Just missing the Pearly Gates
The news reports of climbers lost on Mount Hood bring back eerie memories.
A few years ago – I think it was 2000 – I traveled to Oregon to visit relatives and climb Mount Hood, along with my then 18-year-old son.
We joined a small group led by a professional guide. After a day of practicing on a lower glacier, we headed for the summit at about midnight. In the summer, you climb Mount Hood in the dark to avoid sunlight loosening ice and making the going more treacherous.
The climb up the south slopes of the mountain is relatively easy – as mountain-climbing goes. Wearing crampons – steel cleats that attach to your books to give you footing on ice and snow – carrying ice axes and roped together, we made steady progress through the night. We were just below the Pearly Gates, the rock pinnacles that guard the summit on the south side, about an hour before dawn.
I was exhausted, but certain that I could make the summit. Just another 30 minutes, the guide said, and we’d be through the gates – the steepest part of the climb.
Then one member of our party became disoriented and nauseated. An experienced mountain climber, she had been on higher peaks. But she was suffering from a severe case of altitude sickness, the guide explained.
We waited there, trying to stay warm on an exposed ridge near the summit, in a surrealistic world of ice and snow lit only by moonlight, while the guide worked with the woman. After nearly an hour, he announced what we all feared. We had to turn back.
Our party was too small to split up. There was only one experienced guide, and he couldn’t both stay with the woman and lead the climb to the summit. So, after all that work, we stopped short of the Pearly Gates.
The climbers who were lost last week on Mount Hood chose to climb the much more difficult north face of the mountain. They apparently reached the summit, and had planned to descend through the Pearly Gates and down the easier south slopes.
But it appears, according to news reports, that they were forced by bad weather to turn back, seeking shelter from the storm a few hundred feet below the summit on the north side.
One of the climbers was found dead in a snow cave. Although the search continues, it’s unlikely the two others survived.
They, too, failed to reach the Pearly Gates.
(The photo at right shows the Pearly Gates that guard the south side of the summit of Mount Hood. The point where I stopped is that little ridge at the far left of the photo, just below the rock pinnacles.)
December 20th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Sad that the climbers have perished, but they chose to climb a mountain in the winter without being prepared with adequate equipment. I’m still a Boy Scout at heart and I believe in their motto “Be Prepared”. Every year I head out west and spent some time in the mountains with my son and he always kids me about the extra stuff I carry along. But I hope that I am “Prepared”.