Fleeting Notions: June 2013

Arrow's Axiom of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives says that if you prefer apple pie to peach pie, the appearance on the table of a slice of cherry pie inside an unbreakable glass box won't change your preference for an available slice of apple over an available slice of peach. This seemingly intuitive axiom is one of the assumptions for Arrow's famous impossibility theorem, that there is no democratic choice system (i.e., voting method) that satisfies this and several other equally "obviously true" principles.

Our cat Fluffy (aka Fluffy the Finicky) routinely violates this axiom. She prefers dry food to no food. She prefers no food to wet food - she will almost never eat it unless she's very hungry. However, often when presented with dry food she turns up her nose, even if she's hungry. The trick to get her to eat (so that the other cats don't eat her food first) is to put down another bowl containing a tiny amount of wet food. As soon as sniffs the wet food bowl, she heads back over to the dry food bowl and starts eating.

So her preferences at these times start out as No Food > Dry Food. Presented with some wet food, an irrelevant alternative since she almost never prefers it to either, her preferences switch to Dry Food > No Food.

This is probably why cats have never developed advanced democratic societies.

Last weekend, along with 9 friends and acquaintances, I climbed Mt. Shasta. It was Jim Offel's birthday gift to himself (originally conceived for his 50th birthday, but deferred by 4 years) and I was happy to be included.

Four of us, including me, climbed 3700 feet in 8 1/2 hours, but failed to go the last 300 feet to the actual summit, bailing out at the top of the aptly named "Misery Hill". The other 6 made it all the way to the top. On the descent, I skied back to our base camp, thighs burning like mad with every turn in the slushy snow. The return took about 5 minutes.

We took three days for the climb, though many people do it in two and some even in one. The trailhead is at about 7000 feet, while the summit is over 14,000. We took extra time in order to reduce the chance of getting altitude sickness. It seemed to work: no one really succumbed, though one of the 4 of us who missed the summit had some nausea. For everyone else, the worst symptom was being out of breath.

With my friends Tom and Eric, I arrived a day early to take a class on basic mountaineering skills, which was mainly about using an ice axe to climb, arrest a slide and control the descent, and a little bit about climbing technique on the steep slopes. Our teacher was a young guy who once did the entire climb in under 2 hours.We didn't really understand how impressive that was until our own climb was over.

Our route started at Bunny Flat on Saturday morning. From there we walked up a marked trail to Sierra Club cabin, also known as Horse Camp, around 7,900 feet. We camped that night on the snow, and from there up we were on snow the entire time. On day two, while the rest of the group hiked up "Climber's Gully" to Helen Lake at 10,000 feet, I put my skis and skins on and went up a different route. Unfortunately, my rental skins were crap, and on the steeper slopes they came unglued from the skis, making them worse than useless. Eventually I had to take them off, put the skis back on my pack and hike the rest of the way. I had walkie-talkie communication with the rest of the group, so they knew roughly where I was which was reassuring. But it was a damned hard climb with a 50 pound load (my full pack plus the skis).

On the summit day we got up at 1:30 am, had a quick cup of coffee, and were climbing at 3:00. The final day's climb has four stages. The first is up the Avalanche Gulch bowl, visible in the first photo below, up past the triangular rock feature (the Heart) and through the line of sandstone at the top called Red Bank. This was by far the hardest and longest part of the climb. The ascent through Red Bank was especially hard, with the icy slope reaching 50 degrees and going through a narrow chute eroded through the stone. After the Red Banks came Short Hill, then Misery Hill, after which we could finally see the summit. After a rest, I tried to continue, but it was hard to tell how big the last stage really was. It looked intimidating and I was completely spent, so turned back to wait with 3 others who were similarly done in. As it happened, looks were deceiving and the other 6 took only 1/2 hour or so to get to the summit. Oh well.

Slightly refreshed by a noontime snooze lying on the rocks at 13,800 feet, I picked up my skis at the bottom of Misery Hill, hiked a short way upslope to get around the end of the Red Banks, dropped across the cornice, then skied down the bowl, past the other side of the Heart and into camp. After about an hour and a half, the rest of the group began to mosey back, after sliding down on their butts (glissading). We packed up, retraced our steps (or in my case, skied) to Horse Camp and finally trudged back down the trail to the cars. That last 2 miles to the car was particularly hard - we were all pretty much done in and ready to be off the mountain. Vertical tally for the summit day: 4000 feet (+/-) up, 7000 feet down.

While I think I was in good enough physical shape for the climb, I wasn't really prepared mentally. In spite of reading a book on the route and hearing about it from others, I had thought it was going to be more or less a hike on snow. It wasn't. Climbing is much more gruelling. You trudge along, each step needing a conscious effort, thinking about each breath. You look up every 15 minutes or so, and seem to have made almost no progress, hour after hour. You get to the top of a difficult stretch, but there's no relief: just a view of the next, equally difficult one. It's really a test of mental endurance, especially for an aging geezer.

It's a really beautiful mountain. Our group was great. If I do it again, at least next time I'll know what I'm getting in to.

Some of the photos below are by Tom Hoynes.

Mt. Shasta seen from the town at dusk. Avalanche Gulch is the broad bowl to the right of the ridge near the center of the photo. The Heart is the triangular feature near the top, and the Red Banks is the rocky ridge above the Heart. Helen Lake is just above the lowest horizontal moraine visible below the Heart.