Mount Saint Helens, 4/14/2012

~11 miles / 6:15 / ~5500′, with Kate, Jarkko, and Jon, via the Worm Flows route. A perfect spring day, with views of Mounts Hood, Adams, Rainier, and Jefferson above a cloud layer at around 3000′. We climbed the left of the two prominent parallel ridges in the first photo, and skied down the gully between them. As we approached the crater rim (at 8365′), we were treated to the mesmerizing display of plumes of snow shooting up at regular intervals from beneath the cornice. The snow was willful at first, but quickly became soft and consistent as we descended, and was a blast to ski.

Mount Tapochau, 1555′

Mount Tapochau (myriad spellings; on older maps, a ‘k’ gets slipped in there) is the highest point on the island of Saipan in the Mariana Islands, at 1555’ asl. Yet the peak (an upthrust of ancient coral) has a grandeur that belies its stature. Saipan is a small oceanic island, and so to stand on Mount Tapochau’s summit is to be the highest point on the horizon in a seemingly infinite ocean, with a view of the island’s every contour, privy to the spectacle of an ever-unfolding tapestry of tropical weather and light playing across its green and textured body, and over the sea beyond.

Historically, Mount Tapochau is significant for the brutal battle and months of ensuing guerilla fighting that took place on its flanks during World War II, as the American invasion force strove to retake the island from the Japanese. On the high pleateau below the summit, a swordgrass (Micanthus floridus) savannah became known as Death Valley, and with its solemn memorial plaques and Catholic shrine, it’s a melancholy place. The cliffs that flank the mountain are home to a healthy population of Mariana swiftlets (Aerodramus bartschi) which flock in undulating clouds of tiny black bodies, and below that cling fragments of native karst forest, a stunted habitat dominated by the tree genera Premna, Aglaia, Cynometra, and Psychotria, among others. As most of the original vegetation of Saipan was decimated during the war and subsequently replaced by the exotic legume Leuceana leucocephala (known locally as tangantangan), these cliff-band forests are the last representatives of the island’s ecological past.

And of course, Mount Tapochau is a good thing to run up. The summer I worked in the Marianas our field house on Saipan was about three miles and 800’ to the summit via a rugged limestone road — a stretch that could be repeated without getting too bored, and satisfying daily summit that made up for a paucity of runnable trails elsewhere. The first time I made the trip with my friend Jonnie we ended up watching the sunset from the summit as a storm blew in with fiercer and fiercer winds and dark clouds and pelting rain, us shirtless and in our split shorts, and Jonnie grinned and remarked how remarkable it was to be so exposed to the elements and yet so comfortable. We pushed the pace back down the road and each furrow in the gravel turned into a milky rivulet as the deluge hit us, the air so saturated that we seemed to be at risk of drowning.

Bennet’s Pass, 2/19/12

12 miles / 3500′ / 6:08. With Jarkko.

White River Canyon, 2/11/12

9 miles / 4800′ / 3:59. With Jarkko (as featured in all four frames below). Conditions were variable; the weather, gorgeous.

Mount Hood Ascent Attempt, 2/5/12

The forecasts (meteorological and avalanche both) were perfect and we made the decision to try and summit Mt. Hood (11249′) a few days before the attempt, triggering a frenzy of planning and scrambling for gear. Five of us left Portland around 0130 on Sunday. We made a tragic miscalculation about the availability of fast-food coffee in Damascus, OR, and had to sleep in the proverbial bed of gas-station joe, but otherwise, things went smoothly enough. By 0330, we were moving up Palmer Glacier from Timberline  Lodge (5960′). It was monotonous, even on skis, but with the massif growing ever larger against the stars and our shadows stretching away to the east under the moonlight, there wasn’t anything to complain about, really. At the top of Palmer, those of us on skis dismounted and we donned our crampons and started the slow ascent and soon enough the sun was rising as well, a glorious pink to purple to navy gradient from across the Great Basin that revealed (in a satisfying irony) that the normally-sunny expanse of Eastern Oregon was drowned in cloud while normally-sodden Western Oregon was absolutely clear, with the lights of Portland and the farmland of the Willamette Valley and finally the stark relief of the Coast Range at the terminus of the continent, all visible. To our south, the glaciated peaks of Mount Jefferson and the Three Sisters were enjoying dawns of their own, sentinels of the lower Cascades, sometimes clearcut and sometimes dense with ancient firs and rhododendrons. Above us, the constellations receded along with the glimmer of climber’s headlamps, and by the time we reached the base of the Hogsback (~10600′) it was brilliantly sunny. We climbed to its top before deciding the hour was too late for all of us to comfortably continue across the rapidly warming and slide-prone final pitches of the climb at our current pace, turning around as a group. Our descent was leisurely, somewhat drunk on altitude and sun. But we were shaken out of whatever complacency might have taken hold by witnessing two accidents, one harrowing. Our rear guard, Nate, was the first to reach both victims, and ended up staying with the second until she was evacuated. Rattled, tired, and grateful, the rest of us left for home, Hood receding to its usual place on the Portland skyline. We’ll be back.

Mount Hood Environs, 2/4/12

Dungeness Spit, 1/28/12

Mount Mansfield, 1/9/12

Camel’s Hump

Camel’s Hump is Vermont’s third-highest peak, at 4083 feet, and near and dear to my heart. It is surely the state’s finest summit, iconic in profile and its highest undeveloped mountain. Here in frigid New England, 4000 feet is enough to clear tree line, and so Camel’s Hump is crowned with one of the state’s few patches of alpine tundra. Immediately below, a krumholtz of red spruce and balsam fir drops into a drenched and gnarled elfin forest, lair of Bicknell’s Thrush, one of Vermont’s ornithological specialities, and whose wintering grounds in the mountains of Hispañola are an odd geographic parallel to this range. Below the evergreens, northern hardwood forest, in some patches quite mature, spreads out on the mountain’s flanks. On nearby Bald Hill, spacious groves of birches allow for excellent backcountry skiing, and in the summer, brigades of clipper-wielding enthusiasts keep undergrowth at bay, the ethics of which I am conflicted over, but whose efforts I nonetheless (hypocritically) enjoy the fruits of. (The most famous skiing in the area, however, is the annual Camel’s Hump Challenge, a high-country circumnavigation of the mountain.)

Since returning to Vermont for the holidays, training for Wilson Creek Frozen 50k has mostly been relegated to snowy dirt road runs, complemented by a few laps of skiing on Stark Mountain, but I’ve been up Camel’s Hump regularly to maintain some relictual climbing strength in my legs. Of these excursions, two in particular have been notable. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, it was rewarding to finally make the trip solely under my own power. From the door of my house, a trip to the summit of Camel’s Hump and back is 25.5 miles and about 4300 feet of vertical gain, mostly on hilly dirt roads through farmland before a steady and steep climb to the trailhead. The second was an earnest personal record attempt on the Burrows Trail — of several routes to the summit, this is the most direct and most popular, ascending some 2200 vertical feet in a mere 2.4 miles. With Kasie Enman training on the mountain, I’m sure there’s an impressive record on the hypothetical books, but on a personal level, I had only vague benchmarks in mind, knowing :45 to the summit and :30 on descent was typical for my more casual outings. The trail, alas, was mostly a sheet of ice, and my microspikes being somewhat ill-fitting, I wasn’t expecting much. I started much too quickly, and almost blew up after about 10 minutes, merely hanging as the trail steepened and I was reduced to a painful power hike. I reached the summit in 38:44, and descended in 20:52 for a round trip of 59:36 with a minute or so lost to futzing with layers. Squeaking under the hour mark was something I had thought I would only be able to manage in dry conditions during the summer, and so despite losing time to ice on the descent, I was happy with the run. One of the fascinating things about any sort of record attempt is that so much lies in the art of its execution rather than merely fitness; in the rhythm of exertion during the climb and descent. In this respect, I don’t think I nailed it, and so I’ll be interested to see how this number might change during better conditions the next time I’m back in Vermont.