May 12th, 2002 - What a beautiful day! Today I've been to heaven and it lies just above Paradise. Eight of us made an attempt to get to Camp Muir (10,000 feet) on Mount Rainier. The weather could not have been more perfect. The mountain and mother nature truly blessed us today, and we thank them both. We started from the parking lot at 10:30 and headed up. Doug, Kathleen, Tamara, Rick, Rick, Wynn, Armond and I in our plastic boots and shorts headed on up. We stopped just below the infamous chute (see pictures page) for a quick break before making an assault on this bad boy. About 800 or so of vertical feet. It was pretty brutal, but I survived. We continued on past Pebble Creek (last weeks destination) and stopped at about 7,000 feet for lunch. My quadriceps (big muscles in the uppper front of your leg) started cramping just before we stopped. I was hoping that a bananna, some water, and some rest would cure them. Unfortunately it didn't. When we started up again, my legs were cramping pretty badly. I knew I wasn't destined for Muir today, but I did make it to 7,900 feet. Other than my legs cramping, I felt pretty awesome. My breathing was good, I didn't have a headache or nausea. I felt really good. I'm confident I can make it to Muir if I can keep my legs from cramping. AND if I can do that, I've no doubt, the top is within reach. After sitting on my butt for about an hour and a half at 7900' basking in the sun, it was time to put on the pants and do some glissading! If you've never done this, you're really missing out! Basically you hold your ski poles (or ice axe) across your body and use them as a brake. You sit down on the snow and and slide down on your butt. Let me tell you, the chute was a LOT more fun going down than it was going up! About 2 minutes to come down versus a half hour or more to go up! After getting to the bottom of the chute, we strapped on our snow shoes for the rest of the journey back to the parking lot. I learned that downhill, snow shoes, and John don't mix very well. I had an absolute BLAST! Thanks to everyone for making it so GREAT! And thanks Kathleen for pretending you had a headache and hanging out with me at 7900'.
May 4th, 2002 - FINALLY!!! We're training on Rainier! I must finally be getting there! My dreams are now of me standing on the top of Rainier. AWESOME. I am unbelivably psyched! Today we attempted to get to Pebble Creek on Rainier. This is the route we will follow on the day of the climb. Paradise -> Pebble Creek -> Camp Muir. Today we made it to about 6,600 feet . . . about 600 feet shy of Pebble Creek. Almost made it to Panorama point, although I'm not sure how panoramic it would have been, our visibility was pretty crummy. Lots of FOG. The snow stayed away though, and I had a BLAST! I had my first experience with Plastic Boots. These are about the most comfortable boots I've ever worn. When you see them, they look like Ski boots, but they're MUCH more flexible. They have a soft inner liner that is removable, because of this it is almost impossible to get a blister because any slippage is done by the inner boot on the outer boot, and NOT on your ankle. Totally cool. My feet felt WONDERFUL when we were done. I think I may make this my next gear purchase. REI is having a sale in a couple of weeks, so it may be worth it to look into it then. Chad and I rented our plastic boots and snow shoes from REI on Friday night. Unfortunately my snow shoes broke about 1/2 mile into the hike Saturday, so I was hiking in just the plastic boots. Which was totally fine since the snow was pretty hard. Had a few instances where I sunk in to my knee, but other than that I felt great! One of our climbers, Karen Derrig had a birthday on Sunday (Happy Birthday Karen) and Dave, her husband, brought up some snowballs and candles and we all sang happy birthday to her. How cool is that? She got a cool Garmin Etrex Vista GPS for her birthday. Nice work Dave! All in all, this was a VERY enjoyable outing for the group. It was nice to finally get to play on Rainier. And with my annual pass, I can come back anytime I want to. Teri mentioned she wants to try snow shoeing, so maybe in the next month or so, I'll drag her up there as well. I've posted some pictures to my pictures page, but Chad has some WONDERFUL pics on his page. There are even some cool ones of me. I particularly like this one, Chad and I looking like official moutaineers. Then Chad being the artist that he is, took that picture and imposed it on a close up of my glacier glasses and made this one. VERY cool. I can't wait to get back to Rainier! Two weeks from now we try for Pebble creek again. Can't wait!!!