101 Things

I don’t know why I didn’t put multi-pitch climbing on my list of things to begin with, though it might have something to do with the fact that I have a fairly intense fear of heights and so getting fifty feet off the ground sounded plenty ambitious already, thank you. But I have been doing a lot of climbing lately, and so I went from thinking this was something I might never want to do to thinking it was something I really wanted to do, all inside of about two months.

I got in touch with a friend I hadn’t seen awhile, one who fell out of touch just about the time I started climbing indoors, and so now that I am climbing outdoors, I emailed him to say hey, let’s climb something! And he said, sure! How about a couple of multi-pitch climbs! And that is how I found myself a few hundred feet up the side of a mountain last weekend, hooray!


We did a four-pitch route up North Ingalls Peak. As I understand it, the South Ridge is pretty much everyone’s first multi-pitch route, if you learn to climb in Washington state. (There are a couple of other contenders for that designation, and we meant to do a 5.6 route on The Tooth in the same weekend but bailed due to rain.)


I don’t like scrambling very much, particularly not after the security of a top rope, and particularly not on the very top of a mountain. But here I am on the very top of a mountain! You can see the slightly shorter South Peak behind me, which is a hike rather than a climb. And further back is Mt. Rainier. Every time I see Rainier I now think HOW did I do that and then I think WHY did I do that.


Here’s a shot of the full route we took, mostly a crack right up the middle of the face. You can see a tiny, blue climber finishing the third pitch. I’d never really climbed a crack before, and my leader turned back to me a few moves up the third pitch and said, “Uh, you’re about to learn a lot.” A really cheerful woman who’d rappelled to my anchor watched me follow him up and when I told her it was my first multi-pitch climb, she yelled things like YOU’RE DOING REALLY WELL and YOU LOOK LIKE A NATURAL.


A lot of the rock face was covered in serpentine, which is beautiful and interesting but slick as glass, and it was the cause of a lot of swearing when I had to get myself onto a rappel route involving a vertical wall of the stuff.


Actually, the descent was generally horrible since we’d run out of water hours before on a hot day. Hooray! My first multi-pitch alpine climb!


And then I came home to a text message from an old Minnesota friend saying he was in town to climb Mt. Rainier, and did I know of any good campgrounds around Seattle? And I said why yes I do MY COUCH and everything is all about mountains right now let’s just climb all the mountains.