Climbing

What If: Mount Rainier Eruption

/ Andrew Szalay / 2 Comments

One feature of Mount Rainier that I haven’t covered yet and think is fascinating is its volcanic nature. More specifically, what would happen if it erupted before some of us ever get to stand on top.

The living model is Mount Saint Helens, which — as you probably know — erupted on May 1980. The eruption caused lahars (mudflows) to surge through a significant portion of the state of Washington. The news footage from the event makes me appreciate the various powers of earth, just as do other phenomena like glaciers, mountain slopes, rain storms and even sunshine. They all have a significant impact on the landscape.

While most think of lava, ash, and pumice as the biggest threats from Mount Rainier, it’s actually flooding and lahars. In fact, just a pressure explosion from trapped underground steam — rather than a major eruption involving lava — would melt the vast snow and ice reservoirs on the mountain sides in the form of glaciers, snowfall and snow fields. One of the largest glaciers, the Emmons alone is six miles long, two wide and several hundred feet deep. That’s a lot of water!

The glacier melting and mixing with the soil and rock on the mountain’s slopes would quickly overwhelm the surrounding area. It’s estimated that Orting, Washington would be struck by mudflows in one-to-two hours after a steam eruption. The town could be hit by a lahar 30 feet deep and be left buried in 15 feet of moist soil and debris. Though other estimates claim that Rainier has potential to send lahars that are 100 feet deep and they might move at a rate of 45 to 50 miles per hour.

Population-wise, the three-plus million residents around Puget Sound are the most at-risk from the mudflows that could come down the Carbon, Payallup, Nisqually and Green Rivers. 150,000 people live atop previous mudflows, and some of them having done excavating for a variety of reasons have said that they have dug up entire tree trunks and stumps in the ground. If an eruption were to occur, this group or residents would have to be notified to evacuate as quickly as possible as there will be little-to-no warning of an eruption of any kind based on current forecasting and technology. To help prevent greater impact to more people, there are attempts to limit community development in the at-risk paths.

In the end, Rainier won’t remain over two-and-a-half miles high. The Seattle skyline will have been changed and one of our classic climbing destinations will have been forever changed. While the odds are low for an eruption anytime soon, according to experts, when the event comes, it will be powerful.

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Sources: 1) Filley, Bette, The Big Fact Book About Mount Rainier: Fascinating Facts, Records, Lists, Topics, Characters and Stories, Dunamis House, 1996; and 2) “Mount Rainier: Learning to Live with Volcanic Risk,” NationalAtlas.gov.

Climbing Competitions: The Good and the Bad

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to my Canadian friends and Happy Columbus Day to my fellow Americans.

I followed this past weekend’s International Federation of Sport Climbers (IFSC) World Cup through Facebook and Twitter thanks to the coverage by the American Alpine Club (AAC), a main sponsor, and Climbing magazine. I’ve never followed one before and it was a neat introduction to sport climbing, though my opinion of climbing competitions hasn’t changed too much.

Climbing is a skill and a good method of improving that skill is through competition. Historically this has been done through self-challenge and climbers pushing outside of their comfort zone in front of their peers. Charlie Houston, Yvon Chouinard, Royal Robbins and others are good examples climbers that have done this. Achieving a first ascent or putting up a new route on a natural feature was an accomplishment that often stood on its own merits, though recognition was often limited to other knowledgeable climbers.

Organized competitions, on the other hand, offer a great opportunity to measure one’s skills against another climbers’. Many skill-based occupations have competitions that pit one specialist against another, such as fire fighters, pilots, chefs and so forth. Climbing is now no different.

However, climbing has long held the cultural place of being a space of semi-private accomplishments and that they are only a subject for insiders. As climbing has evolved and even expanded (thanks to gyms and sponsorships of athletes) the sport climbing arena has adopted a contrasting environment likened to high profile marathons, like the one in Chicago also this past weekend.

Climbing competitions certainly raise the bar for the competitors, but it’s important to remember that the accomplishments at comp events and the achievements on rock in the backcountry are very different. One is a wilderness experience and the other seems to be like being at a ski resort. Competitions play a unique role in the lives of some climbers, but for others it can be the antithesis of what climbing is really about.

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The Climbing Community and Its Many Parts

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

This past weekend I watched the television show The Good Wife with my family. In case you don’t know, it’s a court television show that centers around the wife of a politician. What interests me here is this week’s courtroom drama: It involved an Everest climber that died on the mountain but that might have lived hadn’t other climbers taken and removed his oxygen tank.

It seemed to be a takeoff on some of the current events from 2010 where stories of a climber, Peter Kinloch, stopped from suffering from temporary blindness and in need of help was left to die by other climbers. The media and blogs then claimed that climbers gunning for the summit ignored him completely, which does not appear to the case.

The take on the television show was rather entertaining and they took mountaineering seriously in this show. The terminology used was credible without being forced and thereby laughable by climbers. My singular moment of oh-gosh-they’re-trying-too-hard was when they brought in witnesses to talk about the incident. They got into the effects of altitude above 26,000 feet, which was fine, but then a seemingly affluent working professional and guided climber called Everest “my mountain” wistfully and made some comment speaking on behalf of the “climbing community.” It seemed forced and unnecessary for the show’s plot.

It also illustrated to me how complex and diverse the real climbing community really is, but that most of the public only really sees (and still don’t typically understand) the Everest guided-climbers illustrated in Into Thin Air, Jon Kraukauer’s book about the 1996 Everest disaster. The climbers in The Good Wife episode and in Into Thin Air were all primarily professional guides and clients on high altitude Himalayan peaks. If I chose to climb an objective like Gasherbrum II I would definitely be in this group on a client-guided trip. But this is only one portion of the climbing community and they don’t all tend to get along in regards to respect for their style of climbing.

As you know, there are many types of climbing that climbers engage in and various styles they prefer. Aside from strictly rock climbing, alpine climbing alone has its own factions and varying styles. For instance, contrast Alison Levine to James Pearson. Levine climbs established routes as a client like many of us in the mountaineering consumer market. She also speaks to non-climbing audiences regularly. Pearson seeks out unclimbed and rarely climbed routes and while he is known in climbing circles he is far from a household name anywhere.

In the Pearson example, he is pushing the limits of the sport. Levine uses the sport as a message platform. Both undoubtedly enjoy the self-challenge. But I hardly think that I will be able to sit down for a beer with both of them at the same time, let alone the same pub.

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Thank You, Walter Bonatti and Farewell

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I was on the subway on my way to work when I got the news. One of the world’s legendary mountaineers and climbing leaders has passed away. Walter Bonatti died on September 13, 2011. He was 81.

He was progressive in his climbs, often in the midst of controversy, and often lucky to survive. His routes range from the Alps to the Himalayas during its Golden Age.

Here is a selection of informed stories marking and celebrating the great Italian alpinist’s life and accomplishments:

While he is part of numerous stories of climbing, he wrote his own account of them too. Here is a link to his book, The Mountains of My Life.

Thank you for your inspiration, Walter Bonatti.

Kaltenbrunner Summits 8,000ers – Deserves More Celebration

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Shortly after the news was official, I announced through Facebook and Twitter that Austrian alpinist Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner has become the first woman to summit the world’s fourteen highest mountains (above 8,000 m./ 26,246 ft.). That feat alone is worth an accolade and a book deal these days, but Kaltenbrunner went a step further. She climbed these mountains without supplemental oxygen.

Mountaineering celebrates first the way baseball does; first pitch and first ascents; leaders in batting average and leaders in categories. Kaltenbrunner’s accomplishment has been sought after by men and women alike. While nearly 30 alpinists have topped out on all fourteen 8,000ers, only about a dozen – all of them previously men – have done so without using “gas.”

Gas is essential for climbers to get to that top. At higher altitudes, particularly above 6,000 meters, but also much lower, the lack of dense air can make mountaineers feel lethargic, similar to the feeling of a bad sinus congestion with sleepiness brought on from medication. Put into a fog that slows down reflexes and thinking processes, many climbers choose to use oxygen bottles to enhance their air density. In fact, some climbers find it necessary to use gas and would not be able to summit otherwise.

Earlier in climbing history, it was thought that it would be impossible for man to attain the summits of the Himalayas without gas. However, in 1978, Reinhold Messner showed the world that it was possible – through proper acclimatization and will power – to climb 8,000ers without, as Ed Viesturs put it, “cheating.” On May 8, 1978, Messner summited Everest completely under his own lung power.

It is unclear to me at this time whether Kaltenbrunner felt she was racing against other women to be first or had the ambition to be first. Regardless the title was clearly sought after. You may recall that in August 2010, South Korean female alpinist Oh Eun-Sun claimed that she summited Kanchenchunga (28,169 ft./8,586 m.), which if that attempt was not disputed by several reputable sources, would have made her the title holder.

Kaltenbrunner also deserves more attention. In North America, outside the climbing community, there has been very little coverage of Kaltenbrunner’s accomplishment and even less about who she is and how she got there. I suspect that it is her language and nationality that separates her from my English-speaking world. But as a woman and a climber, her story should be retold more broadly. Everyone can benefit.

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Sources: 1) “Gerlinde Kalkenbrunner Summits K2!” PlanetMountain.com, August 23, 2011; 2) Viesturs, Ed, with David Roberts, No Shortcuts to the Top, Broadway Books, 2006.

Delayed Summer and Winter Dangers on Mount Rainier

/ Andrew Szalay / Leave a comment

It’s been a strange season. Earthquakes normal on the western portion of North America has now hit the east coast; though it hardly qualifies as a “big one” to westerners. And in the western mountains, summer arrived late.

On Mount Rainier, summer is normally welcomed with a great deal of unofficial pomp and circumstance. With May/June coming around, the flowers start to bloom in the alpine meadows, unusual signs of life on the snow (yes, the snow) show up, and throngs of automobiles bringing tourists, hikers and climbers pass through Paradise, Longmire and Sunrise.

Interestingly, in 2011, winter and spring lingered much longer than usual… well into summer. Unusually high amounts of snowfall throughout the mountain ranges of the west coast of the US. In fact, the mountain meadows, like in Paradise Valley, have come alive at last. The alpine wildflowers are blooming now in late August – a phenomena that normally occurs months earlier.

Several hiking trails throughout the park were inaccessible and closed to “normal” summer hiking. Snowshoes or skis, ice axes and snow shovels were necessary tools to carry even in July.

But for those that were there in the wintry summer may have seen the mountain in an altogether different light and understood how harsh and exciting a winter environment the mountain can be in other parts of the year. More people were able to see the watermelon snow – an algae that grows on the snow at higher altitudes around Mount Rainier National Park that looks red as if a watermelon’s juices dripped all over.

But with all of these lingering winter conditions are the dangers that make winter and spring exciting and dangerous (both of which are mutual, in my book.) The watermelon snow could be harmful to your system, so be sure to use snow for drinking water elsewhere. Be sure to be prepared for backcountry winter travel and the dangers of avalanches. Winter traction and stability tools are also essential.

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Sources: 1) Yuasa, Mark, “Wildflowers Finally Visible on the Hillsides of Mount Rainier National Park,” Seattle Post Intelligencer, August 21, 2011; 2) Schmoe, Floyd, A Year in Paradise, Mountaineers, 1999.