Epics!

[Off_White]

It gets worse than that. Wasn't it at Bachelor where some poor guy dug a snowcave into the plowed wall of the parking lot and had a whirling blades of death type snowblower come along and devour him in the night?

[Stefan]

In my low 20’s and starting on this climbing thing I went with a partner to do Hall Peak just outside of Silverton up the Mountain Loop Highway in June of one year. We parked at the Big Four parking lot and we got a non alpine start. We started up and of course came through the ruthless tangle of Pacific Yew trees. For those of you who do not know, the Pacific Yew tree is the most difficult type of brush in the Northwest to get through—more difficult than Devil’s Club, and of the ubiquitous Slide Alder, and Vine Maple--in fact the yew tree is associated with death in mythology due to its poisonous nature. It took a bit of time to get through the yew section and we did find some rappel slings, which made us happy somebody else had a low IQ as us. After the yew tree mess we wound our way to the top of Hall Peak seeing a bobcat.

 

It was late, and we needed to get down before dark and a decent time or our wives were going to call search and rescue. So we thought it would be faster to go down the north side to Silverton and hitch a ride to the Big Four parking lot. So we went down.

 

I don’t know how we did it, but we had to start doing rappels. We had to beat the darkness encroaching. We moved fast at setting up the rappels but we were inefficient due to the amount of brush we were rappelling through in the middle of the north face of Hall. On the second rappel, I lost my wedding ring somewhere in the middle of the face. The fourth rappel we were tired, and the sun had it last gasp, but I could see we were close to the bottom. I couldn’t see below me due to the brush and I did not know if the ropes would reach. I threw the ropes, and went rappelling over, not knowing how far down I could go, but I just went for it. The ropes did not reach the bottom. However they stopped right in the middle of a cedar tree with an 8” diameter trunk that was sticking nearly perpendicular out of the rock face about 40 feet above the bottom of the face. If the ropes were 10 feet to either side, we would not have made this tree, or rappel. We hung on to that tree for the final rappel. It would have been funny to see to people hanging on to a tree about 40 feet above the ground. We got down. Now it was completely dark.

 

Take out the headlamps. Only one, and it was fading…Then we had to go out via Silver Gulch. For those of you who do not know, Silver Gulch is a Washington State Slide Alder tree farm. Now try negotiating through Slide Alder in the dark with one headlamp between the two of you, getting worried your wife will call Search and Rescue on you.

 

We got out to Silverton at 1:00a.m. and we were able to hitch a ride from some gangly looking teenagers and to a phone around 2:00a.m. to let the wives know that we were out. The wives had indeed called Search and Rescue about an hour earlier.

 

The epic part comes into play when you know you can make it due to the conditions, but you aren’t going to make the “time” and the wife gets worried—that feeling makes the time feel like days.

 

[wayne]

Thanks for your stories, I used a few and there is room for maybe a couple more. Its been a fun project. Here is the page, thanks