Thirsty Thursday: Mt. Shasta Attempt
Rambler: Beth (and a few photos from Terry)
Drink at Hand: Trader Joe's Pomegranate Limeade
Thirsty Thursday here again...time to pour something yummy and make those weekend plans! Apparently last year was our year to climb mountains. And it was also the year to fail at every summit attempt! Well, really we only planned to climb Shasta and Whitney last year, and we succeeded in climbing roughly half of both. Apparently that meteorologist on the climbing team wasn't so good at picking good weather weekends for summit bids.
We tried to climb Shasta last Memorial Day. We started under beautiful blue skies, and by the time we got to Lake Helen to set up base camp, I was a sweaty mess with sunburned earlobes (missed the sunscreen there).
We went about doing all the regular camp set-up stuff...boiling water, moving snow around, setting tent anchors, etc...all the while noticing that the clouds were building.
This is how you get boiled water cool enough to drink in a hurry.
Ice axes are handy for sinking tent anchors in the snow.
Soon, it looked like this. Light snow. Thick clouds. And two people trying to keep entertained while we waited out the rest of the daylight. The plan was to go to bed as soon as it started to get dark, given our 3:30 am alpine start the next morning.
Terry's alarmed mountaineering look. You know, the ones you always see of the serious climber looking seriously at the summit that he seriously can't see because of the serious weather going on. Seriously, those are snowflakes.
Still kinda nice out.
Nice so nice anymore.
Eventually we crawled in the tent, woke up at 3:30 am like we said we would, couldn't see past the last row of tents due to clouds and snow, so we stayed in the tent. Without being able to see the route, it definitely wasn't safe to try to climb it. Not many people made it up that morning. But the inside of the tent was pretty nice.
Later that morning we packed up and headed back down. Unfortunately we couldn't stay an extra day, but if we had, we likely would have summited the next day. But, the mountain will always be there. Its probably about time that we start thinking about another weekend to try Shasta again!