NAVIGATION

By the second summer every Camp Sheppard staff member was to have completed the Explorer Search and Rescue course. The training involved several weekends of wilderness map and compass work, and training in search techniques. These skills were integral to backcountry leadership on all Camp Sheppard hikes and climbs. Upon graduation from the ESAR course, I received a certificate stating I had passed "only he and his God know how". Only God knows how I passed because it mystifies me. My partner and I bumbled around the compass course. We hit the first checkpoint in good style, then missed the second one completely during a detour around a large swamp. The Xeroxed sheet of paper with a north arrow and five or six x's on it wasn't much help at this point, but we did hear other teams fighting through the brush, we followed the noise and found ourselves at the fourth checkpoint. We managed the remaining compass shots and gave a very abbreviated version of the truth in saying we didn't put our names in at the third checkpoint.

By repetition however, these navigation skills became second nature. Each summer started with a staff training trip that involved cross-country compass shots, alpine traverses and following a trail hidden under four feet of snow. With the scouts, most of the hikes that went out of Camp Sheppard had at least one half day of cross-country travel. One particular trip had a compass shot from the Pacific Crest Trail to Crescent Lake. It was about a mile from the trail to the lake across gentle forested terrain. The traveling was not difficult but the underbrush was thick enough that you couldn't see more than about forty yards and there were no obvious terrain features (ridgeline or stream) to guide one in the right direction. The only reliable way to find the lake was with an accurate compass shot. The lake was big enough that if you took the compass shot on the middle of the lake you could be off by 200 yards either way and still hit the lake, a pretty generous margin of error. My first trip there, the leader, Dennis Ludemann said, "no margin of error, we want to camp on the north shore so that's what we're aiming for." I was impressed when we came through the brush within five yards of where we wanted to be. At Camp Sheppard, the standards were high.

I took one young troop from Hayden Pass on the Crest Trail to Corral Pass. When we rounded the end of the ridge (with the fabulous view over the Greenwater basin) before traversing into the Castle Mountain Dip I dropped off the ridge too soon and we ended up spending hours fighting through brush and backtracking to avoid walking over the numerous cliffs. Those young scouts could not believe that I had gotten lost; instead, they were certain that I intentionally led them through the thickets and brush. Their faith in my abilities was a salve to my ego; I did not like admitting my mistake, but they harassed me for the rest of the week about dragging them through the brush for half a day.

My finest compass shot was from Meany Crest to the one level spot on Whitman Crest where we could cross over onto the Whitman Glacier. On Meany Crest we awoke to a whiteout. Except for the limited visibility, it was a nice day, not to cold, no wind, and no flying monkeys. To Whitman Crest was a climb of one thousand feet in one mile up the Fryingpan Glacier. The glacier was smooth and crevasse free, so mostly it was a long walk across the snow. However, off route to the left was a band cliffs and to the right crevasses and a large bergschrund at Whitman Crest. We had everybody rope up; mostly to keep the group together, I didn't want anyone to get separated and wander near the cliffs. Tom, Dave, John and I were at the front with our compasses set for Whitman Crest, the whiteout was so thick that I couldn't see the person at the front of my three-man rope. The middleman was just a specter fading into the background.

I was worried that while looking down at the compass at my waist it would be easy to keep the compass oriented, but with nothing in the distance to shoot for it would be hard to follow that little needle exactly. So, I had the three climbers on my rope and the first climber on the second rope all following their compasses. The lead climber was aiming his compass and following the course, the second climber was keeping the leader in his sight to make sure he didn't wander and I did the same. The climber behind me had the middleman on my rope and me in his sight, so he could verify that we were indeed going in a straight line. Off we went into the fog. All of the preparation paid off, we stayed on route for an hour and a half, and hit Whitman Crest within 15 yards of our target. I would have liked to be dead-on, but even in the whiteout, this was close enough.

A glacier is a river of ice. Where a river of water would have rapids and whitewater a glacier has crevasses, icefalls and seracs. Just as a kayaker needs to learn to read the river, a climber needs to learn to read the glacier. At Camp Sheppard I learned from the older, experienced staff, Dennis Fenstermaker, Terry Hainsworth, John Miner, Jim Macartney and Chuck Caley. When we climbed up the Ingraham Glacier from below Little Tahoma to the base of Disappointment Cleaver, we had to work our way around three major icefalls. We could avoid the lower one by skirting way to the right and staying right of center on the second one would usually find a way through. The top icefall was the most jumbled and the route sometimes went way to the left and other times it went to the right side. Route finding on a glacier means finding a path that avoids crevasses, doesn't go beneath a towering tippy serac or into the path of an avalanche.

Going up the mountain, the choices become fewer and fewer and as long as you proceed up you get to the top. Going down, the choices are ever increasing and a small error at the top of the mountain is magnified as you descend.

I led the first climb of the season in 1976 up through Meany Crest and the Ingraham Glacier. We arrived on the summit on Thursday afternoon and spent the night camping in the crater. On Friday we played a game of football in the morning and in the afternoon, we went down in the steam caves to see the lake featured in National Geographic. Saturday morning we were planning to retrace our steps down the Ingraham to Camp Muir and on to Paradise to be picked up by the Camp Sheppard bus.

At 6:00 AM, we made our radio contact and our plans changed; the bus would pick us up at White River campground. We would descend the Emmons and Inter Glaciers and hike out to White River campground. This made for a much shorter drive for the bus driver (45 min vs. 2 hr) and it may have been impossible to pick up all the different hikes and climbs if half the day was Paradise and back. However, on top of the mountain, it was cloudy with visibility about 50 yards, not a whiteout, but not enough visibility to get a good sense of where a person was on the mountain. No one had been up the Emmons in a week so there were no tracks to give a clue as to the best way down. I was at least a little bit nervous.

I reorganized the rope teams, putting the strongest of the scouts alone on a rope with me and we headed down first to pick the way. At every serac and crevasse, we had to choose, right or left? The clouds were too thick to pick out any landmarks such as Curtis Ridge or the icefall on the Winthrop Glacier. I had climbed the Emmons twice the previous year, so I had a general idea of where to go. But, I didn't know where this year's crevasses were or where to get on and off the ramp that runs from 10,500 ft. to 12,000 ft. I didn't know exactly where I was and I didn't know exactly where I was going. As we made our way around crevasses and past seracs, I tried to stay on what I hoped was the route. Finally, around ten in the morning, we stepped below the clouds. We were just above 11,000 ft., smack dab in the middle of the ramp and with a great view of the lower half of the mountain; we could see an easy path to the hut at Camp Schurman.

Now, I realize that in the collective mountaineering experience this was a trivial episode. My worrying about being lost, but not getting lost, doesn't compare to Herzog's descent of Annapurna or Wickwire's bivy on K2. However, when I stepped out of the clouds and realized that I wouldn't have to spend the rest of the day wandering around on a glacier with a group of young scouts, I felt a tremendous wave of relief. I didn't know whether to sit down and say "whew" or jump and yell. So I kept walking down to Camp Schurman.