T-2: Recap

We left the house around noon’ish today and head out to Ashford to start this adventure.   We arrived at Ashford around 2:30pm and picked up some of our gear.   As a sponsor of the event, RMI gave us helmet, harness with locking carabiner and avalanche receiver for free to all the climber.   Since I had done the climbing on 2005, I didn’t need to rent any other gear.

Shortly after, we gathered under one of their tent and we brought our pack and the rest of our gear so the guide can inspect it and make sure we have everything we need.   Laura, our event manager gave us our swag and I got an additional bonus — an ice axe that personalize with my name.   Pretty awesome!

We started the afternoon by an orientation by our lead guide, Jake Beren.    He’s been with RMI for 5 years and been all over the place.   We sat down inside the lounge at the base camp and introduce ourselves, where we come from, why are we doing this, etc.   Then he went over some presentation about the route, what to expect and the schedule for the next 3 days.      We chatted for about an hour, did a little bit of Q&A session and we moved on to a gear check.

He went over some of the gear, starting from the ground (boots) to the top (helmet).   It was interesting to see tip and tricks he show on how to pack efficiently, such as, put your snack inside your parka pocket so when you are at 12,000ft, with a strong wind – you don’t have to dig inside your pack for a snack.   You put your parka on, there reach inside the pocket and there’s your snack.    After that, he started to go over our gear individually.   I got everything okay, other than my thick mittens.   He told me that mine wasn’t warm enough, so I need to get a different one.   So I rented this one.

We wrapped up the afternoon around 5pm.   Tomorrow we are going for a climb school and we are meeting at the same place at 8:15am.

That’s it for today!   I’m hoping for a decent weather.  It’s rainy here and somewhat cold.   Forecast tomorrow said that it will be partly cloudy with a chance of shower (yes, that’s Seattle weather) and it will be 53 degrees at Paradise to start of.

Thank you for everybody’s tweet today!  I only have internet access here at the basecamp.   I’ll try to update daily on what’s going on until the time I’m out in the mountain.