Climbing and skiing, and advice on cell phone use

If you haven't noticed, few posts means lots of work and activity here at Mount Rainier. The weather has remained stellar over much of the past week and things have been busy. During this period, climbers and skiers have been tackling the mountain from all directions. Of particular interest are new and extensive reports for Liberty Ridge, Ptarmigan Ridge and the Fuhrer Finger (photos included).

It seems that a few people are just itching to be rescued or call 911. We've had a number of "alarms" or "callouts" over the past few weeks, thankfully nothing has been serious! That said, one callout is in progress and involves a 2 person team pinned down in a whiteout on Liberty Ridge near 13,700 feet. We suspect that they will be fine, as they are well prepared for 2 more days on the mountain. As a reminder, if you carry a cell phone, make SURE you call 911 during an incident or emergency, not your family members.

On the other hand, two separate teams had somewhat serious accidents but self-rescued. Neither of those teams used a cell phone to alert friends. One incident involved the skier who fell 300 feet on the Emmons Glacier last weekend. A more recent event involved a 2 person team on the Kautz Glacier. One member dislocated his shoulder while descending (balled up crampons). As a reminder, we're still working on that streak of NO NEW MAJOR RESCUES since 2005. We hope to continue this trend...

First photo is by Josh Farris near 12k on Ptarmigan Ridge; the second is of a climber on Liberty Ridge by Dmitry Shapvalov.

Adirondacks - Saturday: Part Three: Ski Jumping and How It Relates To Climbing

Not every trip of mine is feted through an obsession of some sort, but this trip did have one element that caught my fascination more than climbing itself: ski jumping.As I noted on Friday's post, I was driving to "Jello"'s when I came around a corner and saw these tall, dark structures rising above the trees and towering into the dark, late-night sky. My first reaction to these "things" was, "

Adirondacks - Saturday: Beer Walls - Part Two: Still Getting There and Then the Climbing

Now, I'm not going to point fingers here, because really, it isn't any one person's fault. No one had been climbing at Beer Walls, not even "Jello", but because he lived in the area, albeit for only a couple of months, and because he had been reading the guidebook dutifully since we left the house that morning, the task of getting us to the crag, which ever one that may have been, was given to "

Adirondacks - Saturday: Beer Walls - Part One: Getting There

I awoke to "Jello" knocking on my door - a knobless piece of wood on hinges that served better as a deterrent to light than sound - and the smell of cheap pancakes sizzling on the stove in the kitchen next door. It was seven in the morning and I was as hungry as surprisingly well-rested. I don't sleep well when I'm not in my own bed. That's why I prefer staying in an actual bed over camping. If

Adirondacks - Friday: The Drive Up

Wow. My first climbing trip in a few years. The last time I went was maybe in 2002 when I went with the now defunct Weclimbs climbing group to the Gunks (as an aside - the MassClimbers group has gobbled up two entire climbing groups: Weclimbs and the MetroRock Google group. The takeovers havent been entirely successful, as only a handful of of people from each group