2am Saturday morning and Im dodging boulders on memorial high way on the way up to Bunny Flat. The sharp slopes of volcanic debris act as a vertical launching pad for stones that were once tossed thousands of feet through the air from the earths hot belly. The white petals of salmon berry and Shasta lilies make little reflective explosions along roads edge in an otherwise dark embankment of Douglas firs, Manzanita, white pine, and cedars. The truck is running a little warm, but doing good for the 5 hour drive from Oakland and most importantly no run ins with the huge number of law enforcement on the roads, patrolling the July 4th weekend. Bunny Flat is like a used car lot, every imaginable make of vehicle is scattered around the front of the trail entrance, so much so that I have to drive back down the road aways and careen over into the shoulder for a space. Adam and I hop out of the 95 Ranger with expired Montana plates and go about preparing the back of the truck for sleep. As I our eyes adjust to the night, the white edges of Mount Shasta grow out the darkness, a large looming slope cut with bands of black. I position my sleeping bag such that I face the mountain and it is my last visible sight before consciousness checks out. I wake around 6 am and ask Adam for the time and then conk back out for another hour. The air is a strange olfactory experience of warm cedars and firs mixed with gusts of mountain stream moisture and the crisp cut of snow. Outside the shitters there is a sign in post for the wilderness permit and summit pass, so we take care of the necessary business and deposits before heading back down the hill into the city of Mount Shasta. At the Fifth Element Outfitters we get avalanche probes and an extra snow shovel, so I can dig Adam out if he gets buried by a column of snow. We hit the trail around 9am and within minutes are accidentally off trail and just b-lining towards Avalance Gulch. The loose alpine soil is rich with soft powdery dirt and high alpine plants trying to eek out an existence. The sun is unbelievably bright and glares off of every stone, every patch of snow. At the base of avalanche gulch we take in a little more food, make sure the plastic hiking boots are tight and that we are ready for the long haul. Looking up the southwestern slope of Shasta we can spy Helen Lake amongst the vertical snow fields. The climb up to the lake has no major point to comment upon, for its basically just a vertical gully filled with snow. Red algae grows on much of the snow, giving it the look of snow with fresh blood. I move up hill faster than Adam and happen to run into a guy named Brian with the same problem, so we camped out on some of the only three exposed rocks on the way up and waited for our respective parties to catch up. Brian is traveling with Anne, Jim and Peter. As Seattlites three of them work for Microsoft and Brian is the tag along boyfriend. A group of them had been on Rainer two weeks ago, taking the Emmons Winthrop Glacier route up, a gain of 10,000ft, but failed to summit because of a group puke due to altitude sickness or as Brian would rather call it, food poisoning. At Helen Lake, which is really more of a depression with snow banks good for digging into, we camped between the Seattlites. I dug a little snow coffin, just big enough for my plastic and summer bivy to fit into and Adam put his tent just on the opposite side of this and dug himself out a step for sitting. We had camp set up by 1pm, so we took a nap to catch up on the sleep debt from the night before. I didnt have any sun protection in the form of a tent so just covered my exposed skin in clothes etc. From Helen lake Lassen was visible to the south and Castla Crags just across the valley to the west. Lassens main peak was bathed in snow and so was the ridge stretching westward. We dug out a hole for the stove and proceeded to melt snow to reload our water bottles. Adam had his 3.5 L and I had my 2 L which I knew that I probably wouldnt drink all of. To the East of the main Helen lake encampment were the privacy pits for dropping your shorts and making deposits into plastic bags and a urine pit. The urine pit, well labeled by a stick that said Urinate Here, had an icy little cornice to it, so you wanted to be especially sure you were stable before letting things rip, because if you fell in, you would be trapped in yours and everyone elses frozen urine and the only way you could probably get out would be to yell for help our dig holes in the urine walls so you could climb out. Adam at some point was using the privacy pit to collect his human waste and had two girls accidentally walk up on him with his ass hanging out in the process of trying to put last nights processed dinner in a bag. We finished up boiling water, had dinner and by about 8p crawled into our respective sleeping accommodations. Adam had his alarm set for 2:30am, but slept right through it. Luckily I had woken up in nervous anticipation and realized other people in the camp were also moving about and getting their gear on. I put my boots on outside of Adams tent and noise woke him. The sky was brilliant with stars, so much so that I had a hard time picking out constellations, because there were just so many stars. The ambient night light glowed off the banks of the mountain in a dull blue hue. A few headlamp lights reflected off the snow about half way up to the Red Banks. All the planning and packing I did last night paid off, because I was ready to go within 10 minutes of waking up. Brian and Anne were also up and ready to go. They took off ahead of us, but once Adam had his stuff we caught right up. The snow had a crust of morning ice to it, which snap and popped under the weight of the crampons. I found walking back and forth like a switch back trail was the most effective way to get the most friction out of the crampons, so I did this most of the way up, passing many people that were just going toe forward up the mountain. I had to wait often for Adam to catch up or at least get close before I took off again. I waited for him at the cusp of the Red Banks, so we could decide which shoot to take. The ranger Nick who we had talked to at Helen Lake the night before said the middle shoot was the way to go and it should be easily distinguishable, because of the trail in it. We some how managed to not see the trail and ended up on the chute to the far left, which was a strong vertical, enough that I was actually nervous about loosing footing and was constantly going back over how to self-arrest using the ice axes. The chute was only about ten feet across and the red rock wall scaled up about 20 feet above us. The trail we carved spit us right out onto the top of the 12,500ft Red Banks, where we walked up a snow field to join the rest of the morning climbers. To the west a giant pyramidal shadow of the mountain stretched out in the pink haze. A layer of heavy night blue rested on the pillow of purple to pink sky just above the shadow. At the shadows peak light seemed to swirl from dark shadow, to red, to yellow. Unfortunately the slope was too steep for me to even think about taking my pack off to get at my camera, so it was one of the many images I end up just having to hold on my neurons and not a piece of paper. I took a break just before Misery Hill and allowed Adam to catch up. The sun was starting to blaze a path of fiery white across this depression, so I sat and soaked up warmth as Adam ate some more food. Brian and Anne caught up to us and we checked in to see how they were doing. No food poisoning for anyone, so we continued on. I blasted on ahead feeling the summit close. I hit the top of Misery Hill and walked the saddle over to the last short climb to the Summit. The wind ripped through the shoulder like the foul wind that had been ripping through my colon since being at about 10,000 ft. I blame the change in atmospheric pressure and the 10 servings of peanuts I had for dinner. Shastina to the left sat with minimal snow and the sulfur springs that had once saved John Muir life when climbing Mount Shasta sat just to the base of the summit trail. The summit was a small rocky configuration of pink rhyolite with a step vertical drop to the northeast. To the north the most distinguishable peak was mount Mclaughlins perfect pyramidal peak and closer in was the glassy surface of lower Klamath lake of Tule Lake. An iron box contained the sign in sheet for those that had made the top. I signed in and waited for Adam, Brian and Anne to make it.
Sitting amongst the weather broken stones of the summit I realized that I dont really enjoy summiting mountains in that there is a lot of dead time, a lot of gear, and hubris to it. Most people see themselves as conquering a mountain when they summit it and the entire trip is about besting nature, being able to stand on top of her and say look at me I am able to climb your steepest pitch, battle your coldest winds and conquer you. I far more enjoy a long trek with no obvious goal, no peak, no opposition between me and the land. All of the best things are the surprises that nature leaves along the way; the indescribable beauty of purple-ing trillium tucked between logs, a pileated woodpecker boring fist sized holes in dead pines, orange cup mushrooms, saprophobic snowflowers, harvester ants with their peppery sting, a black tailed deer in felt, a small stem of Thysanocarpus curvipes or a thousand other things of such undefined, unplaceable magnificence that one can not conquer, but can only hope to be a part of.
20 minutes later Brian, then Anne and then Adam filed in to the summit nook, hung out for a while and then we took off back down to Helen Lake. The snow still hard all the way down to the heart, meant no glissading. About halfway down the side of the heart Brian took off his crampons and tried glissading in the well worn trail that was about as deep as a luge run and as icy. He ended up expending most of his energy using his ice axe to slow him down. A little lower where the snow began to soften we all sat on our asses and slide for Helen camp. After about 2 mintues of rocketing down on ice and snow I could fee my butt, my balls or anything in that neighborhood. I was slides so fast that I was worried that I might be giving myself a snow enema without knowing, luckily this was not the case. At base camp we hung out and talked while Adam took a short snooze and then packed out gear up and headed down the mountain.
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