Safety Fourth

My friend Matty with whom I had the pleasure of climbing Mt Rainier in 2006, recently had twin daughters. Their gestation and birth have been greatly complicated by twin to twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS). In response to this, Matt has launched a new non-profit called Climb for Kids which is organizing a climb up Mt Rainier this Summer with the help of Alpine Ascents.

So for all of you who’ve asked me about climbing Rainier this summer, my answer is still “No. Not this year, thanks.” But if you’re looking for structure and comradery for the climb, and want to help out a good cause while you’re at it, this might just be the thing for you.

Running is kinda like learning how to ride a bike, right? Once you learn you never forget. I think that’s true for both, but there’s a big difference between being able to do it at all, and being able to do it for long distances.

So I’m learning to run again. It’s been years since I’ve done any running for exercise. I’m excited about the possibility for the following reasons:

• Time efficiency – by running you can get a great workout very fast
• Universal access – you can run basically anywhere with very little gear
• Cross training – the skill of running is applicable in so many other situations
• Triathlon – running is part of triathlons which seem like lots of fun

On the flip side, I’m nervous about the following:

• I’ve never been good at running any distance
• I’m not sure that my joints are up for it
• I don’t want to wear out my body by running and prevent myself from doing other things later in life

So given that, I’m starting my running program very slowly. I’m following the suggestions of Cool Running for how to get from the couch to a 5k in 9 weeks.

So far I’m in the first week where I’m doing more walking than running. After warm-up, I run at 40% duty cycle with the running stretches only 60 seconds long. I’m really enjoying it! I’m looking forward to every running session! I’m learning things like:

• which joints need the most attention
• what stretches are most important and how to do them
• what height to carry my body at
• how much time to keep my feet on the ground vs in the air

I’m having a blast learning to run.

I thought our Mt. Rainier Food Club was a little crazy. (Food club? What’s that? Well, the first rule of Food Club is that you don’t talk about Food Club. I’ll leave it at that for now.)

A few weeks ago these brilliant lunatics carried up enough equipment to setup and run a bona-fide hot tub at the highest point in Europe — the summit of Mt. Blanc at 15,774 feet. I must say that these folks had it down. They hauled 75,000 watts of heating power and melted snow to fill a portable tub that held 20 people.  Want more details?  Read about it at their site.

I tip my hat to this inspired and inspiring lunacy.  Good job.  They’ve definitely got the first three rules of this site down.

Earlier this year I had a brief and passionate love affair with a Trek Portland commuter bike. I payed about $1600 at Gregg’s Greenlake who were very helpful. I got the 58 cm frame and loved the bike, but unfortunately it got stolen before I’d had it for even two months. It was an awesome ride — very light and fast. It could be decked out well for taking lots of stuff. But it had one serious problem which I’ll describe later.

Selection Criteria

My three criteria for selecting this bike were:

• Road Bike Geometry (drop bars)
• Mount points for front and rear racks
• Disc Brakes

The rack requirement is so i can use it touring. The road bike requirement was so it would be fast enough that I could keep up with my friends on weekend rides. The disc brake requirement was for commuting during the winter. I know a lot of people think their brakes work fine in the rain, but I’ve spent too much time going down wet hills scared that I can’t properly control my speed that I didn’t want to mess around.

I decided I’d prefer to get 1 bike that does just about everything pretty well than to start specializing between a commuting bike, a touring bike, and a bike for long weekend rides. This was for space and convenience more than price — I possibly might have found a cheaper solution for those different problems by breaking them up into different bikes. But I also didn’t want to deal with that many choices.

Fortunately for me I only found 3 bikes that fit all these criteria. Disc brakes and pannier rack are a hard combination because usually they occupy the same physical space. But the Portland has a creative design that allows both. The portland, a Lemonde bike called Pop Rad, and a I think it was a kona bike we saw at second ascent. The kona was a steel framed monster. Very burly. Very heavy. Didn’t meet the “keep up with my fast friends” criterion. The pop rad only has 2 cranks on the front, which meant it wouldn’t be good for going up hills when tired or loaded down. It also felt noticeably slower, either because it’s a touch heavier (I doubt it) or because it had cyclo-cross tires on — not too thick, but kinda knobby. Or it might have been a completely unfair bias because it didn’t have click-in pedals when i was testing it, and the portland did. But the cranks thing was a real turn-off anyway.

So my choice was pretty easy. If you remove either the disc brake or the road bike geometry criterion there’s a ton of options. Lots of good commuter-oriented bikes with disc brakes and flat handlebars. I see them on the road sometimes with really skinny slick road tires and it looks like a pretty good choice overall. They can be pretty cheap I think too. Take off the disc brakes and there are a lot of cyclocross bikes out there that meet the criteria pretty well. Cyclocross bikes are a nice combination of speed and strength. But they’re also aimed at this racing circuit which has strange rules like only 2 cranks (thus the pop rad).

The Ride: Fast, Light, sometimes Unstable

The Portland is extremely fast. It’s light and handles well and can accelerate like crazy. The gearing is really nice and the STI shifters work really well. The handlebars are comfy. Keep in mind that this was my first road bike, but compared to all the mountain bikes I’ve been living on, this was fabulous. In the rain it handled really well too. The brakes worked as well as I’d hoped.

There was one major major problem with the bike however. If I tried braking while going over rough terrain fairly quickly, the front fork would shake to the point where I could barely control the bike. There’s a stretch of 15th Ave NE by the UW where this happened more often than not. It seriously vibrated so much I could barely keep the bike going straight — it was dangerous and just about enough to make me trade the whole thing in.

Source of the instability

What caused this vibration? I’m gonna take some guesses based on my knowledge of structural mechanics and the bike’s design. It seemed like a harmonic oscillation. There’s a vibrational mode of the bike that is just not damped enough. Several aspects of the bike’s design seem likely contributors to this oscillation:

• The Carbon Fiber front fork — Carbon fiber is intrinsically a very springy material.
• The fork has no damping in it — some carbon forks have gel inserts or other materials to explicitly dampen vibrations. Not on the Portland.
• The fork is completely straight — curved materials don’t have as clean harmonics. This fork is just two straight tubes that would twang and shake on impulse.
• Disc brakes apply force at the hub, not at the rim — because of this separation, if there is a loose coupling between the rim and the rub of the wheel, a vibration can occur there through a kind of rotational flexing of the wheel. (Imagine the rim rotating slightly while the hub stays fixed.)
• The single-cross spoke pattern on the front wheel — the light-weight low-spoke-count wheels on the Portland will naturally provide a looser coupling between the rim and the hub than a traditional double-cross spoke pattern.

If I were to do it again (which I somewhat need to now that it’s winter and I don’t have a good rain bike again) I’d look for another bike with stronger wheels and a metal front fork.  There aren’t many out there.  Giant made an OCR2-Touring in 2004 that met these criteria, but they don’t anymore.  Perhaps the Portland could be modified to meet these specs.

You can’t go wrong with a good light Goretex jacket is what I’ve always said. Way back in 1995 I got a Marmot jacket that I’ve taken around the world and up some of the tallest mountains anywhere. For years it’s been wonderful — it has greatly endeared me to the Marmot brand because of its quality workmanship. But eventually the DWR (durable water resistance) coating just gave out and couldn’t be replenished. 12 years is a good lifetime for any piece of gear.

So just before I climbed Mt. Rainier this summer I saw a rippin’ deal at REI: a new thin light waterproof breathable shell by Marmot for less than $100. (My previous jacket cost more like $400.) And it was a nice bright safety color which I liked. It wasn’t called Goretex — “PreCip” whatever that means. But since the Goretex patent ran out a little while ago, I’ve been more willing to explore other brand-names of waterproof breathable shells. Well, I’m reconsidering my openness now.

The PreCip jacket is well made in many ways. It’s got nice big technical pockets. By technical I mean they are high enough up that you can clip together a big frame-pack waste belt and still have full access to the pockets. The pit zips are also big enough that you can fit your arms out of them without removing the jacket, which is a nice feature. The hood hides nicely and works well when you’ve got it up. The sleeves have a simple but effective velcro mechanism at the cuffs to cinch down. It’s very light and small and could probably pack into a 1-liter nalgene if you wanted to. Lots of nice features.

One problem: it’s damp inside. I’ve worn this jacket twice now while biking home in the rain. Both times I was wet when I got home. I suspect this is from sweating more than water leaking in. But a good breathable shell (like my real Goretex shell) wouldn’t have done this. This one seems to do fairly well at keeping water out, but not so well at letting water vapor out.

For the price, it’s still a good deal. For many people this will probably meet their needs just fine. But if you’re planning on sweating a lot while it’s raining, I recommend trying another jacket.

This is probably fairly obvious, but I advise against running, even short distances, while wearing biking shoes.  At least if the shoes have hard plastic soles like mine do.  Some bike shoes are soft soled with cleats, but my shoes are stiff plastic across.

Last week I ran a bit in them.  Not far.  Maybe a few hundred yards total.  And not that fast either.  But I was late getting to the first session of my entrepreneurial law class because I confused Mary Gates Hall with William H. Gates Hall on UW campus.

Now I’ve got about 3 sore tendons.  The part that amazes me is that I barely jogged for such a short distance, and I’ve got a sore left achille’s tendon, and a couple other sore tendons whose names I don’t know.

Since I want to do a triathalon next year, I’m clearly going to have to learn to run better.

I spent the weekend in Eastern Washington with some good friends rock climbing in the Tieton River Valley. The Tietons have some beautiful basalt columns very similar to Frenchman’s Coulee at Vantage. We were climbing at Royal Columns, which is here. It’s about 20 miles West of Yakima on Highway 12. This google map is centered on the rocks themselves. Park across the street by the Fish & Wildlife but be sure to get a F&W parking permit or you will get a $66 ticket. Permits are about $10 anywhere that sells hunting/fishing licenses. This is not the Northwest Forest Adventure Pass.

View Larger Map

The scenery is really nice, with rafters floating by on the Tieton below. There are dozens of nice climbs here ranging from 5.3 to hard 5.11. They’re all single pitch but some are up to 90′ long. The weather is comfortably warm while Seattle is starting to get gray and cold. Although the wind makes the temperature a little strange — we saw shirtless climbers being belayed by people wearing down coats.

A couple of climbs we did that I particularly enjoyed were Mush Maker, a 3-star 5.7 hand and fist crack that is a wonderful way to learn/practice crack climbing. There’s not much for hands or feet, but if you’re willing to hang on your hand wedged into the crack, you can get up it. It’s easy, really: insert hand, turn thumb down so it’s wedged in there, put all your weight on it, and grimace as you pull yourself up.

I also did my first trad lead in about 4 years. It was nice and easy — a 5.5 called Rough Boys which still had me shaking like Elvis about half way up. “Elvis go home!” I chanted while pulling the rope up to clip into a piece of gear. The crack was so smooth and even that placing cams into it was really easy.

We also saw some friends from the Washington Alpine Club who were there with their intermediate climbing class learning how to lead. We saw one guy take a nice lead fall onto a #10 hex (a really big piece of passive protection). He got a little bruised but was fine. It took a fair bit of wriggling to get that hex out though!

Overall I thought Royal Columns was really fun. It’s easy to drive to the trailhead, and the approach is short, which makes it popular. My biggest complaint is that it has far fewer bolted anchors at the top than there are climbs. Many anchors don’t have chains. So you’ve either got to figure out a walk-off, or unrope and walk along the top to another anchor to rappel off, or dingle around trying to do that while staying on belay.

The best guide book is Tieton River Rock, which is not readily available from Amazon. (It would be here.) Amazon has Weekend Rock: Washington, which has a small section about the Tietons, but is not by any stretch complete. If you can, go to Second Ascent which has many copies of the good Tieton guidebook.

On my recent trip to Mt Rainier, I used the Suunto S6 Altimeter Watch. It’s marketed as a skiing watch, but it has close to the exact feature set I’ve been looking for for a climbing watch. Overall I’ve been quite pleased with it. It’s got a few issues, but in balance it’s quite good.It has a barometric altimeter, a compass and a thermometer giving it the basics. It also has an interesting feature called an inclinometer which measures how far off from horizontal the watch is. This allows you to measure the steepness of slopes you’re on with some accuracy by sighting down the watch towards the ground, or lining it up with the slope. I feel like I can come within a few degrees if I’m careful with it. It will combine the inclinometer with the rate of ascent/descent to tell you how fast you’re moving in miles per hour, which is neat.
The negative display (mostly black with white numbers) makes it a little hard to read. It is cool looking, but overall I’d rather do without it. Switching the backlight to “night mode” helps that a lot. It has 3 display areas so you can see date, time and seconds. Or for climbing you can see current elevation, rate of ascent/descent and time, which is really important.

It also has a logging feature and comes with PC software, which is nice. I find it refreshing to include the PC cable for free with the package — I was expecting to have to pay an extra $50 for the cable as you do with many phones or other PC-connectable devices. This price actually makes sense economically because PC software like this is so universally bad that somebody trying to use it is almost guaranteed to call tech support. So the price of the cable is really the price of somebody helping you to get it to work. I didn’t need to call anybody. The skimanager software didn’t run initially, but a quick web search found that I needed to install Hotfix for KB93544 to work around this (ahh, windows) and then it worked fine. The software is fairly primitive, but works as expected, and allows you to export to a text file which is what really matters to me.

I tried to record the elevation profile for our entire Rainier climb, but I unknowingly left it in a mode where it records every 10 seconds, meaning its capacity is limited to a little under 36 hours. If I’d been paying attention I would have switched this to every 30 seconds or every 60 seconds and would have been able to capture the entire 40 hour ordeal. Even still, it’s fun to see the trip played back. Here’s the raw data format if you’re curious how it exports. (Hint: elapsed seconds at meters.)

You can see our methodical climb from Paradise to Camp Muir, with regular, short breaks approximately every 1,000 feet.

On Sunday, you can see the slow arduous climb up to the high point where we split up and the Suunto and I return down the mountain to rescue the fallen pack.

and here is the entire journey:

started our trip at 9 AM on Saturday from the Paradise visitor’s center, 5600′. We were all smiles and optimism. The hike up to Camp Muir was and familiar, since we’ve all done it many times for training, sometimes even with packs this heavy (about 50 lbs each).

We got to Muir (10,000′) at about 3 PM we for glacier travel and crossed the . At about 6pm we reached at 11,100′, pitched , watched the gorgeous and ate our Mac & Cheese dinner. At 9:30 we were done for tomorrow, so we crawled into our sleeping bags.

After a solid 2 hours of “sleep”, the alarms went off and we geared up to hike again. It was brutally cold as we ascended a 43 degree ice-slope paralleling Disappointment Cleaver. Borderline hypothermia tempted us to turn around, but the coldest donned goose-down jackets and were determined to see before giving up. Sure enough, once the sun started to we were all much happier and determined to continue on. The weather actually stayed nice for a couple hours as we before getting brutally hot. The were gorgeous.

The climb was arduous and tiring. We were fighting altitude sickness and pushing the limits of our abilities. We had originally set 8:30 AM as a turn-around time to make sure we got down before the glaciers were too warm and unstable. But realized that we weren’t going to make this and that it was unnecessarily conservative considering that last year we didn’t summit until 10AM. To save weight, Corrie decided to leave her pack on the side of the trail so we sank a picket into the ice and anchored it safely to wait for our return. After redistributing a few key items to climbers with more spare energy, we continued upwards.

At 13,600′ we took our last break before the summit on another steep 40 degree when Mez’s pack jumped out of his hands. It flipped over and rolled to the other side of the trail. He jumps up, looks at us and yells “Am I roped in?” as if he would chase after it as it tumbled end over end, shedding pieces down hundreds of feet of ice. Our incredulous stares communicated “Hell no!” Nearby climbers all stopped to see if it went into the at the bottom. Instead, it stopped .

We analyzed what this meant for our expedition. We started thinking about the gear in the pack and decided that it was all replaceable, and that the worst consequences were no music at the summit and heavier packs for the trip down. We were a little disappointed that it hadn’t fallen into the crevace since the finality of that would have been more satisfying and made our decision clear and now we were risking some major littering. So we decided to pop up to the summit, and on the way down determine if it was safe and worthwhile to rescue the pack. Until we thought of the car keys. Car keys! In the pack? Not sure, but probably. Without them, we wouldn’t be getting home that night. Another night on this torturous mountain did not sound appealing to any of us. So we decided that we needed to effect a rescue of the pack. We knew this would take an extra hour or two, and it was already 10AM and the sun was warming the glaciers to dangerous instability. So waiting an extra couple of hours to cross the dangerous bits was not wise. Going down without reaching the summit seemed prudent. But Corrie felt she was too close to give up. Partly motivated by a sense that with a family impending she didn’t know when she’d get another chance to come up here. I proposed splitting up, having Corrie unrope and summit — after all, there wasn’t much dangerous stuff from here to the top. I volunteered to go with her to watch out for her. But after thinking about the mechanics of rescuing the pack, I decided I’d better go that way since I had the most climbing experience, and the rescue would likely involve placing protection and tying knots and other things which were my specialty. So we agreed that Mason & Corrie would head to the summit while the rest of us would go down to rescue the packs.

Both sub-parties succeeded. Mez was and Mason and Corrie .

The descent involved crossing a with a fixed line, and many uncomfortably-warm, soft without any protection but our rope team. At this point we were seriously rationing water, and I almost passed out coming down the Emmonds from a combination of heat exhaustion and forgetting to eat. Some ice in the helmet and down the back and a few hundred calories of fat and we were back on our way. Then there was a descent down a , and we were in the home stretch, or so we thought. Crossing under the Cleaver we got caught in an afternoon hail storm — oh mountain, why dost thou hate us so?

When we finally returned to Ingraham, around 5PM we immediately burned what little fuel we had left to make water, and got 4 liters total. There was much debate about whether we had the energy to make it down or if we should spend another night on the mountain to recover. I turned on my phone to try to send word to our friends back home that we were exhausted but safe and thinking of spending another night on the mountain and they shouldn’t worry. My phone valiantly tried to deliver the message but just drained its battery with no luck. In the end we pushed down to Muir by 8PM, and in darkness navigated the snowfield by GPS, finally arriving at Paradise by 1 AM. By 4 AM we reached Seattle again and sleep was wonderful.

I consider the trip a solid success. The ones who cared most about summiting made it up. I got to spend a memorable weekend with good friends sharing an experience I love, and gained valuable experience points towards reaching my next level of mountaineering fu. I would happily repeat such an adventure, but next time I’ll be wiser!

I posted my pictures from the Rainier climb at http://www.flickr.com/photos/leodirac/sets/72157601306749582/. Here are a few of my favorites: