This was my first attempt at getting seriously high up in the mountains. Shasta is the second highest peak in the continental US and conquering it gave my peristalsis a seriously hard time... Do you know what the paper targets they hand out at the foot of Shasta are for?
- 13.00 Sneaking out of work to look at a studio flat on the island of Alameda
- 15.45 Back at work, packing up
- 16.30 Sneaking out of work to meet up with the Pertolds
- 18.30 We set off north, direction Mt Shasta
We pull off the highway 500km further north, get a bit lost in the little town of Mt Shasta
Parking lot below the mountain. By the light of the Pertolds' miner's lamps we pitch the tent. During the night I find out that at two kilometres of altitude it's not wise to dawdle too long when you need a pee. The full moon casts shadows.
2000 m a.s.l., Saturday 31 August 2002, 8.00, Bunny Flat
On the noticeboard we read the mountain rescue notices about the state of the routes up the mountain.
Excerpts:
• “very poor conditions”
• “walking of the two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind due to sliding scree”
• “absolutely not without crampons and an ice axe!”
• “60 to 90 degree gradient”
• “ascent not recommended due to lack of snow” etc.
Our optimism drops so far that we don't even buy the permit to climb the mountain (15 dollars per person), since we don't reckon we'll make it. Even so we pack into our backpacks everything 3 people could possibly need in the mountains for 3 days. We don't take the targets yet (see below). The idyllic peace with a view of the sunlit four-thousander is disturbed by a bunch of Chinese who have never heard that you don't yell in the mountains.
Mountain hut in the forest. Squirrels. A photo of the oldest conqueror of Mt Shasta – 85 years old. The hut is looked after winter and summer by one guy, after a year of service the next one takes over. For showering he's got a plastic bag full of water out in the sun, which he evidently hangs up in the evening on one of the surrounding spruces. He tells us this is the last place where you can get water. Well, that's nice.
On the gable of the hut there's a snow shovel hanging. About 4m above the ground. Evidently there's plenty of snow here in winter…
2500 m a.s.l., Saturday 31 August 2002, 11.00
Ranger (member of the mountain rescue?) Eric overtakes us at almost a sprint.
A rest spot where the Chinese have stopped. They're chatting with Eric.
Madla got talking to a guy around fifty who's coming back down from the summit. He set off at midnight and was on top after 9 and a half hours of marching! He confirms it slides horribly under your feet. He looks like death.
Jirka got talking to ranger Eric. He claims the climb takes on average 6 hours from base camp, then 2-3 hours down. No crampons or ice axe needed, apparently no problem. It's good to set off between 3 and 4 in the morning.
I got talking to two guys, about 35, who came down from above at a SPRINT! From them I get the info that from base camp up to the so-called Red Banks it's about 1 hour, the rest is a doddle, about an hour and a half. Well, the info varies. Jirka then squeezed a tip out of them about which way to climb up to Red Banks, which later turned out to be key information.
To Eric's suspicious question the Chinese answer that they're very fit.
Once the Chinese have left we keep talking to Eric. He knocks it down and says it could take us about 4-5 hours to the summit, i.e. an hour or two less than average. What a fool. I mean, in my whole life the highest I've climbed is Sněžka! Well, actually also that mountain in the Austrian Alps above Schladming. And then that climb in the Swiss Alps and then the Swedish Matterhorn, but that's really all of it! Plus in Mexico on a volcano I threw up and sh... damn, how do you put it politely? Well, in short, diarrhoea from the altitude, and that at 3500 m a.s.l.! Same thing in Venezuela, where I was sure I was going to die on Pico Bolívar and I got up there by cable car! True, that was, I think, 4763.7 m a.s.l.
Anyway, all I'm trying to say is that I was bricking it. Especially when I remembered how Haydn told me that he and his brother almost died on this mountain. True, that was because they forgot all their food at base camp...
Camp, where the only amenity is a few stone walls against the wind. Snow as a water source. Not a trace of a lake. Just snowfields.
Once I got cocky after the climb I wanted to show how much strength I still had and built a wall around the tent against the wind. Before I finished the wall, two serious things happened. The wind stopped blowing and I threw my back out.
In the evening Eric came over for a chat. He's been living here in a tent for maybe more than a year now, in summer he helps mountain walkers (anyone who climbs without a rope is a mountain walker to me) and in winter snowboarders and skiers who don't mind that there's neither a cable car nor oxygen here. When it looked like it was going to come round to paying for the permit, I quickly steered the conversation to paying for the camp. Down below I saw a sign that we can voluntarily pay $5 per tent. Turns out that applies to the camp by the mountain hut and not here.
Then the talk came round to the target again. I think it's about time to explain what a target is. Down on the noticeboard it said that in the interest of keeping the mountain clean everyone should carry up a bag, which is available down below, and should catch their “human waste”, in the original “human waste”, in Czech you'd more likely say shit :), in that bag and bring it down, where there's a special bin ready for it. That of course seemed like nonsense to us, we're not going to carry shit on our backs. But now Eric explained to us that up here at altitude, on the rocks and the glacier, nothing decomposes and that human shit stays there for years... When we saw how many people there are here and on top of that had a guilty conscience about the unpaid permit, we took 3 bags off him. It amused us quite a bit when Eric explained how you use it. Inside the bag there's another bag and in that one another one and in that there's a sheet of paper with a TARGET drawn on it! So you unpack the target, put it on the ground printed side up, weigh the corners down with pebbles against the wind and then you aim for the bullseye! Then apparently you wrap it up like a burrito (that Mexican food wrapped in a big corn tortilla. Up until now I've been eating it about 2-3 times a week. Now I don't know, I don't know :)) The burrito then goes into one bag, the bag into the second one, then the whole thing goes into a ziplock plastic bag and that goes into the backpack! And off you go carrying the shit.
Out of politeness we took the bags, but we still swore we'd rather carry it down in our bellies than in the backpack... Ha ha.
In the evening I was wondering whether I'm farting so well because I'm at 3000 m a.s.l. and the pressure is low here, or whether it's the food.
When we went a few weeks ago to visit a Czech guy who has a cabin in Stanislaus National Forest at about 2000 m a.s.l. (the poor guy had no idea 33 of us would turn up), we took crisps with us. When we bought them they were normal. When we took them out of the car up there they were totally puffed up, about to burst! Precisely because of the lower air pressure. So I wonder whether it doesn't work the same way with your belly...
The Chinese set off at 3 in the morning. Of course you could damn well hear them.
We didn't get up until half six, packed the targets and the food, nobody showed any signs of altitude sickness. Apparently it would most likely show up during the night. Well, we'll see, we've still got another 1200 metres of climbing to the summit. We have oats for breakfast. The water where we filled our bottles yesterday (melted snow) is frozen.
The going is good, the surface frozen, the cold air balances out the warming up from climbing. Still wearing a beanie, gloves, winter jacket. The scree really does slide under your feet, but we find a frozen stream where the walking is superb. It's the route the two sprinters recommended to us yesterday, just before they ran off towards the car. Madla lends me one of her two special mountain-walking telescopic poles. May the good Lord repay her.
Surprisingly we made it to Red Banks in an hour, i.e. exactly what the sprinters said. So maybe it's not so bad with me after all? I had no doubts about Jirka and Madla from the start. They're scouts, 4300 m a.s.l. is just a morning warm-up for them.
We squeeze through a crack in the rock, the first and only spot where it really feels like climbing. Madla isn't too keen on it, I am (bit of adrenaline :)), Jirka seems neutral. Only Jirka brought a helmet (a cycling one), me, idiot that I am, didn't bring mine so I wouldn't look like a cyclist, Madla didn't think of it. Jirka climbs first and suddenly I hear a rumble and Jirka shouts WATCH OUUUT! I look up and see Jirka leaping aside away from two rocks, one the size of an Alsatian's head, the other about the head of an oversized dachshund. On their way down the rock they picked up hellish speed and are bouncing from side to side. The smaller one bounced off to our right, but the bigger one at the last moment comes flying straight at us. It's going so fast that it would probably knock us off balance, helmet or no helmet. Phew. It smacked into the rock right between me and Madla. Yuuuck. Get out of here, fast. Just in case I yell something rude in Czech at the ones climbing above us who probably dislodged those rocks.
Up until now we'd been climbing in the shade. The moment we come out on top of Red Banks the sun hits us from the right. Damn it! About a second after the sun hit me, I voluntarily hit myself on the forehead. Me, the feeble-minded ox, left my cap back at camp! I mean, I've got a beanie, I wouldn't have set off in that frost without it, but I don't have a cap against the killer sun that's waiting for us from now until the evening! Madla partly saves me with a spare scarf.
About 100 metres above Red Banks the glacier begins. We sit down in the sun and have a proper snack.
It was 4000 m a.s.l., almost exactly to the hair. Jirka has a watch with an altimeter.
Jirka, who went ahead, has the targets. Damn, here it comes again. Yesterday Eric told me that diarrhoea isn't a symptom of altitude sickness. He was talking rubbish! Whenever I climb higher than is healthy, I get the runs like mad. And now again. I shout at Jirka to wait, that I need a target. He doesn't get the gravity of the situation, pulls the targets out of his backpack, waves them around like a matador and laughs. I might kill him. I thought that at this altitude, on sliding gravelly terrain, with a lack of oxygen and the exhaustion from the climb, you can't run. Wrong. The reluctance to have it in your trousers is stronger than all the “objective difficulties”. I run off the main trail, out of sight of the other mountain walkers. Unfortunately it's a stony plain here with no bumps and hardly any bends. I have to go a long way. Surprisingly I didn't give up on pulling out the target and weighing it down with pebbles. What a self-sacrificing ecologist I am. In the end half of it ran off anyway.... Well, I won't go into too much detail... In any case, in the middle of my godly activity I discovered that although I can't be seen from the trail, a bunch of people resting a few hundred metres below have a splendid view of me...
I left the package by the trail, I'll pick it up on the way back. I hope nobody picks it up before me. Or do I?
After about 150 metres of marching across the ice field I start to feel two things, at first seemingly connected. Namely pressure and rumbling in my guts and a terrible stink. Luckily the stink got explained, it was sulphur from the springs welling up. Shasta is in fact still an active volcano which erupts with a period of about 200 years. It last erupted 220 years ago, as Jirka informed us yesterday. Luckily he's read up on everything, otherwise we'd have climbed up clueless.
The rumbling, though, I had to deal with. Luckily up here there are bigger rocks too. I crawled behind one and just as I'm getting ready to relieve myself (this time “for real”, the targets had run out), I found out I'm not the first with this idea. So I'd rather find myself a different rock. Instead of wrapping a “burrito” I at least covered it up properly with stones.
Jirka's heating up lunch (not that we'd be carrying a stove, it's one of those paper pouches with a string sticking out that works like the pin on a grenade. You pull it and inside it kicks off a chemical reaction that heats the food all by itself! Not just me, even the Americans who happened to be on the summit were gawping at it like crows) Waiting for lunch in the sunshine, which is blazing like crazy, wore me out so much that I fell asleep. It's so lumpy up here that normally I wouldn't even sit down, but right now it's good enough for sleeping too. I wouldn't have expected the biggest problem on top of a four-thousander to be the awful heat. The direct sun has already given me a migraine. I've wolfed down 3 ibuprofens already.
After waking up and eating the beans with potato (about 3 spoonfuls, since the chemical heating factory unfortunately takes up most of the volume of the pouch) I took the summit photo and wrote an entry in the summit book. It went:
„Conquered! Conquered! Conquered! Despite the shits, lumbago and a migraine, CONQUERED!“ Naturally I wrote it in Czech.
What comforted me was chatting with a girl who'd been climbing up here for the sixth time now, and four of those times she'd had to turn back halfway because of headaches.
Sadly nobody stole the bag with the target. I pick it up and I'll be carrying it in my backpack for almost two more days. (In the end I got over the urge to throw the backpack away along with the bag and just washed it.)
We run into two of the roughly 9 Chinese guys who set off towards the summit 4 hours before us. They look terrible but they're doggedly plodding upwards. So are they really „very fit“?
3700 m above sea level, Sunday 1 September 2002, 13.00 Red Banks
Unwisely I let slip to Madla that I hadn't been for a pee yet today. Not even onto the target. Madla was horrified, since there are only three rules against altitude sickness.
1. drink a lot
2. drink a lot
3. drink a lot
The drinking cure begins. From that moment on, for the next 24 hours, Jirka and Madla regularly and without a break force water into me. Until it's coming out of my ears. But I don't go for a pee until about nine in the evening.
On the edge of the glacier (a gorgeous one, by the way) sit two Chinese women waiting for the two climbers. The rest of the noisy gang has already given up and gone down.
For us the agony of descending the scree begins. Surprisingly, going down is much worse than going up. The scree has thawed and now it slides under your feet as it slips down the glacier. You can't walk, you have to sort of ski along, sunk in the scree up to your ankles. I'm expecting my knees to start shaking soon. Nothing so far.
I sit down on a rock and ponder the fundamental question. If I throw up, will I feel better or worse? I'm working on it for the whole rest of the descent to camp.
As the snow melts in the sun, a trickle of water runs down the gully. Even though after scooping it up your palm is full of more pebbles than water, after a whole day in the punishing sun it's bliss to splash it into your hair.
Just when I was at my worst, fate sent us help. We reached a wide strip of snow, a few hundred metres long, leading in the direction of camp. In the morning it looked unrideable, but now we know that anything is better than scree. Jirka and Madla slide down the snow on their boots, I've got special ski shell trousers with a padded backside (and they're waterproof too, so brilliant in that sun) so I go down on my bum. The longest slide of my life! It's pretty bumpy, sure, but the snow is softened by the sun, I brake a bit with my feet, the main thing is I don't have to walk!
The last kilometre or so to camp we had to walk again, but only over bigger rocks. A few more times I stopped to solve my life dilemma: „TO PUKE OR NOT TO PUKE\". When the answer finally came out YES, it wouldn't come.
My migraine is hellish though, the only thing I long for after a whole day without a single scrap of shade is to crawl behind the big rock next to our tent and get away from that STUPID SUN! Madla and Jirka went for water.
I crawled into the tent, the only thing that works on a migraine is quiet, calm and sleep. Ideally darkness. It took a while before I managed to explain that to Jirka and Madla, and then they stopped climbing into the tent every 12 minutes with various suggestions like „You have to get up, we'll pack and walk down to the car, that'll do you good.“ Or „You have to eat and drink, that'll do you good.“ They basically looked after me like family, but unfortunately I've had more than twenty years of experience with migraines and I know that any treatment other than rest and sleep is pointless. Whether the migraine is brought on by stress, the sun, a flickering monitor, sitting in the car in a traffic jam, or ultimately by altitude sickness, the treatment is always the same.
Around nine in the evening I was pretty much okay, I crawled out, sucked some energy goo out of a sachet and finally went for a pee.
Then I got up again every hour to pee until finally at three in the morning, watching the unbelievably clear stars, I had a proper feed. You could also hear rockfalls above the camp now and then.
We're getting ready for the final descent. While packing the tent and sleeping bags etc. we discovered that although we ourselves had produced only three bags with a target (Jirka and Madla followed my example in the evening), there are four of them at our campsite. Someone who slept here before us left theirs under a rock. If it were anything else, we'd of course load it up and carry it down to the bin. But carry somebody else's turd on your back? We're all pretending not to notice.
As we're leaving the campsite, Eric waves at us and tries to find out whether I'm feeling better. Yesterday's idea about descending 2km lower down was apparently his. He looks after everybody here like mad. He also told us that last weekend there was a gang of beefed-up hockey players from Czechia here, and yesterday even one solo Czech set off for the summit about an hour after us.
When we'd descended about 500 metres from camp, we started discussing that fourth target again. It dawned on us that it'll look like we left it there and Eric knows we're Czechs. Jirka tries to play it down with the line that it won't be the first time a turd has been left behind by Czechs somewhere, but in the end we still draw lots for who's going back for the bag. Jirka lost. Phew.
In a while he comes back puffing, somebody else's turd in his hand. We're deciding who'll carry it. I keep cowardly quiet. Madla sacrificed herself.
The annoying thing is that I'm the only one who's got it packed stink-tight. So I walk first, because there's no scent trail behind me. Jirka and Madla have to walk side by side or with a big gap between them.
I feel great and I'm running away from those two the whole way. I don't know if it's more to show them that I'm not such a wuss whose little head is always hurting, or because I can't wait to open that lid with „Human waste“ written on it and get rid of the thing people usually get rid of the moment it leaves their guts.
With a short stop at the spring by the mountain hut we make it to the cars in pretty good shape.
This is what the moment of getting rid of a turd you've been carrying on your back for two days looks like:
Then just a stop for excellent food in the local Chinese restaurant (Chinese food is probably the only thing here that's cheaper than in Czechia) and a swim in Shasta Lake. Down by the lake it's 42 degrees Celsius! And of course 5.5 hours on the motorway on the way home. Only a bit of a traffic jam.
