Mt. Hood extravaganza

In short, nobody got hurt, but we had a little navigation problem (or was it a decision-making problem) that turned a 2-day / 1 night semi-technical trip into a 2 night / 3 day technical expedition with significant rock/ice fall hazard.

All pictures:
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20081115Hood

On the day before the trip, I called the ranger station to check road conditions for the North Face route we’d been planning. Turns out road and trail were shut down due to fire. Did rapid replanning to do Sandy Glacier route instead. No problemo. Route heads up from Timberline Lodge to Illumination Saddle. Then down below Yocum Ridge and up the Sandy. Heads up left side of Sandy headwall, up the "obvious line of ascent" to Cathedral Ridge. Then to summit. Then down the usual Pearly Gates route.

Departed Timberline Lodge and departed by noon on Friday.

Fairly smooth sailing up to the Saddle, then down onto the Reid Glacier where we set up camp at dark. Departed at 2:30 AM and headed down beneath Yocum. Battled to stay high and had some tricky scrambling on total garbage rock with undesirable exposure. In retrospect should’ve sacrificed altitude and gone down to stable rock and easy walking. Headed up Sandy Glacier and reached headwall before 9 AM.

At this point, we saw an obvious line of ascent up a couloir. It looked pretty tough at the bottom, but nothing steeper than 55 degrees. The snow/ice was solid. A gps check suggested that the couloir wasn’t the route I’d entered in the gps. However, we convinced ourselves that it must be the route. I didn’t have the guidebook description with me. Only had a summitpost writeup which said “take obvious line of ascent.” So up we went. It was a 2 hr commitment to ascend the part that we could see. As we continued past the 2 hr point, continuing on 50+ degree ice, we kept assuming that things would open up onto a snowfield. I didn’t do a thorough gps + map check until 4 hrs up. Then I realized that we were in a bad spot.

Ascending Meier Couloir:

In retrospect, we should’ve known that the route was much more technical than the Sandy Glacier route descriptions we’d read. It takes time to really sit down and puzzle out exactly where you are on the map. Plus, the Nat. Geographic Oregon TOPO maps are not particularly crisp and were of limited help when navigating up the headwall where +/- 100 m is crucial. But spending the time to carefully study the map would’ve been worthwhile at the 2 hr point, not to mention prior to beginning the ascent of “Meier Couloir”. In retrospect, we found that the notoriously difficult Yocum Ridge route coincides largely with Meier Couloir.

At the 2 hr point, our hopes of summiting were shot if the route didn’t go through. That’s probably why I was reluctant to look carefully at the navigation. Because of the technically difficulty of the route (very difficult downclimb) and the poor conditions (falling ice) that we would later encounter, that was a bad decision. By 6 hrs, we’d made it to a safe bivy on the only flat spot on Yocum Ridge. I peered over the south side of Yocum and could see an escape route. At the time, I wasn’t aware that the escape route I saw was the standard “escape route” for Yocum Ridge climbers. It was too late to descend that night. It was almost 4 pm and sunset was at 4:30. Damn it was nice to see that little V-shaped snow drift. We carved a spot for our tent and settled in.

The next morn, we made the descent down to the Reid. We essentially used leader/belayer technique to downclimb without leaving pro behind. We left at 8 AM when light was good (could’ve left at 6:30). By 10 AM, things were getting warm. We didn’t get down to safety until 1 PM. Dangerous ice and rock fall had threatened us on the way down. From the Reid to Illum Saddle isn’t too bad. We simulclimbed the upper portion of this climb with sparse protection and reached the saddle at 2 pm.

Illum. Rock and Saddle:

Neither the Reid nor the Sandy had particularly difficult crevasse crossings.

After reaching Illum saddle, it was a cakewalk back down to the car. We made it there by 4 pm.

Here's a map of the route:

Food:

For this trip, I packed nothing but powerbars and clif bars. Ate ~18 bars (4000 calories). Had 1.5 liters of white gas stove fuel with my whisperlite stove. Was sufficient to support us even with the additional time en route. Lost stove skirt at top of Sandy (blew/rolled down the hill).

Clothes:

We both enjoyed our puffy jackets. I used a pair of bib pants this time. Quite nice. Tore some holes in my puffy jacket but patched them upon return.

Lessons:

- When possible, get GPS with high-res integrated topo map

- Check map/gps at least every hr if at all uncertain on steep terrain.

- Make the decision to retreat without undue hesitation.

- Nat Geo TOPO maps are not quite as good as topozone maps online. Would be nice to have paper topo maps but Hood maps aren’t available at Seattle REI.

- Carefully prepare gear before climbing. Need to have pickets set up for easy access with slings prepared and ready for action.

- Always use leash with ice axes. I dropped an expensive ax down the hill.

fusion as replacement for fossil fuels?

My grandfather (aka Uncle Bill) asked me if fusion power could replace fossil fuels. Here's my response....

Unk Bill,

You asked me if fusion can replace fossil fuel in our energy economy in the relatively near term (30 years). Below I’ll describe two candidate fusion machines. The first is a tokamak. It is unlikely to solve the problem because it’s too expensive. The other is the compact torus (CT). It is unlikely to solve the problem because a technological breakthrough is required. However, anything is possible, especially if enough research money is devoted to the challenge.

Tokamaks have received the vast majority of research effort in the past 50 years. With the tokamak, we have achieved “breakeven”, which that the ratio of fusion power out to electrical power in is one. For a commercial powerplant, this ratio should be about 10. If things go as planned, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) will achieve this desired factor of 10. However, tokamaks are incredibly complex and expensive engineering marvels. Superconducting magnets are required to produce the strong magnetic fields in tokamaks. Perhaps in 30-50 years, tokamaks can be made commercially competitive with coal plants, but not in the near term.

A sudden breakthrough in an innovative device called a compact torus (CT) is a long-shot possibility. The CT is similar to the tokamak, but is generally smaller and doesn’t require the superconducting magnets. One of the keys to the CT is that it allows the magnetic fields to relax naturally instead of using the high magnetic fields of a tokamak to force the plasma to behave. Consider bridge building: if an engineer wasn’t very crafty, he/she might just make the bridge deck very thick. However, a crafty engineer would use cables to suspend the bridge, thereby greatly reducing the cost of the bridge. The CT is the crafty engineer’s approach. CT development is far behind the tokamak in funding levels and in technological development. However, a breakthrough might yield a useful fusion powerplant in the next 20 years.

Now… if fusion can’t solve the problem alone, can it help somehow? Nuclear fission technology works, but has a radioactive waste problem. Nuclear fusion can help solve that problem. Fission produces radioactive isotopes. By bombarding the radioactive isotopes with neutrons, they can be transmuted into radioactively stabilized. Fusion produces lots of neutrons even if it doesn’t produce energy. With fission-fusion hybrid technology, we can employ those neutrons to deal with radioactive waste.

Many people don’t realize how much progress has been made in fusion! We routinely control plasmas and make fusion energy. Hydrogen (which can be obtained by splitting water) is the fuel for fusion. This is a technology that humanity will surely benefit from in the long run if not the short run.

Hope this sheds some light on the issue!

Eric

P.S. I’ve only talked here about magnetic confinement fusion which uses electromagnetic fields to trap plasma (hot charged particles). Another approach is to use lasers to compress a chunk of fuel. This idea also has some merit, but I think magnetic confinement is preferable, so I ignore laser compression here.