick up Hwy 26 that took us all the way back to Portland. This was the first time for me to see this part of the state so I was very much enjoying the view from the backseat while we did Mad Libs with James. We stopped for lunch at Ice Axe, a restaurant on the foothill of Mt. Hood.
Erin & Chris - Thank you again for everything!!
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