| Summary | |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2006-01-29 23:58:03 UTC-0500 |
| Description | Steve Block, Pavel Gorelik, Chris Hill, Michael Oltmans, Michael Scharfstein
We set out from Boston Friday night and hit the Glen Boulder trailhead around midnight. We hiked till 2:30am and were in camp and asleep by 3. Three hours later, on Saturday morning, we woke up to battle the 50-60 mph wind gusts on the way up to the Boulder and eventually beyond it to Slide Peak and Boott Spur. That afternoon we descended down to the Lakes of the Clouds, slid around on the frozen lakes and built up some wind protection for our tents. Within an hour the snow anchors were as solid as if they had been in concrete, the guy lines were super tight and the tents seemed ready to take a fair bit of beating from the wind. We settled down to make dinner on the stoves in the vestibules, but we had a snow storm inside. The snow was blowing underneath the fly and causing havoc with one of the stoves. Each time we'd open the tent door the snow flurries from the vestibule would blow inside the tent and instantly melt over all our gear; we had water everywhere. The moisture on the walls was from from the steam of cooking; the puddles at our feet were from the snow that came in, and the rest was damp from the leaky floor. Still, none of us wanted to cook outside in the real wind. We went through the cycle of stiring the food, adding some snow to melt, then retreating back inside the tent for a couple minutes. We repeated this over and over for about three hours, but by 9pm we managed to finish dinner, melted enough snow to fill up all the nalgenes and got ready for bed. The snow bank where we had carved out nooks for our tents, however, started encroaching on us during the night. It gained about 2 feet in height and moved 3 feet towards one of the tents. Steve and Mike S. would have been in trouble had they not moved their tent further out of the way partly through the evening -- a brave operation indeed. By morning we had about 4 inches of precipitation inside the vestibules with all our pots and pans hiding underneath; the tent walls became solid from all the snow that had piled up against them overnight, and the fly was drum tight. The wind at the summit of Washington that night was 70 mph, yet our camp was reasonably sheltered and quite strong. Nonetheless, hearing roaring above and watching the steam in the tent shift in discrete steps as the walls flexed gave me the creeps and made me wonder how much abuse these shelters could actually tolerate. Sunday morning was dead calm; we woke up in time to catch the would be sunrise, but everything was overcast. Breakfast consisted of a pot of hot chocolate and two dozen eggs. In a couple hours we dug out our tents, broke everything down and set out for Washington. We reached the summit around noon with beautiful views of the presidentials both north and south, and barely any wind at the top. The place was teeming with backpackers, skiers and observatory visitors. After taking the required topless summit photo we made some nerd-pride art and headed down the Lion's Head trail. A couple sweet self-arrests aptly demonstrated by Steve (next time we'll do head first on your back) provided the entertainment on the way to treeline. Once below, we dodged some sketchy steep rock/ice and finally came out at Pinkham at sunset |