Climbing Season Recap
November 27th, 2013 | 
Author: The Mazamas held their Annual Celebration on November 15. The keynote speaker was Conrad Anker, famous for finding the body of long-lost mountaineer George Mallory on Mt. Everest.
The Mazamas give out various hiking and climbing award certificates every year, and make them available for pick-up at the Celebration. The easiest climbing award to earn is the “Guardian Peaks”, earned by summiting Mt. Hood, Mt. Adams, and Mt. Saint Helens on official Mazamas climbs (they don’t have to all be done in the same year). This spring and summer was my first season climbing with them, and I managed to earn the Guardian Peaks. So needing to pick up the certificate was a good-enough excuse to attend the Celebration. 😉
All and all I managed to summit 7 mountains this year. It was a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to next year.
They did a nice job with the certificate
Mount Hood Summit
Mount Shasta Summit
Sitting on the Summit of Mount Thielsen
Summit of Mt. Adams, with Rainier Peeking through on the Right
At the Base of the Summit Pinnacle of Castle Peak in Mt. Rainier National Park, with “Big Momma” herself in the background 😉
On the Summit of Mt. Washington (the one in Oregon). Awesome Rappel on the way down 🙂
Mt. St. Helens Crater Ridge; Spirit Lake and Rainier in the background. It was very windy
Posted in Uncategorized
WOW!!!! What gorgeous photos and stunning accomplishment. So cool!
Nicely done!
You might enjoy this Wall Street Journal article about middle aged(?) folks getting into Mountaineering written by a friend of mine:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303342104579099201088472802
I finally found a link that didn’t require a subscription: http://stream.wsj.com/story/latest-headlines/SS-2-63399/SS-2-365472/
An OK article, although I didn’t see much of an emphasis on the “over 50” angle. It could have almost as easily been titled “Introduction to Mountaineering with Guided Climbing”, as it seems more of a promotion of the use of guide services than anything else. I guess that’s a good, safe, recommendation to people with no experience who want to do a technical climb, but I haven’t been overly impressed with aspects of guide services I’ve heard/seen this year. You end up getting put on a team with total strangers you know nothing about; I know one person who paid >$2K to a service and ended up on a rope team with someone out of shape; that person paid her money and didn’t summit solely because another client shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Then there’s the bored/uncaring guide I saw slogging up Hood, dragging a rope with some client at the other end who looked scared out of her wits. Much better approach, I think, to take a class to get the skills, and climb with people you know.