And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. Dude climbed (maybe crawled is a better word?) with the pole in one hand and his Nalgene in the other, which he used both to make steps for his feet and to prevent ungloved hand from touching the snow and getting too cold.For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. I felt some responsibility for him, kicked myself for not telling him earlier to go home, told Joseph to give him one of the ski poles, and showed them how they could use the pole with the basket removed to self-belay. He was in a weird gray area–maybe he was more than some dude who was following us–we had hiked up half the trail and had lunch together. Dude was having trouble with his footing, he felt he was in a dangerous situation, but he clearly wanted to continue, and I wasn’t about to call it on account of somebody who just happened to be following us. We found ourselves climbing steep snow, and we were too far into it for Dude to turn back. Well, the base of Del Campo got to be halfway up Del Campo. The route from the basin to Foggy Lake and the base of Del Campo isn’t very steep, so the dude followed us. He was wearing black running shoes which were already soaked through by the time we got to the basin. Now this guy was completely unprepared even for the Gothic Basin hike, a hike that’s one of the most rugged normal non-climbers’ trails in Washington. I told the dude that Joseph and I were going to try to climb Del Campo, or at least get as far as we could. I took out my ice axe which I had brought in case there was steep snow, and I gave Joseph my ski poles to use. It was 1:30 by then, plenty of time to scramble Del Campo, which I read was a pretty easy peak. The snow started around 4000 feet or so, and the basin itself was entirely snow-covered. He was hiking at the same pace as us, so we ended up hiking together. About halfway up the trail, we encountered this guy hiking by himself, a bit younger than us, muscular, also Asian-American. We rolled out of Lake City around 9am and got to the trailhead at 10:30. I’d been to Gothic Basin before, but didn’t make it up to Foggy Lake, and I wanted to see the lake and maybe maybe scramble Del Campo. Last Sunday (July 14, 2013), on a night-before whim, I decided to go Gothic Basin with my friend and first gym climbing partner, Joseph. I thought to myself, “Maybe after I take this class, I’ll be more prepared to do early season hikes!”įast forward to now. Now here was a piece of equipment I didn’t know about! This planted the seed for me to think about taking a climbing class later that year when I overheard a colleague talking about one. Another party passed us going downhill, and noticing us struggling, asked us if we carried ice axes. We encountered steep snow between Little Heart Lake and Big Heart lake, which we negotiated…very carefully. My friend Ralph and I camped on a little patch of bare ground next to Copper Lake, and the next day set out on the snow to see as many of the lakes as we could. It was in June during the summer solstice, and being fairly new to backpacking in Washington, I was surprised by the amount of snow still on the ground. Have you ever felt way in over your head? Three years ago, in 2010, I went on a backpacking trip, my third ever, to the West Fork Foss River Lakes.
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