LostCamKenny

ok, a little idea here - anyone please feel free to critique... the forest service isn't going to put anyone on the mountain to do this kind of stuff - its not one of their priorities as far as their budget goes. the NPS will only have climbing rangers there if the mountain is in fact a national park, and rules and regs come along with that. so how do we have management, permit checks, and that "babysitter" for those who decide to go up there but really have no business doing so? answer: the Mt Hood Volunteer Climber's Association. have a board of climbers who are willing to schedule time to be available to "patrol" the more heavily used starting points for ascents of Hood - so at Timberline and, say, Cloud Cap... i dunno, just brainstorming, here. this organization would make it their charge to monitor the activity on the mountain and who was going up and coming down, though not for money but because THEY LOVE CLIMBING and they want to see as few accidents on the mountain as possible. having people doing this might not prevent all accidents but it might help reduce the deaths... this would mean that climbers attempting the mountain would have to check in directly with a person rather than just filling out that oh so useful and informative checklist that is in the climbers cave presently... is there anyone that can see something like this working? i'm sure there is bound to be spray coming my way, but whatever. reasonable ideas, comments, suggestions or additions to what i've already mentioned? anyone?

my concern is that the mountain would be limited to a certain number of climbers per day or a certain number of tents allowed for overnight stays (such as that at Camp Muir or Shurman on rainier - granted, rainier is a completely different mtn with different logistics and problems...), or even closing the mountain during the "off" season, charging to climb, etc... i'm sure you can think of many other things that i'm not mentioning. whatever the issues that would arise i know one thing about regulations and climbing: rarely do they peacefully go hand in hand without problems. making money off the climbers trying to ascend hood doesn't seem like a great source of income - even if it is climbed as often as it seems that's still not that much money in the bigger picture. if their sole motivation was to make money then timberline lodge officials could have charged the climbers years ago to walk up their lift lines - i bet that has come up sometime in the past. Please don't think that i believe that making hood a nat'l park is a bad idea for the mountain - i'm just not too sure about it helping the climbing...

proposals for this have been shot down before - i'm skeptical about how hood becoming a nat'l park would affect the mountain as far as its climbing is concerned...

rj, the times i've done msh i've had to get the permits 6 months in advance - except in the winter. i know during the peak hiking season that there can be many more permits sold than there are campsites at the climbers bivy...

i wonder if they are the deadliest based on their technical difficulty... also, this comes off a hiking website - any reason to question its validity?

love that one!

thanks y'all for all yer responses

i can't tell... is that tiger woods?

just because a mountain doesn't require technical climbing skills doesn't mean that it isn't a risky undertaking... there are still objective hazards while hiking to the top of it. I'm not saying that hiking s. sister is as risky as climbing hood, but what i am saying is that there are shared potential dangers between the mountains, weather being the first and most uncontrollable of them. washington in NH gets some of the strongest winds in the country, hood gets whiteouts all the time, rainier's got altitude... this isn't to say that washington couldn't get engulfed in a whiteout, or that rainier couldn't see 100mph gusts (or higher), or that the 11,239 feet of hood's summit couldn't be enough to give a climber a bout of AMS, because it could happen. The objective hazards of climbing are what make climbing exciting because it must be understood how to avoid these hazards or at least manage them in a calculated way. climbing is very dynamic and one must ready themselves for a variety of scenarios - many of which one may never encounter. technical difficulty aside, if a mountain is ascended regularly and people die on it (not necessarily on a regular basis) than it seems to me that there might be a bit of danger associated with its ascent. i don't think it is unfair to just divide the number of deaths by the number of attempts... it seems fair to reason the numbers that way... i dunno... someone else?

i know they are out there... some must feel they are collector's items, or they just have been through so much with it that they just can't see to letting it go for under 50 bucks... whatever. if you have one and want to sell it for 80 bucks (which i feel is more than reasonable, but i really want it so i'm willing to go that high now) send me a PM - or just spray about how cool you are beneath the original post!

during the summer, rj... that's when both see the majority of their traffic. it might not qualify as "technical mountianeering" but they are still ascended. the fact that they are hike-ups make them largely more accessable to those without a mountaineering background, thus, not just climbers will take it for an outing but hikers also. i can understand why someone might say this doesn't count but in the statistics of climbing volcanoes it would just because they are both volocanoes.

could they be proportionally equal?

the other cascade volcanoes with high traffic are somewhat more remote or not climbed/attempted nearly as much. St helens and s. sister have passed hood for most often climbed volcanoes worldwide, behind fuji. if rainier got the traffic hood gets i bet the proportion of accidents might be about the same. there's a fair bit of traffic up baker, but how many trips go to the other 8 cascade volcanoes over 10000 ft? not so many, probably... relatively speaking.

... 1000% better than the stuff we were gettin on in the gorge - which is pretty much gone now

no bullshit, kev... lash's back at it on ice!

spray master kevbone... now it gets serious! maybe a miracle will happen this year, kev...

do i dare say it? ... and so far nothing has ever ended in any legislation...

i can sure think of a few Ok, here's one: if larry were to lean back on that phone cord connecting him to his tools and load it, how many teeth would he lose if the tool popped out of its placement and hit him in the mouth?

ol larry told me bout this - good the see him get out and climb something rather than just jugging everything!

perhaps you are looking in the wrong place, bill This it Rick McDonald getting it done on the second pitch of Ainsworth Left. He is such a bad ass.

The take home message here: don't rely on anyone or anything else to save your ass - you can really only rely on your own skill and experience to keep out of situations where you would need a mlu/plb...

so is it mr. plaidman now that he is published?

eggs-actly... a place for all things climbing - rescues included.

perhaps you are looking in the wrong place, bill