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Porters wanted


neilgbaird5

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Porters on Rainier! Ha! That's funny! I suggest telling them peeps that if they're gonna climb Mt. Cook, they need to learn to carry their own weight!

 

Although, seeing that I am a money hungry bastard, I'll be pleased to carry a load for a nominal fee of $1000/day. grin.gif

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That's a long way out for anyone to commit. Repost a week or so before you head up and you can probably find someone up for a conditioning slog. As always, making sure any porters have cold beer when they get back to Paradise may help your cause.

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i am not to familiar with mt cook but presumably there is some climbing involved? maybe carrying some weight around mt. rainier would be good training?

even the weakest newbie should be able to carry at least a small pack.

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The standard route on Mt. Cook involves a climb of about 5,000 vertical feet from the Plateau Hut, up a moderate angle'd glacier for 3,500 feet until you get some steeper snow slopes up to a couple ice or mixed pitches, and then perhaps 1,000 feet of moderately steep and very exposed snow/ice to the summit. The climb is comparable, perhaps, to Ptarmigan Ridge or something. The range is known for quick changes in the weather and, yes, they'll have to carry summit packs for sure.

 

To get to the hut involves waking perhaps a mile or two on a huge and hugely broken valley glacier, climbing a steep and scary moraine wall, some rock scrambling, and a bit of glacier climbing -- this approach itself is WAY more of climb then, say, Mt. Shuksan or Eldorado Peak.

 

Carrying packs will be the least of their worries, but these guys will want their clients to be in good shape and they are going to want to teach them a little about climbing before they make the trip. I guided a complete novice up that route (a "climbing partner" I recruited at the youth hostel) and determined, in hindsite, that I had no business doing so.

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Dalius, the climb actually went well and we made reasonable time, but had anything gone wrong we would have been in a world of hurt!!!

 

(A pick fell out of my Hummingbird on the summit so we had only three tools between the two of us, but he couldn't have downclimbed anyway so I simply lowered him to the end of the rope, had him hammer in a picket, and then I downclimed six or eight times.)

 

Anyway, somebody ought to contact the guy and maybe make some $ or an interesting contact in exchange for making a training hike.

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