I failed at summitting Mt Adams this year. Adams is (for most people) a two-day summit, and I had been looking forward to doing this climb all summer. Granted, this was two months ago at this point, but it was very sad. I got altitude problems at our overnight campsite (called “the lunch counter” – lunch not included), and then was unable to continue after only a thousand feet or so the next day. I admitted to our hike leader that I wasn’t going to make it up (as if it wasn’t obvious from my falling further and further behind), who agreed that I wasn’t going to and we should head back down. The rest of the group – four guys in all – headed up, but the two of us started to turn back down. This alone was sad enough, but it was the next bit that was awful and embarrassing.

This past summer was unusually hot and came unusually early: the result being that the mountain was nearly-bare for our ascent. We did it without crampons, scrambling over the rocks just to the side of the remaining packed snow above the lunch counter. However, our camp leader brought crampons anyway and after I had decided to turn back, loaned me them to get back down to camp faster. I had never used crampons before and despite my friend giving me instructions and help with a couple of steps, within two minutes of stepping out onto the snow, I planted my foot, tried to turn it (feet in crampons don’t turn), and fell down and twisted my ankle.

Several expletives later, and after getting my bearings, I tried to get up off the snow. My friend was beside himself, certain it was his fault despite however many times I told him it wasn’t. But I was not walking long distances anytime soon. I found it impossible to put much weight on it, and I hop-moved off the packed snow and back to the rocks, where we made ourselves warm and tried to figure out what to do. After thirty minutes to an hour I was still unable to put weight on it and we called for assistance. It sounds simple but we spent a good fifteen or twenty minutes trying to get a cell signal, and then asking the emergency responders on the other side what to do, then waiting for a call back, then arranging for a ranger to come up and take a look, then waiting for another call back, and on and on and on.

So we waited. Nerve-wrackingly. It is cold to wait on the side of a mountain for hours (we were at about 10,800 feet if I recall). But we couldn’t've asked for better weather to have this happen in: clear skies and sunny, so we were at least heated by the sun. I took out my ankle and it was a little swollen (not as bad as I imagined – I had an identical injury on the same ankle the previous month playing tennis, and had a swollen knot the size of my fist for two days afterward) but it was still too sensitive to walk on. Eventually the ranger came up, and the rest of our party met us on their way down. The ranger looked at my ankle and tried to dress it but couldn’t do much. It would be tedious, long, and difficult to get a group up the uneven rock field to carry me off, and it would take at least half a day to get them in place, meaning it would be night or the next morning before the team could be up. Feeling the little nudge – or giant cattle prod – in my head not to be a wimp and be pulled off unless I were in the worst, most debilitating pain of my life, which this was decidedly not, I said that I would make it down. We made our way back to our campsite by glissading down the strip of packed snow that we had followed beside much of the way up. Besides being fast (and fun), glissading had the benefit of keeping my weight off my ankle for much of the way down.

We made it back to camp and my compatriots, as well as the ranger (who followed and assisted us all the way back down), were noble enough to take most of the weight of my things on their backs instead of mine, and we made our way down the five or six miles of trail to the parking lot. And I made it just fine – well, until the next day when my ankle swelled back up and hurt worse than the day before. But civilization has much more ibuprofen than the mountain wilderness.

What’s the moral of the story? A couple things:

1. To use a phrase I have only recently become acquainted with, I am athletically retarded. I come from a long lineage of tall, athletically retarded but athletically determined (and hence, accident-prone) men, and I am no exception. I know I have thin and fairly weak ankles and now I wear an ankle sleeve brace on the troublemaker whenever I know I’m going to be doing something demanding.

2. Rangers are awesome.

3. The five other guys I went with are hosses. Seriously. I wasn’t the only injured one, another friend had terribly blistered toes (not normal-blistered, made-my-skin-crawl-when-I-saw-it blistered) from his boots most of the way up and down. Another one had been on who-knows-how-many hikes and summits this year alone, and still another had summitted Kilimanjaro. And they were all both good company and kind.

4. I am trying again. Don’t know if it’ll be next year or not but I will summit it. I was less than 2000 (vertical) feet short of the top this year! Just because I’m athletically retarded doesn’t mean I’m gonna let that stop me – within reasonable limits. And next year I will know how to use crampons appropriately and go earlier in the season when there is more snow for a smoother ascent and descent.

What, I have a blog?! Yes I know it’s been quiet lately…

Here are some assorted pictures from around Seattle over the summer. Most of them are from Mt Rainier because, honestly, Mt Rainier is just awesome.