eteam

Yup, I know some of these guys. One of them is my son, Ben Elkind. I have to admit they made some errors, and at the same time they made some good moves. I'm pretty amazed at how quickly you guys on this forum act like pompous *sses (pardon my french). It's as if none of you guys have *ever* made a mistake in your lives ! And the comments you guys throw out on this forum end up splattered all over the 'net. See http://blog.oregonlive.com/breakingnews/2007/05/popular_online_climbing_forum.html So, here's the story: They had (mostly) the right gear, but they failed to load a topo map in their GPS (lesson #1), and they failed to store their waypoints (lesson #2), they overestimated the abilities of their climbing buddies (lesson #3, or maybe *risk* #1), and they should have turned back sooner (they would have avoided the bad weather) (lesson #4). They lost the trail to the summit, and retried a couple of times, and in the process over-stayed (GPS waypoints would have helped). On the way down they hit the storm. They knew where they were (GPS), but not where they needed to go. A phone call from PMR gave them a heading/coordinates, and they made it down. PMR offered them two options: go to Illumination Saddle and wait a couple of hours for the snow cat to arrive, or hunker down for the night in a snow cave. The climbing party correctly decided to hike down rather than risk the overnight stay or a couple of hours of exposure in bad weather waiting for a snow cat. As you might imagine, this was a "training" climb. Ben hit REI the next morning to buy a proper GPS, vowing that this lesson (waypoints and topo map saved in GPS are your friend) would not have to be re-learned. All in all, they could have done better, and they could have done much worse. And by the way, they also learned that Cingular cell phone works *much* better than Verizon on Mt. Hood. (i.e. if you only bring a Verizon cell phone on the climb, you haven't brought a cell phone at all). - Bob Elkind (Ben's dad)