Rainier ascent via Emmons-Winthrop

Rainier ascent via Emmons-Winthrop

Aug. 8-10, 2009 (Saturday thru Monday)

Eric Meier, Seth Meier, Cihan (the Living Legend) Akcay, (Pistol) Pete Norgaard, Ralph Swanson, Kaitlin Murdock

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090809RainierEmmonsWinthrop#

Seth flew in Friday night late as hell as usual. We started out with the game plan of departing early on Saturday morning and going for a summit and return to vehicles on Sunday. We did manage to leave *relatively* early, but the Sunday return to vehicle was not to be. The mountain is too damned rough this time of year for that. We got out of Seattle at about 9 AM (early, huh?). Got on the trail by about 12:30. The wildflowers were gorgeous down low in Glacier Basin.

Seth, G and I were a little behind Pistolé, Ralph, and Kaitlin. We caught up to ‘em just before we hit the Inter Glacier. (It is called “Inter” because it’s between the Emmons and Winthrop Glaciers.) The Inter is a big mess right now. It’s like a mostly melted ice cube sitting in a big tray and collecting a helluva lot of rock and dirt.

Climbing it required crampons and a lot of care to avoid slipping which would mean a very unpleasant ride down the rough ice/rock surface. The thought of climbing down was rather unpleasant. In the early summer, it’s cake: the whole basin is filled with a big snowfield and you just glissade down. We made the top of the Inter at about 6 pm. At Camp Curtiss, we traversed down onto the Emmons with no trouble. (There is a fairly clear trail.) On the Emmons:

Made camp at 8:30 as dark fell. Upper camp was full on this busy Saturday night and we had to clamber down to the snow below the exposed solid-ground campsites and join a couple of guided groups. Chill set in as we dug out spots, threw up tents and melted drinking water. I believe Jupiter was the beautiful object in the sunset.

The guided groups didn’t appreciate us crashing into camp. Some curses could not be contained as we fought across a little mote between the rock and snow/ice. Somebody told us to quiet down (they were getting to sleep in prep for early departure). This is common courtesy at such a camp and they didn’t even need to tell us. They arose at 2 AM (an hour before our planned wakeup time) and started raising hell and talking like they were drinking beer in their back yards.

We were up and at ‘em at 3 AM and actually hit the trial at 5, all roped up. There was the red team: me, Seth and Ci (pronounced “G”). There was the green team: Pistol Pete, Ralph and Kaitlin. (Our ropes were roughly red and green.) My buddy Reid two of his pals had started a couple of hours ahead of us. We stayed in touch with radios. It was nice to have them ahead to tell us about any route difficulties. G as we got started:

We enjoyed the sunrise on the way up to 11.5k,. So beautiful. Venus was shining bright. I caught this shot (Anita's favorite) just as the sun rose.

Mt Stuart and Glacier Peak showed themselves in the distance. By 11.5k, Ralph and Kaitlin, who had not really trained for this trip since they were roped into it on short notice, were pretty worked and decided to hang it up. It was also at this point that Pete and I started throwing our gear into deep crevasses. I donated my fairly new (et un peu chèr) sunglasses to the crevasse gods and Pete contributed his helmet to make me feel better about myself (real slick; the good news was that rockfall was not really a concern on the upper mountain). Fortunately, I had a pair of ski goggles to use as a backup. Here's a shot of the upper mountain from about 11.5k about a half-hour after sunset:

Pete roped into the red team and on we went. At this point, the route goes up “the Corridor” and then turns right beneath gnarly crevasses. We took a break at about 12.5k to melt water. It took what seemed to be an eternity to melt enough to get going again. But good to be hydrated. It was toasty that afternoon and we were sweating heavily. On the way to Liberty Saddle at 13.5k, the route weaved this way and that around broken snow bridges. No technical climbing was required at all on the route. After reaching the saddle, the walk to the top is simple. As usual, you just put one foot in front of the other, taking one full breath per step and just resign yourself to the grueling task. Eventually you end up with a pretty nice view.

Descent was decent. Hard on the knees/ankles. Seth was raring to haul ass and I had to hold him back a little. We got back at sundown with a half hour to spare before pitch dark. Slept well and felt great the next morning. We found a way to descend without touching the Inter Glacier. We asked around at camp and found that you can just descend the ridge upon which Mount Ruth sits. It worked out nicely.

Yellowstone (Fairyland Basin)

SLC / Yellowstone (late June 2009)

THis post is quite late. We did this trip 3 weeks ago!

I made a visit to SLC where we celebrated Seth's bday, attended the wedding of one of one of Seth's best buds from high school and college days (Ben Passey), then headed to Yellowstone with my dad and a buddy of mine from here at UW (named Christian, who is actually back in Denmark now). Selected Yellowstone pictures can be found at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/200906YellowstoneSelected#.

It was fun to get together with all of Seth's old SLC crew for his birthday celebration and for Passey's wedding. The wedding was fun. I got into some interesting conversations. Talked to a Swedish Jewish woman who told me a bunch of history of holidays (like Hannukah and Christmas). Also talked to an older couple about global warming (which often comes up when i tell people that i do research in fusion science), and about the justification for our government support of NASA. We also got together with a few of my old buddies (Mano and Poore). Seth and I hung out a lot with eachother's friends...

My sister Tess just did a great post about the family trip on her blog,
http://tessothy.blogspot.com/2009/07/family-visit.html (pictures courtesy my mom).

We arrived in Ystone Monday morning. The crowd was horrendous. I almost lost the handle while driving the big Ram pickup and simply drove over some of the tourists' cars. But Christian's danish etiquette restrained me.

We had a lot of interesting conversations, many of which did not end up in wrestling matches. As i've mentioned, Chris is danish. But he seems to have had a bad reaction to the heavy dose of liberal social policies in Demnark. He largely agrees with Libertarian ideas. We had a heated discussion about whether it would be better to let the free market handle Yellowstone or not. Chris thinks that private conservation efforts would be sufficient to protect the Park and all of our other protected wild areas in the US. My dad and I are fairly convinced that capitalists would gobble the place up and spit it out. Another interesting discussion was about gun control. In demnark, handguns aren't allowed. A shopkeeper who'd been robbed several times eventually got ahold of a gun and shot a robber. The shopkeeper was thrown in jail. We talked about when somebody like the shopkeeper is gonna just snap and how everybody has a breaking point beyond which any morals or compulsion to follow laws goes out the window. Christian pointed out that there's a fundamental question about how much power governments should have, arguing that they will be inefficient because they aren't part of the free market. I pointed out that governments were established essentially through free market forces anyway. So it IS the free market keeping Yellowstone alive!

Lots of beautiful scenes in Yellowstone. We finally made it to the seldom-visited Fairyland Basin. It was quite a slog through a fog of mosquitos and mile upon mile of lodgepole pine downfall. But the fantastic thermal features along the way, plus the Basin itself made the slog worthwhile.

Volcano #3 (Mt. Adams)

I've made it to the top of three volcanoes around here now. First Hood, then Rainier (twice), then Adams last weekend. Did this trip with Reid, Veronika (a friend from the UW climbing club) and several of Reids buddies (one of whom [Bill] toughed it out to the top with us).

This was a spectacular trip. Gorgeous weather, good friends, and to use a UW climbing club phrase, good times. We climbed the South Spur. I had to tow a tree out of the way as we drove to the TH at gray daylight. We got on the trail at 7 am, and hit the summit just before 4 pm. TH is at 4500 ft. Summit is at 12300. Nearly 8000 vertical. The most vertical footage I've ever done in a day. But we did get to cheat and ski down. Took about 3 hrs down.

Here's a google earth image of the route we did (GPS trace from Veronika's GPS).


See all pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090606MtAdams#

Saw some of Veronika's fellow Russians near the summit and they posed with their flag. The dudes joked with me that they were meeting there for a secret KGB meeting. I joked back asking where their Kalashnikovs were. They responded quite seriously, "Kalashnikovs are quite heavy. Nearly 10 kilos. We would never carry those up here."


Here's our summit shot.


and a picture of my skis on top :)


Veronica took some nice pics of me on the way down the SW chute. The route was spectacular. At the top, it was a bit icy, but below about 11,000 ft, the snow was softened by the sun. The best part of the chute had snow of very uniform consistency that let you sink in about a foot with each jump turn. See the video too in the pictures on Picasa.

Rainier -- On top again.

This Rainier trip went pretty smoothly. Me and Ci and another guy named Aaron (also in my research group) were the crew. In a 2-day effort, we tagged the summit via the Ingraham Direct route and returned to Seattle. Left Friday morning early. Got back Saturday night. I'll sprinkls some photos in this post, but if you want 'em all, see
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090523RainierWithCihanAndAaron#
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090523RainierCihansPics#

We did a glacier skills training day the week before and pics from that are at
http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090516GlacierTravelTraining#

We got up to Muir in 5.5 hrs. Left Paradise at about 10:30 AM and made it to camp at 4. We chilled on the heli pad for a while in the sun.


The shelter had plenty of room. There were lots of guided climbers, but they set up their own tent sites. Here's a nice shot of the camp from above:


A guy had fallen into a crevasse the previous day. His team (including his guide) arrested his fall and he was able to climb out on his own power using his axe and crampons. He was petrified though, and headed back down. I talked to him on his way down past us. He said he'd need some therapy, then he'd come back to the mountain for more (I think he's a big pansy for turning around .. was he that shocked that he had to use his equipment? Why did he think he was roping up?? to look cool?).

We got up the next day at 1 AM and departed at 2. Beautiful morning climbing. Venus and Jupiter were up and bright. Here's a pic at sunrise:


Made the summit at 9 AM (7 hrs climb).


Hung out there for 1.5 hrs. G and Aaron felt like dogshit. I felt decent if not chipper. They felt better once we descended. Descent only took 3 hrs. Hung out at camp for about 4 hrs (until 5 pm) and then headed down to car where we arrived at 9 pm. I admit that I did feel like hell once I got back down to Camp Muir and was happy to get going to lower altitudes that evening instead of hanging out for the night.

You'll notice in my pics that I tried some night photography. For example, here's a shot of St. Helens with Portland lighting up the night sky behind it.


I actually hauled my full-sized tripod up to Muir. In retrospect, it was perhaps a mistake. It is a long way up there... But it was fun to have it and I learned that I had a little more to learn about night photography. For example, I had the ISO set way too low.

We met a badass guy who's been climbing Rainier and other NW volcanoes for 17 years. He said he did the Kautz as his first route on rainier with his dad back in 1995. Said route was vastly different then. No significant ice climbing. All snow. Hard to imagine, but i guess it's true. Anyway, this guy was soloing the mountain on skis. Has done solos on skis numerous times. He showed me where the climbing register is stowed under a rock ("register rock") near the summit and I signed in this time.

I bathed myself in sunscreen and avoided sunburn altogether this time. We brought far more food than we needed. But we were planning on 3 days + emergency food for 4 days. I ate mostly my usual fare of ... clif bars. However, i did down a fair amount of freeze dried food, snickers bars, and dried fruit. Oh and I did have some power bar goo packets which are good quick energy. We didn't have to boil water on summit day. Just carried about 1.5 quarts. Ate a little snow to tide us over until we reached Muir again.

I kept my heart rate at or below 120 primarily. I wouldn't want to push it over 130. I was happy that on the final ascent, I was only running 110, and my pulse was calm on top.

Victoria (followup)

I left out a few fun things.

On our bus ride back from the Gardens, the bus was jam-packed. Ani and I found a nice open-looking spot near the back door. I ignored the yellow stripe and settled in. At the first stop, we found that the back door automatically (!) opens. It continued to attack us for the remaining 20 stops until we got home. We learned how to properly defend ourselves.

We went to dinner one night at a local pub. The local color was interesting. In particular, we sat next to two older (or just old?) couples. They had fun conversations about tennis (i was stoked) and politics. One lady complimented Anita and I on being a nice couple that reminded her of she and her husband. It was very sweet. Plus, her husband was a Catholic priest, so i think it was a good sign.

Anita challenged me with a couple of puzzles on the trip. The first I won't describe here except to post this link:
door puzzle
Momma and Tess, if you read this before your other (clearly worse) halves, you can challenge them with it. Be careful though, this almost wrecked Anita and I's friendship. I was so sure I was right. But she was the one asking the puzzle question! What an idiot I can be.

The other puzzle is given here. You're gonna have fun with this one. I'll post the answer later. I'll also respond to comments if you're stumped.

A bad guy buries three other guys up to their necks in sand as shown in the figure below. He then blindfolds them and puts hats on each of them as shown. It is critical that only the guy in back can see two hats. The middle guy can only see the hat on the front guy. The front guy can't see anything. The bad guy takes the blindfold off and says: you each have hats on. There are either a) 2 black hats and 1 white hat or b) two white hats and 1 black hat. Without speaking to each other, if one of you can tell me what kind of hat you have on, I'll let you all live. Otherwise you die. [edit: If one of you guesses what color your hat is, but is wrong, you all die.]


How do they survive? (They do survive.)

Victoria

Pictures -- http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090426VictoriaWithAnita#.
Anita probably got some better shots than me that I can post later.

Anita and I had a great time going to Victoria last weekend. We caught the Victoria Clipper at 8 am Saturday morning. The tix were $90 round trip per person. Kinda expensive, but when I calculated how much the gas cost for the 200 passengers, it's not too bad. Canadian customs decided to allow another visit by one of the notorious Meier brothers. (They harass Seth and I every time we enter Canada because of a little border-crossing incident back in 1997 when their dogs thought our vehicle smelled a little like a marijuana... well OK, that dog's marijuana detection system was probably totally overloaded and permanently damaged. Anyway, we made it in.) Hopped on a bus to get to the famous Butchart Gardens. They were indeed beautiful. But a little smaller and more manicured than I expected. And fairly crowded. But it was nice to see.

We saw one of the street performers in the harbor. These young acrobatic guys put on little shows and are usually hilarious and pretty impressive (juggling torches, etc.). Had a nice dinner and the hotel provided a pretty deluxe night's sleep. Next day, we rented a car and drove an hour to a nearby coast hike. There were some pretty spectacular trees. Especially right on the coast where they hadn't been logged. There were a couple of downed trees that happened to run down the fall line and were turned into quite useful staircases. It would've been nice to spend even more time walking, but a 5-hr hike was pretty nice. We had to hurry to get back for the 5 pm ferry back to Seattle. Talked to some interesting people on the ferry. A Swedish guy who was pretty excited about fusion energy. A couple of French girls who helped me "progresser mon francais". The boat ran into something halfway back to Seattle. Whack! Thud thud thud thud konk. She came to a halt. They pulled the log (hopefully they didn't hit a whale and pretend it was just a log) out of the water intake and we were able to keep going. Delay wasn't too bad. Overall 'twas a smooth trip to Canadia. Oh -- the report wouldn't be complete without mentioning the "Victoria Bars" that Anita baked for the trip. Wow. They are made with crumbled graham crackers with a sorta pecan-pie-ish filling... mmmmm...

Barack's in ... & Ski trips

First of all I'd like to say GO BARACK! I thought his speech was fairly appropriate. I only wish that, at the end, instead of just saying "God bless America" he would've said "God bless America, bless all the other nations in the world, and bless the planet itself."

Did two trips last weekend. One was with my buddy Peter up to Marmot Pass in the SE Olympic mtns. Stayed Friday night at a little motel in Quilcene. Took off at 0530 and got on the trail at 0700. Hit snow so couldn't drive to TH. Had to stop 4 miles short (4!) of the TH. Hopped on skis and rounded the first corner... then took skis off and trekked along bare road for a mile or so. Snow was off and on until somewhat higher elevations. Dammit. From the formal TH to the Pass is 5 miles. 9 miles up. Whew. But we pulled it off. Pete was committed to doing an ass-kicking trip. He got his wish. Beautiful views from up top. Returned to vehicle at 1730. I was quite blistered by the end of the day. Pete was snowshoeing and used his hiking boots so had an easier time in the bare spots. But skis saved me some energy for significant stretches, so was about equally difficult i guess.

This pic shows the remnant debris from a big avalanche coming down Buckhorn mountain. As you see it's quite melted down now tho.


Here's a pic looking down the valley we'd just hiked up. Beautiful clear view of Cascades on this fairly cold day. Glacier peak visible at left in distance.


A pic of me at the top looking west from the Pass.


A pic of Pete, exhausted, at the Pass.


The other trip was one that Orli organized. We snowshoed/skied in a fairly popular area up near Snoqualmie Pass. Slava (the postdoc i work with) and Ci came along with several of Orli's other friends. The trip was short but sweet. It was pretty socked in so we couldn't enjoy much scenery, but it was nice to get out. And at least this trail was totally snow covered. Wow. Had 4 dogs along with us. One little-bitty dog was running around harassing the bigger dogs (2 golden retrievers and a siberian husky). Fortunately the big dogs were not hungry and did not eat the little dog as a snack. My blistered feet were plenty happy to keep it down to a 3 hr round trip.

Here's a shot of me and Ci.


Here's an artsy picture of Orli.

plasma school

Down at UCLA, I enjoyed another 6-day plasma science winter school. (I previously attended in 2007.) Plasma science is mysterious, but when you couple good theory (pencil and paper work) with the enormous computing power that's we're developing. We covered several topics, listed below, but the funnest was probably the astrophysics.
* Learned something about how magnetic field is generated on large scales -- earth's magnetic field; galaxies' magnetic fields; magnetic fields in the universe in general.
* Learned some new stuff about turbulence and associated heat transfer in both astrophysics and in fusion devices.
* Learned more about shocks in fluids and in plasmas.

It's hard to convey how neat some of the computer simulations were, but here is a picture of one of the sims. The full sized movies (which I can't round up online right now) and images were more impressive.

Here's a picture of the aftermath of Tycho's supernova, the shell of which is a plasma shock wave:

Here are some pictures of the crab nebula. It has a pulsar at its core. Image in optical spectrum on left. Infrared (?) taken by Hubble on right.

Now the Crab nebula in xray:

Met lots of cool people. The U Wisc Madison crew was especially fun. We went out one night and ended up hanging out at one of the plasma labs where we drank a few beers and some British guys showed us how to play cricket -- the game seems quite strange to me.

Had an afternoon off on Wednesday. Went down to the beach to enjoy the 70 deg weather. I jogged from Santa Monica to Venice and back. At sunset, I took this photo of Ci using some rings. I'd never seen this kind of set of rings before. Some kids were doing some spectacular acrobatics on them...

Note the ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier in the background. It was fun to ride that.

One evening Ci and I went to the nice outdoor track at UCLA. I ran a mile in 5:53. I was shooting for 6 min. I incorrectly calculated that I needed to run four laps at 1:20 per lap. Because I aimed for this pace (which would've given me a 5:20 mile), I managed to average 1:28 per lap... :) Then I did a 100 meter sprint to see how slow I am. On the first try, I set a new world record at 9.5 sec. Then we realized I hadn't run quite far enough. My time was 13.7 sec. Not bad.

At sunset that eve, I didn't see it, but some people saw a "green flash" at sunset. On my flight home, I looked for the flash, but evidently conditions weren't right. I did get this cool pic tho:

UT Christmas

My 2 week break in UT was wonderful. Skied my legs to jello at Solitude two days -- one with my dad and the other with an old college pal, Manolakis. Mano and I relished cutting lines in the slopes that could be seen easily from the lift.

Mano at Solitude catching a snowflake.

Happy thoughts before a fabulous powder run at Solitude:

We did numerous x-country ski tours. In SLC, we skied up Milcreek where we could take our pack of 3 wild dogs (well, really 2 wild dogs plus Howie who is most certainly not wild, but rather a dangerously accurate licker). In Roosevelt, we skied a few different places. Twice to an old oil drill site where there is a drill pipe sticking up, hence the name "stickey-up".

The white bird droppings on top of the drill pipe stickey-up really topped off this wonderful picture of Tim:


Steve and I did an ass kicker backcountry trip to a secret stash of bristlecone pine trees which live to near 5000 yrs old.

Me with a young bristlecone pine:

I really enjoyed using my new AT (alpine touring) ski setup for all of the skiing. Excellent performance. Garmont boots, Shuksan skis, Dynafit bindings.

I tried to fatten myself up on all the wonderful food my mom provided. We played a couple of games of chess, both of which were action packed. I whooped everyone's ass at scrabble (probably a holdover of skills from my spelling bee days) a couple of times.

My dad in his holiday best: