Today, I made an attempt on Middle Sister, in the Three Sisters Wilderness. It was a gorgeous, warm day and the climbing was great, but I had to turn around 800 vertical feet from the summit, but it was still an awesome, and exhausting day. I was cramping because of the postholing in the soft snow, and I also was worried about avalanches. Another thing that concerned me was there was a team of three experienced climbers on the mountain and they advised me that snow was too soft and they were, themselves, turning around and skiing down. Right after I turned around there was actually a small rock fall right behind me - never a good omen.* But it was a really great day. (Another weird omen was passing their bags all in a pile a few minutes later. I have to assume they left them behind to ski down and then climb back up but it was just eerie seeing them sitting there without their owners).

I think any day where you learn something new is a good day. And today, I learned how to fail to climb a mountain. Now, you may scoff, but I think that learning to fail to do things is a really valuable skill. Especially when those things are dangerous, and even more so when you're the kind of person - like me - that doesn't like to fail or quit things. Some things, of course, need to be quit, and gracefully, and intelligently. And today, at 1:30 PM, at 9,275 feet above Sea Level on the slopes of Middle Sister, I passed that particular test.

It's worth noting that I had not yet actually gone out to climb a mountain and failed to do so. I was 4 for 4 so far. This isn't because I'm really good at mountain climbing; at best it's because I'm a bit lucky, surrounded by talented people, and incredibly stubborn. When I climbed Mt. Thielsen, I made several naive mistakes that, had the situation been different, could've gotten me hurt, and I got away with all of them. Which is a fun story, but dumb.

When I was at COCC, my professor was also the professor for the Psychology of Risk class, which I'm still hoping to take some day, and I learned a lot of interesting things from him. In Rescue training, like for WAFA, you learn that a lot of really terrible situations arise because of compounding mistakes; the "rule of 3", for example, which says that 3 really minor mistakes that all end up layered back-to-back can easily be enough to get somebody seriously
hurt. Like, say, you're leaving the house to get in your car and drive, but you forget your glasses; but you're running late to meet friends, so you decide you'll just drive anyway. Then, at dinner with your friends, you have one more drink than you really intended to. You also stay an hour too late, which means it's dark by the time you leave and you have bad night vision when you don't have your glasses on. Wham; car accident. None of those three
things might have been enough to make a mess, but put together they certainly could be.

The point is that learning to cut your losses instead of compounding mistakes is important. When I was sitting up on that mountain, at 1:30, I had one major problem and a couple of minor ones. The major problem was this: I'd read the weather reports, but because I'm not experienced enough, and because I'm not intimately familiar with the area around the Sisters I didn't know how to interpret them. Most importantly, I missed the danger of postholing.
Postholing is a phenomenon where warm weather creates slushy snow, sometimes with a layer of ice on top. When you step on that snow, you go deep into a hole. 4 times today one of my legs went in all the way up to my waist, and going up to my thigh was a regular occurrence. The answer to this problem is either pick a different time or, sometimes, to bring snowshoes. But I didn't bring snowshoes; they're big and unwieldy and I didn't think I'd need them.
So I postholed**. Postholing can be dangerous in and of itself, but the real consequence is that it's exhausting; you have to keep pulling yourself out of holes and every step is extra work. But I'm stubborn, so I plowed on. But by the time I got to 9,275 feet, my body was done. Specifically, I was getting bad cramps in my hamstrings and adductors. Now, if you wait, the cramps pass, but they come right back, and always at the worst time. Plus, I was slow,
and while I had intended to hit the summit by 1:00, it was 1:30 and I was still 800 vertical feet away.

Another thing you read a lot about is "summit fever". Otherwise intelligent people do dumb things when the summit looks so close, and you've invested so much time and energy. This doesn't just happen in mountaineering, of course; most people hate "sunk costs" and all of us have thrown good money after bad. When things look like they're just around the corner we lose our ability to think clearly. In mountaineering, summit fever can kill. And I wanted to
touch that peak today. But at the end of the day, I limped into my car completely spent and exhausted and cramping. If I had tried for that extra 800 feet, I either could have had an accident right there, or - possibly worse - I could have just become over-exhausted on the way down. Two years ago, an experienced mountaineer died on Middle Sister for what's largely thought to be that reason.

I did some things well and others poorly today. I've got to get a handle on the frostbite problem in my feet. I have poor blood flow to the extremities, and my feet just get really cold. Even though it was quite warm on the mountain, snow got in my boots and my feet took a beating. I had to MacGyver two pairs of wet wool socks with a black plastic bag in-between, which worked, but was a little silly. One thing I am doing a much better job on is rationing
food and water; I had plenty of both which was good. And I practiced a little bit of self-arrest lower down on the mountain; I'm getting much better at that. I also give myself a gold star for navigation; I'm getting the hang of it.

*If you've never heard the sound of layers of snow compacting on top of each other next to you, it's distinctly disconcerting.

**One of the things that annoys me about myself is that one of my instructors actually warned me about postholing and I totally ignored her. My bad.

Three Sisters is badly burned in many places.

Day 100 - Middle Sister, OR