Climbing Mount Hood

The south side route up Mount Hood is considered by braggarts and able mountaineers to be easy, yet it is both strenuous and, at times, a little scary. An early struggle is the alpine start. The summit day eve, my friend Barn and I hiked partway up the mountain and camped so we could sleep to a luxurious 4am. The climb became good old, hard working fun once our adrenaline got pumping, the breakfast Excedrin started working and pink light coated distant peaks in cotton candy, which gave my eyes a merry roust.

The most frightening bit of the climb was on the descent, and it was not due to the mountain. On the narrowest section of the steepest part, an inversely-funneling snow chute that runs to the summit ridge, I became stuck during the descent behind a young guy with nylon gym pants and soft leather boots, sans-crampons. Now, Mount Hood is a very popular climb, probably the most heavily climbed glaciated peak in all of North America. We’d seen a couple dozen other people that morning, but all had been at least marginally competent and properly equipped. Not this guy. Every step he took was a nightmare. He’d plant his ice axe into the snow and flail his boots for purchase. Most steps he slipped, using his axe to stop a long fall that would end in a lucky snow runout, an unlucky boulder runout or a tumble into a crevasse. I gently advised him a fall could be fatal, and asked him to move over so I could get around. My next few feet down, until the chute widened, were a nervy dance to the view of his slipping rubbery soles.

The photo is of Barn making his way down to the Hog’s Back, that curving ridge. Mount Jefferson is visible on the horizon. The sky was a dark blue and dreamy up there.

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Refinishing Redhorse

This spring my uncle gave me his beautiful old canoe, well, technically he gave it to his sister, my mother, though I have properly usurped it from my landlubber parents, and taken it down 250 miles of rivers this warm season. The canoe is older than me, a cherry red, 1978 Mad River Explorer with a Kevlar body and wood trim. My uncle didn’t use it much, so it was in pretty good shape. Unfortunately, I’ve put a few dings in it. Pound for pound, Kevlar is super strong, but in canoes it's used more for making lightweight crafts than battering rams that glance off any rock. The Kevlar itself is only as thick as a sturdy layer of canvas. It’s actually a fabric weave, made rigid by an epoxy coat, and in the case of the Redhorse, an additional gelcoat (the red part). I managed to chip the gelcoat away in three places and otherwise score the bottom with countless minor scratches. I went to NorthWest Canoe, a sweet shop in a warehouse in Saint Paul, and bought an epoxy repair kit. After laying on a thick coat of the goo, from a short distance Redhorse looks as good as new. Though, if you get close, the many bugs from my front yard that adhered to the epoxy while I was applying it appear in their new vocation, part of the hull. The photo shows the half-treated Redhorse.

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Namaste, Namekagon

I paddled seventy miles down the Namekagon River in northwest Wisconsin last week, and aside from a dreary six mile stretch in back of a dam, it was, I dare say, a lovely journey. The Namekagon is small and clear, and a little dreamy. One afternoon I set my paddle down across the canoe gunwales and gave up counting miles and landmarks. The water oozed along like swelling melted glass. A leaf flowed three feet below the surface and six inches above the sandy bottom. Of what had been yellow, only a neat quarter leaf remained so, the rest was dark brown, the color of a leach. The leaf’s bonds were breaking from the relentless water that permeated its soft bonds; it would crumble at first impact, whether it against a round gray stone or slimy submerged branch.

Redhorse carp darted abundantly. I named my canoe for these fish, bottom feeders with the hated name, but, like game fish, this strain of carp is susceptible to pollution, and is disappearing in rivers lacking the protection the Namekagon has.

So often the northwoods seem almost sterile—the scoured stone lakes of the Boundary Waters, the deep tight forests empty of sound other than rustling breeze—but the fecundity of the Namekagon was striking. In the depths of a pool on an outer bend, a muskie the length of my paddle’s shaft sat ominously in the shadow of a bleached and beached log, a fishy T-Rex waiting for something to blunder by. In the thicket above, a beaver chewed into a tree. The lumberjack was out of sight, but the squeaky chomping of soft wood carried strangely from dense alders. Full Post»