Made It To The "Best" Page This Week On B3ta's QOTW!

Yay! Hard to make it to the "best" page!

It's not a new story, though: it's an old one I've told several times on this blog. Still, it's probably the highest-quality retelling of the story.

The "Question Of The Week" this week at B3ta was:

Ignored Advice

What wholesome advice have you ignored, to your own downfall?

My answer was:

"If you climb the mountain, be up and back by noon"

A pearoast, but it all started with neglected advice.

At age 17, a friend and I took a month-long auto trip around the American and Canadian West. One of our stops was at Mt. Hood, Oregon. My friend was partly prepared for the icy summit, but I wasn't. He had an ice axe, but the best I could scrounge from hunting around the ski slopes was a bamboo pole. Neither of us had crampons.

Someone advised "if you climb the mountain, be up and back by noon," but we didn't understand the advice. That meant starting the climb shortly after midnight. We wanted our sleep, however, and started instead after sunrise.

One reason for the advice is, as happens on summer's days, the surface snow begins melting, but is still rock-hard right under the surface. The combination is extremely slippery.

Descending from the top around 5 p.m., my friend was able to control his slippery descent using his ice axe, but my bamboo pole was nearly useless for that purpose. I slipped, and slid. I was hurtling downward straight towards a crevasse (technically a bergschrund), which sported a 30-to-50 meter tall cliff, depending where you sailed off. Painful death appeared certain.

I aimed my descent and plummeted straight into my friend, who was able to arrest both our descents with his ice axe. I started cursing him with the foulest language imaginable, even though he had just saved my life.

A panicky young death is not a pretty death! After more scary sliding experiments that brought us closer to the brink, I discovered I could roll over, hug the snow, and stop on my own. And I could take tiny baby steps downhill. After an eternity, we got out of there. I would have kissed him, except by now our tongues and lips were all sunburnt, and neither of us needed more pain.

Here is the final report on a particularly horrible 2002 accident, featuring the spectacular crash of the rescue helicopter, at exactly the same location.