The Andy Aupperlee Explosion 5000

We left pavement and cell phone reception behind long ago. Bombing through winding dirt roads in the backwoods of Mount Adams, Ryan and I chased Tristan’s Subaru Outback with my Volkswagen under the night sky. Unlike Gus’s approach to mountain driving, Tristan seemed to prefer a style closer to Colin McRae. With every dip and compression in the road, a scraping noise resonated through my cabin. “Has to be the mud flaps… those things only have a few inches of clearance,” I told myself. Several dozen miles later the Subaru pulled off to the side of the road with the hazard lights blinking. I pulled up next to Tristan, rolled down the window and called over to see why they stopped.

“Car doesn’t sound good. Something is making a lot of noise.”

After a quick investigation, we determined that a major section of the exhaust had become detached. While none of us are exactly mechanics, having two car loads full of mountaineering gear isn’t exactly the worst situation to be in when faced with designing an ad-hoc automotive repair in the middle of nowhere. Using parts from a BCA shovel, duck tape, rope, a stick and nylon webbing; Tristan and Bobby were able to craft a solution that allowed the Subaru to continue soldiering on.

Despite the unplanned vehicle repair, we arrived at the Cold Springs Trailhead near midnight. I found a place to stash the VW, unrolled my sleeping bag and caught a few hours of sleep under the stars and trees at 5600′. Unfortunately, 4 AM came sooner than I would have preferred. After a few minutes of resisting the inevitable, I was dressed in climbing gear with my skis and ski boots strapped to my back. Saturday, August 13, 2011 would be the day I summit and ski down the second highest peak in Washington. With well over 6000′ feet to reach the 12,310′ summit of Mount Adams, there wasn’t any time to waste.

Gus, Bobby, Ryan, Tristan and I hit the trail a little after 5 AM. Although we began the climb with headlamps blazing, day broke soon and views of Mount Hood and Mount St. Helens framed the early morning hours of the climb.

While not as aggressive as the climb Gus and I accomplished two weeks earlier, this excursion still required a fair amount of gear. We did not need provisions for overnight snow camping, nor did we need harnesses or ropes due to the fact that it is possible to summit Mount Adams without setting foot on a glacier (and thus avoiding crevasses). Still, we brought a stove for melting snow, water purification systems, clothing for a range of temperature conditions, ice axes, hiking shoes, crampons, skins, ski crampons and of course skis, ski boots and poles. Like I did on Mount Rainier, I also strapped my Nikon D300 and 35mm f/1.8 lens to my chest.

After ascending a few hundred feet, our first glimpses of Mount Adams appeared. The thing about mountain climbing is it always looks deceptively easy. “Oh, we just have to get up there? No problem.” From a distance of only a few miles, the snow, rock and ice provide little scale. A massive peak can look relatively attainable. As the day stretches on and hour after hour is spent putting one foot in front of the other, this early notion is quickly scrapped. Climbing mountains is fucking hard.

We reached 9,000 feet sometime around 9 AM. We took a break, shuffled gear around, melted snow for drinking water and got something to eat.

Although we were approximately 50% complete in terms of vertical feet, the second half proved to be more brutal. I changed out of my hiking shoes and put on my alpine ski boots. Originally, I hoped to skin up with skis on. When this proved to give me little traction, I added ski crampons to the mix. After several hundred frustrating vertical feet with this setup, I abandoned the skis and went to straight boot-packing. The road to the top of Mount Adams is a long slog; a snowy staircase that demands every last ounce of your endurance.

Shortly after noon we reached the false summit. When you’re climbing Mount Adams from the south, the summit appears to be 600 feet lower than it actually is. Only when you reach the false summit does the true summit come into view. In other words, when you think you’ve finally arrived, you haven’t. After a quick break we skied over to the base of the true summit and began climbing the last few hundred vertical feet.

Standing on the summit of Mount Adams, I reminded Gus that we’d just climbed the two highest peaks in Washington in two weeks. Whereas the Rainier expedition fulfilled a destiny a decade in the making, the Mount Adams jaunt was thrown together via email only days before the climb. Nonetheless, I was pretty pleased with how my August turned out.

With the summit at our backs, it was time to make the descent. In front of us was 6,000 vertical feet of 30-35 degree pitch and Cascade corn snow. We descended via the Southwest Chutes, which is not the route we climbed but was much better for skiing. Tired and weakened from the climb, we didn’t exactly showcase the best skiing; but it was certainly better than hiking down on foot.

When the snow finally began to run out, we switched back to hiking shoes and traversed the mountain in hopes of finding the trail. We were not exactly sure where the terminal of the Southwest Chutes would take us, but we knew we had to head left. So we went left. Initially we assumed we would find the trail just over a ridge. All we found after the first ridge was another ridge. Okay, keep going left and down. Using GPS and maps, we eventually ran into the trail that would take us back to our initial route. It was now late in the afternoon. The party I had planned to attend in Seattle that night would have to rage on without me. Spotting the car at 7 PM never felt so good. I commented to Ryan that even though we’d just been climbing for a day, it felt like we’d spent a week on that mountain. A Bud heavy tallboy and an hour of packing later, we were back on the road to Seattle.

More photos on Flickr.