thatcher

dont wear yourself out then. we are doing shuksan or adams. that reminds me. which are we doing? if the approach isnt too bad, lets just go for shuksan. ill do hood the following tuesday/wednesday. anyways, a little off topic. sorry.

I am driving to LA the week of the 15-19th and would like to climb shasta on the way down. I need someone to climb with. its fairly flexible. its a two day climb, so any two days within those dates. email me if interested... thatcher@biola.edu

the loowitt loop around st. helens is beautiful. it is a quite awesome one day hike. its just under 27 miles. i dont know if its shut down this season from volcanic activity,but if it isnt, i highly suggest it. the funny thing about st. helens is that on the north side in the blast zone, there are $1000 fines for going off a trail. before entering the area there are well marked signs telling you that. the irony is that through that whole north side is completely route finding...looking for foot prints, thinking you are on the trail when in fact you are on an elk trail or dry stream bed. its wide open, so its not hard to eventually find the trail and not get lost, but its just funny how they sound so strict about staying on the trails when in many places the trails dont exist.

yeah...it sure helps when tumbling 2000 feet to stop before the vertical ice fall and 100 feet away from the head of the largest search and rescue unit in the country. yeah, I'm mostly healed. i ended up with two plates in my leg and grafted skin on my stomach. I've been doing a bit of climbing. I just pop the advil before getting started.

how is it in difficulty compared to mazama? I'm not up for doing something too difficult this weekend.

yeah, my regular climbing partner is busy this weekend, so i am actually now planning on hopefully going up with another friend who doesnt have glacier experience either. we went up to muir in a white out last weekend, thats the most he has done. One problem is that I am short on gear for glaciers. I have an ax, crampons, picket, harness, prussiks, a bit of webbing and a few carribeaners and a helmet. my friend will rent crampons and we will get him a helmet, ax and possibly a picket and prussiks. we currently dont have a rope or harness and may need a couple other little things. if you are able to provide these, then we would be quite glad to do mazama. i hear its much more interesting than south spur. we might possibly get a harness for him. do you know if anywhere in seattle rents harnesses? for liability sake, probably not. anyways, saturday/sunday works for me, and might work for my friend. I will check with him and get back to you. my email address is thatcher@biola.edu

I'm definately interested. I've been up DC twice, but never Emmons. I can only really do weekends. Usually friday through sunday. maybe a friday hike to schurman and saturday summit climb? or do sat/sun?

I have climbed rainier twice and hood, and this weekend I'm going to do adams. every climb I have done has been in a two man team. I have semi-learned crevasse rescue and have prussiked up a rope, but I really dont have much experience in arresting with the weight of other climbers and setting an anchor and z pulley. I understand all those concepts, but have little actual experience in practice. I climb with a SAR/MR friend who knows what he is doing, but we would probably actually be in big trouble if someone fell in..especially since it is just a two man team. I am hoping to get up to rainier or some glacier close to seattle to do some practice in a couple weeks (the 23rd and 24th). Is there anyone with good experience that would like to come up and share their wisdom. or is there anyone that has any good reccomendations for glaciers close to seattle that are good for arrest and crevass practice? let me know if you have any thoughts or advice. I will keep posted where we will be doing practice in case anyone wants to join us.

i just want to add that sunday on muir sucked. i was up there, visibility was horrible. the last couple thousand feet were complete whiteout. only the RMI wands helped us find out way and winds got fairly high as far as muir is concerned and there was a lot of precipitation.

i dont do a lot of vertical due to tendonitis, but occasionally I will hit the glaciers. my site shows some climbing and hiking photos. www.bubbs.biola.edu/~thatcher it also has rescue photos from when I tumbled a couple thousand feet down an icy slope in socal

In april i was rescued off of a mountain in LA county. As far as I know, when a county chopper is involved, the county taxes cover the cost, however after being rescued I made a significant donation to LA County SAR, which covered the chopper bill, and after talking to the sheriff, he said that if worst comes to worst, the county would pay for the bill, however there are enough donors to cover the bills usually. obviously this only applies to county. when its military, as someone else stated, its covered as training.

heak, I'll pay $200 for it. not to offend you or anything. I'm just broke, and if you wanna give it to me for $200, then hey i can fork up the money. so just thought id throw out the offer -tk

I dont know man...I stole my crampons, ice tools, and gortex jacket and bibs. I climbed with it all and i did drugs at the top of the mountain. so i guess some people can fall into both climbing and criminal activity. just kidding, i paid for everything, and only drink rainier beer at the top of rainier, no drugs. -tk

I would do either DC or Emmons...emmons preferably because I've done DC twice already. I'm up for it the second week of august. are you still interested? -tk

I've done Rainier(DC), Brothers, Hood, Baldy (its in So-Cal) winter summit up the bowl. Anyways, Me and a friend are planning on hitting up Adams on friday night/saturday. Thinking about the Mazama glacier...possibly South Spur, but would rather do something at least a little more challenging. let me know if you want to go. -TK