TR: Guye Peak Solo, Jan 7, 2012

[PsychedWill]

TR: Guye Peak Winter Solo, Jan 7, 2012

 

 

Bob was lying motionless before me. I knew the descent would be hard for him, hell, if I could even rouse him, he'd say that it was damned impossible, that I should just go alone, and let him fall away into dream and darkness.

 

But, I wasn't going to let that happen. I had to cajole Rob to get off of his couch and help me find something in his basement.

 

"Ugh,.bro, I'm in pain right now, do you really need those snowshoes?" Rob isn't a climber, he doesn't understand. The Cascades in January? Phfff, of course I needed snowshoes.

 

"Yeah dude, they're pretty essential."

 

Getting off the couch was an effort for Rob, and getting down the stairs caused his face to contort into a grimace. Rob is one of my best friend in Washington and my boss. I'm his right-hand guy, we get stuff done. I'm just a kid, but Rob isn't old by any means, but at 34, his youth is hidden by a horribly crooked gait. 15 years of masonry took their toll on Rob's back before the sluggish economy forced him to find a better job. But it was too late for his spine, which turns suddenly right halfway down his vertebrae column. New job, better healthcare, there's been good news recently. But his rehabilitation is a long journey, and he's just getting started.

 

We find the snowshoes under a bag of golf clubs. They're surprisingly nice, an aluminum framed model from Red Feather in Leadville, CO. Their weight is phenomenal, perfect for light and fast travel. Rob said that he got them from a rental property his wife managed when an old resident was foreclosed on.

 

That night I packed. Baselayer, softshells, synthetic fleece for layers; semi-ridged crampons, ice axe and one leashless ice tool for the climbing, and my new snowshoes for all the walking. I don't have much of an appetite on climbs, so food was pretty paltry, a couple of Mojo bars and Gatorade, with, of course a Red Bull thrown in for morale. I thought about taking a rope and small rack to self-belay. Then I decided against the rack and kept the rope for any possible rappelling, but pretty soon I threw the rope aside too.

 

The next morning my coffee kicked in at about 7:30 as I drove past North Bend on I-90. The day was crystal blue and the growing light cast a thousand amber tones into the sky above the Cascades. My psyche was overthrowing, I cranked the Grateful Dead on the stereo to calm myself. But for the rest of the drive I was in a flow, I just knew that I was going to have an awesome day in the mountains.

 

Snoqualmie Pass is bumping, It seems like everyone with a penchant for skiing in Seattle had come out to enjoy this gorgeous day. I felt a bit ashamed that the soccer mom's and I had a similar definition of an "alpine start" this morning.

 

I struggled to keep my eyes on the road as I pulled into the Alpental resort parking lot, the morning light on my chosen objective was too beautiful.

 

 

Guye Peak's Southwest face rose to five thousand-something feet in front of me in a solid mass of Batholithic rock cloaked with snow, ice and pine. For a boy raised in the hills and holler's of Southeast Tennessee, the sight was quite impressive. I strapped on snowshoes in a stairwell of the Alpental Lodge and started stomping my way towards this beautiful mountain. As I walked, I realized that I hadn't really done way much research on the climb. But, I reckoned that in a way, that made the thing so exciting. Ahead I saw a mong, clean gulley splitting the SW slopes of Guye. The terrain looked really fun, and was enfiladed by a sheer cliff band that looked free of hanging ice. I decided to go and climb that.

 

 

I broke through the pine into a bare slope that gradually steepened as I moved up towards the gully. Along the way I passed a minefield of avalanche debris and stopped to take a picture. A hundred meters past the debris, the powder abruptly turned to high-angle neve.

 

 

I kicked out a step and swapped snowshoes for crampons and ski poles for my ice axe and ice tool. I was able to kick easy steps for the next fifty meters and used the picks sporadically for balance. But then I came to a rock band split by a half-frozen stream. The rock was my height, crumbly and coated with verglas. But, with the help of a snow-covered shrubbery an an ice tool sunk into some plastic ice, I pulled the bulge and got into the best part of my day.

 

The next couple hundred meters of super-rad snow, ice, snow/ice (snice?) and icy rock were a delight to climb. I mostly gripped ice tool and axe near the picks and punched them into the snice as my crampons broke through nearly past my secondary points. Occasion would arise where I would sink both picks overhead, and dance up thin ice on front points, but they were short sections with thick ice above and soft snow below. I lost myself in climbing the gully, and after some time I looked down and was shocked at how far up I was, and how steep the terrain below me looked. I couldn't help but chuckle at how terrified my mom would be if she saw her little boy up here.

 

The ground leveled off into a more gentle slope covered by deep powder snow. I put my snowshoes back on and went for some distance in the powder. Even with snowshoes, I was leaving deep tracks. Soon the slope steepened, and I stopped for some food in a copse of trees that offered an unimpeded view south where Mt. Rainier stood clear and elegant with her head covered in opaque gray clouds. When I fished my Builder Bar from my pack, I found it frozen solid and instead downed the slushy contents of my Red Bull can, and as I eyed the terrain before me, couldn't help but with I had a splash of Stoya to throw in it.

 

 

Blocking my path was a multi-tiered waterfall rising in steps another hundred meters up the mountain. Halfway down the fall, the ice was split by a dihedral of black rock sending two separate tendrils snaking down to the powder at my feet.

 

The tendril of ice to climber's left looked the most promising. It's slope looked low-angle and coated with thick ice.The day was still young, but from my vantage I couldn't tell how far from the summit I was, so I was wary to stop moving for too long. My gloves were cold and wet, and my numb fingers fumbled with my crampon straps and boot laces.

 

 

I delicately tapped the pick of my ice tool into the flow and, finding it solid, I thunked my ice axe in hard after it. The ice was tricky to read under it's shroud of powder,and I held my stomach in my throat as I tested each frontpoint and tool placement two or three times before weighting it.

 

I hadn't warmed my gloves enough at my last breather, and soon my fingers went numb with the cold and pain. I wanted very badly to be off of this mountain, by a fire maybe, with a pretty girl and a wool blanket. But I imagined that probably wouldn't make me a very happy human in the long run, and besides, once my core warmed up, I knew that the feeling would return.

 

As the ice flow leveled off, the blood returned to my fingers in a biting case of the screaming barfies, but my joy at surmounting the hazard was so profound, that I paid my fingers little notice. The ice was gone, replaced by a thick-crusted snow that I sprinted up, kicking steps and gripping my axe and tool just under their picks.

 

I continued on in that fashion for a time, until the neve gave way to thick powder, and I was compelled to switch crampons for snowshoes. The terrain was settling out, and I sensed that I was on the summit ridge, a few yards later a highway of footprints in the snow leading up towards a prominent confirmed both that pressing suspicion, and another that was in the back of my mind. I hadn't climbed climbed the regular SW Gully route, these people had. I had done something completely different.

 

The revelation played a drama of conflicting emotions in my mind as I followed the footpath in the snow. On one hand, I was proud of myself. I had covered what, though certainly not new terrain, was ground that saw very sporadic traffic. I had given myself a wilderness experience unsullied by any sign of other humanity on route. And certainly, my path seemed more technical than the SW Gully route descriptions I had read, and was certainly a more trilling adventure.

 

But at the same time, the gaffe exposed my immaturity as a mountaineer. Mine was a bold day, but I was unprepared, and allowed myself to prance around in a dangerous mountain-range without sufficient skill to extricate myself from a potentially catastrophic situation.

 

But these thoughts were a bummer, and soon they faded away from my conscious as I suddenly realized that I couldn't climb any further.

 

 

 

I was on the summit of Guye Peak I looked out onto the world, Rainier lorded over the horizon as the sun's lights danced majestically over her glaciated flanks, while I-90 split the mountains east and west, and the skiers of Alpental scurried about like ants.

 

The exposure of the summit was daunting, and I struggled with vertigo as I snapped a panorama of pictures.Then hastily retreated back onto the wide snowfield below and began to pick my way down the mountain.I spent the next hour and a half, maybe two, snowshoeing through the pines and glissading down every clear slope I could find.

 

Soon, I heard dogs barking, and the squeals of school-age children. I came out of the woods onto a smooth slope of snow where families sledded, built snowmen and threw volleys of snowballs at one another. I found the scene surreal, two hours ago I was a soloist standing alone on an alpine summit, and now I shielded the pick of my ice axe as children shot past me at speed on grocery-store sleds.

 

At the Alpental bar, a friendly fellow asked me how my ski day went. For a moment, I contemplated a long-winded, but admittedly honest answer, but decided against it.

 

"Well dude, to be honest, I'm not much of a skier, I guess you could say that I'm just scared of going that fast."

Edited January 19, 2012 by PsychedWill