Posts tagged climbing in the Pacific North West

I always get a bit of a nervous feeling as trip planning comes to an end and all that is left is the trip itself. At that point you just have to hope you did your homework and roll with it because you know that an adventure is almost sure to ensue.

Well now that I am just a few weeks out from a 4-week trip to Washington where my climbing partners and I have planned a rather hefty schedule of routes to bag on glaciated, hopefully still icy peaks, I am excited to see what we can tackle and if our training has paid off. But after all training is what this article is about so I thought I would share how we have trained for our plans of 5 peaks in just under 3 weeks in a light and fast style. 

For sometime now I have been against carrying the whole kitchen and going expedition style on any climb especially when it can be done in alpine style or with a light & fast mindset. I also find myself not attracted to the standard mountaineering routes on popular mountains where the struggle becomes more with fighting the crowds than the actual climb itself, especially since many of these routes involve more of a hike than climb. So when setting off for mountains like Rainier, and Baker my crew looked at what routes we could do to use or technical skills and how we could get away from the crowds. We saw that some of these routes would be a little more demanding and that we would have to move quickly to deal with conditions. So we started training early. This included building up leg muscle to carry all the necessary gear, getting acclimated to highly aerobic exercise at elevation, becoming comfortable with your climbing partners in multiple situations and figuring out a system that allowed us to carry just what we need without unnecessary bulk and then fine tuning this with lightweight gear.

We started out by hiking up hill with water bottles in our packs about 3 months before the trip. Our weights varied but it was about getting stronger not seeing how miserable you could make yourself from the start, training should be fun and even if it is physically demanding you should be excited to improve. These hikes were our short burst workouts that lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours done twice a week and our packs started around 20lbs and moved up towards 45 lbs. When we reached the top of our hills we would “water the plants around us” so that we did not have to carry the full weight back down and could save abusing our knees for the trip. Then once a week we would have a longer trip that would be our endurance workout. Often times these consisted of much less weight and would be much more exciting activates that you looked forward to such as climbing a coulior, rock climbing with a hike in, or overnight camping. We are fortunate to live in Colorado so we could continually workout at altitude similar to that of the N.W. or above it. Along with this we knew that our skills needed to be honed in, that if we were carrying just our essential gear we needed to know how to use it quickly and any possibilities of limitations. For this we would go over our rope systems once a week or so. Now not only are these systems fresh in our minds and we have complete confidence in our climbing partners but we have also been able to tweak things so we can help to eliminate any surprises. The last thing that we sorted out was teaching our bodies how to deal with early mornings and long pushes, the key to Alpine Style climbing. Although this is something that you just have to go out and do I have seen that the more you do it the more adjusted to the strain your body becomes and those long miserable grinds turn into fun full day missions that don’t leave you completely dead the next day, which is essential for multi-day climbs. Part of the success for this is learning that you need to pre-hydrate and that it is a process to start days before not the morning of. Also eating good nurturance packed food leading up to big early morning, all day pushes helps your body have calories to burn. The other parts become a mental game; you have to learn to operate early in the morning before the sun is up warming you, you have to learn to work tired or somewhat dehydrated, you need to learn that you can push yourself a little bit farther to get out before dark if you need to. All of these situations are not the perfect conditions to be in but with practice you will learn how to work through them, how your body operates and what you personally need to do for yourself to have a fun time and most importantly stay safe.

Now that this training is almost over and the trip is weeks away I am feeling much stronger and the long days have become easier. But for me the training was not miserable we figured out a schedule that would be fun, contained exciting adventures that not only helped us work on necessary skills but also helped us build up strength and endurance. Also I found it very important for everyone in the group to come up with ideas for these adventures. Sometimes it was something that they had wanted to do for a long time, or a route that they created for a long hike, but by involving everyone it not only allowed individual input it also gave us a great opportunity for team building.

Well I guess I will let you know how it goes. The itinerary looks like this: Rainier-Kautz route, Culchuck Mt-North Buttress coulior, Dragons Tail-Triple Coulior, Shuksan- North Face, Baker – North Face. Hopefully we can skirt around some rainstorms and meet our goals. Look for trip reports when we return in July.

Cheers!