On Monday, I stopped at Mt. Shasta Town on the way to the
trailhead, and stood in the viewing place where I stand every time I come here,
for a look at the mountain and the route I so much wanted to climb. There were no clouds anywhere, and the
weather forecast was good for the next three days. I would spend two nights on the mountain,
camping on snow the second night, and melting snow for water.
There was no reason to leave early for the hike to my first
night at Horse Camp. The trailhead at
Bunny Flat is only a thirty minute drive from Dunsmuir, and the hike is only
two miles. I wanted to camp at this
7,800-foot elevation to acclimate and avoid, if possible, mountain sickness in
climbing to the 14,162-foot summit.
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| The trail to Horse Camp |
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| My 40-pound pack |
The trail soon lost its dry rock and soil base to be covered
with slushy snow or solid ice, depending, it seemed, on the trees and how much
of the trail they allowed to receive the warmth of radiant sun. The weight of my forty-pound pack seemed
easy, and I was happy for the man coming down who took a picture of my
light-footed and hopeful self, about to ascend the summit.
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| Almost to Horse Camp |
I had an unreal
feeling about this now, as I was finally beginning the ascent, as though I had
written it all before, as though it were a train and I was standing on a
platform at a station watching it go by.
I had figured out how to survive in all those places I had gone,
and I was sure I could figure out Mt. Shasta too. Or was it that all the mishaps that didn’t
happen were now converging in unalterable probability against this particular
climb? I thought how I had once considered
Mt. McKinley (Denali) after seeing it from a train window, so much that I
bought a book and studied the art and skill of mountaineering, but gave up on
the idea those many years ago. Perhaps
Shasta, a lesser goal for an older body, might actually be obtainable. And soon, there it was , around a bend in the trail, Horse Camp in a lovely setting with scattered red fir trees, dry ground underneath them, and
six-foot-deep snow all between.
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| The Cabin at Horse Camp |
The cabin was built in 1923 by the Sierra Club, and I knew it
was not for sleeping—only for emergencies.
I met the caretaker, Cindy, and said I’d like to find a patch of dry
ground under a big red fir, melt some snow, and camp for the night. She said, “We don’t allow camping except on
the snow. We want to protect the forest
floor as long as possible into the summer. You can borrow a snow shovel to level a spot
if you want.”
So I found a place
where someone had dug out a protected shelter from the wind, used the shovel to
remove newly-fallen snow, and compacted a flat area for sleeping. I rolled out my small tent and cooked
dehydrated food on my propane stove.
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| Zoomed in on the Route |
During the long afternoon on this near-solstice June day, I
looked up at the summit and saw clearly the route I hoped to climb in the next
two days. (If you click on the picture to enlarge it, you can see it too. Press Esc to return.) I even saw traces where other
climbers had traveled in the past two days.
Before that, winds up to one hundred miles per hour, and snow, with
white-out conditions, had stopped all climbers except for a few fanatics. I waited for more than a week until
turbulence on the mountain had mostly ended.
Now, it appeared from the traces that many others had preceded me in
marginal weather since that big storm. They went around to the right of the rocks seen
on the right of the picture, then to the left of The Heart, that bulge in the
center, heading toward Thumb Rock, the prominent peak in the upper right. Then I lost them below the Red Banks, that
strip of red cliffs dipping from upper right to left in the picture. Supposedly, they climbed up in one of the
chimneys, those chutes of snow-covered rock-slide between the Red Banks.
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| Crampons |
I put on my crampons, having never worn crampons, except on
the grass at home, following the package instructions, and climbed a short way
up that evening, just for practice. I had
studied the art of self arrest, a necessary procedure, should one slip and
start sliding endlessly down a slippery slope. I used my ice axe for the first time, as
learned from a video on YouTube, to stop me from sliding on a short slope, just
for practice.
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| My tent at Horse Camp |
When darkness began, I slid into my small tent, inside my
winter sleeping bag, on my foam pad, used more as protection of the snow, to
keep it from melting under me, than for comfort or warmth, and went to
sleep.
Sometime in the night the wind became perfectly still, and I
heard a faint groan, like the wail of far-away animals in distress. It was not birds or the squirrels of the day,
but muffled and strange, dreamlike, resembling far-away suffering. Thinking it a dream I dismissed it, but awoke
again, listening, waiting. Then there
was slight movement under me, almost imperceptible. I finally realized that the snow, melting
during the day, freezing at night, that the sound and motion I heard and felt
came from under my bed, of changing, moving snow.
