The Sunshine After ICS

by Michael Zasadzien

Our route.

What do I know about the Sunshine Route on Hood? I dunno, isn't it supposed to be a simple walk-up?

This was the question that kept running through my head as we're doing our 3rd high-angle snow-pitch, after crossing a treacherous bergschrund, only after crossing a glacier field...

So, here's a little bit of backstory. What can I tell you about ICS (Mazama Intermediate Climbing School)? It's long. Like REALLY long. And there are days where you just feel completely broken. You've been standing in knee-deep snow for the last two hours. It's been raining ice, and it's cold, and you're absolutely soaked. You look at your watch, and you realize you still have 6 more hours of this misery of diving into the snow with your axe, getting more wet and more cold, before you can go back to the lodge. And in case you think that's the end of it, you're sorely mistaken, since you have to go back into these conditions the next day...not to mention the next week....for a few more months.

Nightime navigation.

This is what I'd like to call the dark times of ICS. The seemingly never-ending struggles with low morale while learning important mountaineering techniques over and over again, weekend after weekend in what just always seemed to be the worst of weather. The lectures begin to feel long, the weekends even longer. You literally begin to run out of time in taking care of yourself. You come home late Sunday night. You unpack your gear Monday night to dry. You go to lecture Tuesday. You do your laundry Wednesday and pick up any new gear you need. You pack and cook Thursday. And you head back out Friday just to do it all over again. You're just about at your mental, physical, and emotional limit of what you consider to be 'fun' while volunteering your own time for half a year to become a stronger climber.

But then there's poor Gary Ballou. While we're buried up to our necks in commitment for this class, we had

Audrey self-belays down to the Elliot.

a leader who, on top of all that, had to organize this cat-herd. Always somehow enthusiastic, and never letting us give-up, even when we really really wanted to, he was a positive leader and had tons of great assistants that pushed us hard to really drive some key concepts into our heads. They made us master important skills until we could, as some Mazamas love to say: "Do it in the dark, in a cold shower, upside down, backwards, one-handed, with thick gloves on..." etc. [I swear this list keeps growing everytime I hear it]. You're also constantly building great camaraderie with other classmates, gaining an enormous network of cool climbing buddies for life, and somehow managing to get through the class hopefully unscathed.

So, here we are, four foxy 2014 ICS grads, just finished up with helping BCEP classes, free from all this torment! We were eager to climb any mountain presented with crazy-tough challenges that truly put all our skills to the test and generally ready to conquer the world!!

Starting to get dicey.

Or....we can do what we're told is a nice and refreshing, easy but long day with just a couple of little-bitty technical spots. As Jason Wagner, Jesse Applegate, Audrey Brown, and I found out the fun way, it was a far more committing than that.

We had gear for what we thought was just going to be a simple glacier crossing down below, and maybe a little bit of steeper snow up above; possibly even a little step up over a bergschrund. Five pickets should take care of the possible crevasse navigation issues if we run into any, a pair of ice screws for the bergschrund, and an extra ice tool so that we can take pictures and look badass for mom at the top and truly mostly just for show.

Well, I can't tell you how happy I am we brought all those things.

First of our major challenges that night was getting down to the Elliot glacier: it wasn't too shabby, we engaged ourselves in crampon french-technique while traversing for a bit, and we're there. As far as crossing the Elliot: we roped up just-in-case, found two hairline crevasses during our crossing, and figured we brought our pickets for naught. "Oh well', I thought, "guess we got past the anticlimactic 'hard part'; thanks ICS...for making us a bunch of over-prepared Mazombies..."

Audrey belays Jesse across the bergschrund.

So ... here's where I bite my tongue. A thousand feet later, we quickly found ourselves in a precarious area where things got pretty [d]icy. Not to mention that if anyone were to slip ... well, it'd be a long ride down. But hey, really it's no bigs, we got these pickets, we got the skills, and we're already on ropes; which made for a quick travelling team with solid snow protection and we kept going up ... thanks ICS.

Now we get to this "tiny step-up" of a bergschrund that I've heard so much about. Well, lets put it this way: when you're looking at a crack in the snow that appears infinitely deep and goes 10-feet-wide directly into the mountain underneath that ledge you were going to step up onto, you re-evalute your life and what you're getting yourself into. As frightening as it was conceptually, it was by no means a deal-breaker for us; for we had the training, and we had the gear. We placed a couple of bomber pickets in the snow for backup and up and over all four of us go. Thanks ICS.

High angle snow on the way up to Cathedral Ridge.

So now's the walk-up, right? WRONG. From the moment we stepped over, we found ourselves on high-angle snow for the next 600 ft, that with any bad luck, we go barreling back down a mountain for thousands of feet, if not directly into the 'schrund - not sure which is worse. The clouds have completely enveloped us. These momentary white-out conditions were actually quite positive for us, as it gave us a chance to rest. Since you couldn't see anything - best not to move - and it conveniently played mental-pro and masked us from a dangerous fall zone down below.

At that very moment we realized we were a well-oiled machine prepped for these kinds of situations. We all had the skills and judgement we needed to make sound decisions based on constantly changing variables. We could climb up and over on any line we wanted. We had the gear we needed and the experience necessary that made all of this not that big of a deal. And we all knew that each one of us could be solidly relied-upon to carry through efficiently and safely in these conditions. From an earlier Mazama article that we were quoting at that very moment, we knew that there was no turning back, that "the only way is through," and that we could do it right. Thanks ICS!

The summit! Jesse, Audrey and Jason.

After four protected belayed pitches using various types of rock/snow anchors and quite a bit time requiring intensive focus, the sun broke out of the clouds right as we gained the Cathedral Ridge, and we FINALLY hit that "simple walk-up" with a blue-bird sky. What a poetic way to enjoy a Hood summit: all by ourselves up top  after conquering a whole side of a mountain without seeing a single soul. A first experience for all of us on the north side, and a first successful ascent of Hood altogether for Audrey. It was awesome!!

A super-huge THANK YOU goes out to Gary and all of ICS, both assistants and fellow students, for making this last year fantastic, and for making us all dangerously good out in the field. All that time spent; in the cold, in the wet snow, in the darkness, has totally paid off.

For only after the night comes the sunshine.