altitude slickness

I’d climbed it before, but only in winter, so I was on board as soon as I saw Mark’s email. We had planned to go to Portland this weekend, but that was scuttled in favor of finishing up the work around the house that was left undone from last weekend. No sense doing today what can be put off until Moving Day, at least when there’s some peak to bag. We headed up fairly early, and started up the climber’s descent path between Guye and Snoqualmie. Hitting the split, we took of to the south and continued our way over the top of a waterfall and up to the treeline, where we broke through the clouds. It was pretty foggy, and weather was moving in, so we pushed it as well as we could up to the summit. This season’s outings hadn’t been as regular as last years, so after a while I was sucking wind and ready to eat something. We stopped beside the trail and threw down some water and snacks for a few minutes before heading up. The summit was much closer than we’d thought when we stopped, so we topped out only a few minutes later. The summit was socked in pretty quickly though, and the few pictures we pulled out didn’t have much of a view. The wind had picked up as well, so we didn’t spend a lot of time there before heading down. As we came back down the trail, the sun started pushing clouds around and we were allowed some pretty cool views of Commonwealth Basin and the rising sun. The Pass really is a beautiful area, and a place I’m going to miss once we’re down south… The rest of the trip down went quickly, as we both had chores waiting for us back at home, but we both left with the satisfaction of putting in a solid seven miles before breakfast.

Dean and I took a new (to us) route up (and down) Rattlesnake Ledge this morning, covering a little less than four miles and over 1100 vertical feet gain in about an hour and 45 minutes. After heading up the main trail for around half a mile, we cut up (and I mean UP) to the right and followed a narrow and infrequent boot track until we hit some gravelly ledges. Once on the rock, it was a quick scramble up to the ledge where the sun was already over the tops of the Snoqualmie Pass summits. We spent some time exploring the large cave-like crack in the rock, which led out to a lower, more exposed ledge. The rock at the end of the ledge was climbable, so we did our best to create a more interesting exit for ourselves. It only took us about twenty minutes or so to make it back down, so we ended up doing a little more exploring of older trails before heading home to families and breakfasts.

Enjoy.

Quickly Now, Ascend! on Vimeo