Had a great fun time biking, hiking and camping on orcas islands this weekend. Pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/campingorcasislands/ !! This is view from top of Mt. Constitution you can acutally see Baker over the water!!!
Monday, August 21, 2006
Monday, August 07, 2006
Mt. Rainier - A Blissful Climb!!
Yesterday I was fortunate to be on Mt. Rainier, such an awesome day, great views and gracious weather. This was one of the most blissful climb i have done. I was enjoying each moment of the climb and the motto was enjoy the journey than the end! Nine of us summited at about 9:00ish am. Pictures at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vaibhavb/tags/mtrainier2006/
We started the climb on Saturday Aug 5, 2006 at about 9:30am from the Paradise parking lot. We was team of 12 lead by Olympia mountaineer Barney. Going at an easy pace we reach camp Muir at 2:00pm. The weather was awesome and blissful vista. I tented up with Robert. We had our dinner at 5:30pm. I really enjoyed the Mountain house Pasta i bought for dinner! We were planning to start the summit day at 11:30pm, it was going be a one long day from base camp to summit and back to cars! So after cranking up tonne of water from ice got to bed at 6:30pm.
Barney woke us all by 11:00pm the same evening and after roping up we left for destination 14411ft. We had about 4500ft of elevation to cover and the plan was to do 500ft per hour and call if a day if we dont summit by 10am. With tonnes of folks attempting the summit and the RMI light lamp crew we slowed a bunch. At Ingram flats Michael a little fatigued, called it a day and decided to stay. From 4 ropes team and 12 member crew we went down to 3 roped teams with 11 people. For another 3 and half hours we travelled the nasty and steep rock route to get on top of dissapointment cleaver. It was 5:30am and our team was ready to launch from the cleaver! However we doing a very slow pace and with this rhythm we could never make the summit before 10am, however every was feeling quite strong! Barney with Garette and Robert made a call to take back Coleen and have the rest of crew give a shot to the summit!!
Garette from assiting Barney become the climb lead. At 5:30am we just took of for the summit, Garette really pulled hard and I kept up with him while the other rope teams (Robert and Peter) were hauling their asses behind us as well. After about an hour of climbing I asked Garetter to slow down a bit so that i can keep up - man he was just running!! We had to take a de-route from the standard path as lot of crevasses had opened up. After solid hour and half of climbing we were at 13400ft and there we saw the hope of summitting!!! We kept up the pace and at 8:30am we were at the lip of the crater, booyaa!!! We all then shot for the true summit at the other side of crater. Very strangely the whole journey seemed to have a very satisfying resemblance to life, I enjoyed each moment of it but never was really crazy about a great end, but you know if you play it well you do succeed!! Soo.. we took a log of summit pics, signed the log, eat, drank, relaxed, Jeff and Larry even sh*?ed :) at 10am we headed back to the base camp!!!
From Summit to Cleaver to Ingram flats to Camp Muir we were back !! The down climbing had really killed me, my inned thigh muscles and calves are still sore!!!! We got at the base camp at 3, Barney had graciously melt us some water. I immediately guled a bit and stared packing for way down!!! We left Camp Muir at 4pm and reached cars at about 7:00pm, I was really taking it slow and for last mile i almost baby stepped! Robert and Garette hung out with me all the while testing out all the possible trail benches!!!!
From Saturday 9:00am to Sunday 7:00pm the whole journey was blissful!!! I'm really glad to have done this and lucky to have a great team and amazing weather!!
I did the climb to fund raise for a non-profit clinic for the needy in my home area, Nashik. In case you are interested to help out to help this clinic get started please give me your donation checks. This effort is not under any US-NGOs but I’m trying to get this running myself – with local help and charities. Will let donors know about the progress of project as it un-rolls.
We started the climb on Saturday Aug 5, 2006 at about 9:30am from the Paradise parking lot. We was team of 12 lead by Olympia mountaineer Barney. Going at an easy pace we reach camp Muir at 2:00pm. The weather was awesome and blissful vista. I tented up with Robert. We had our dinner at 5:30pm. I really enjoyed the Mountain house Pasta i bought for dinner! We were planning to start the summit day at 11:30pm, it was going be a one long day from base camp to summit and back to cars! So after cranking up tonne of water from ice got to bed at 6:30pm.
Barney woke us all by 11:00pm the same evening and after roping up we left for destination 14411ft. We had about 4500ft of elevation to cover and the plan was to do 500ft per hour and call if a day if we dont summit by 10am. With tonnes of folks attempting the summit and the RMI light lamp crew we slowed a bunch. At Ingram flats Michael a little fatigued, called it a day and decided to stay. From 4 ropes team and 12 member crew we went down to 3 roped teams with 11 people. For another 3 and half hours we travelled the nasty and steep rock route to get on top of dissapointment cleaver. It was 5:30am and our team was ready to launch from the cleaver! However we doing a very slow pace and with this rhythm we could never make the summit before 10am, however every was feeling quite strong! Barney with Garette and Robert made a call to take back Coleen and have the rest of crew give a shot to the summit!!
Garette from assiting Barney become the climb lead. At 5:30am we just took of for the summit, Garette really pulled hard and I kept up with him while the other rope teams (Robert and Peter) were hauling their asses behind us as well. After about an hour of climbing I asked Garetter to slow down a bit so that i can keep up - man he was just running!! We had to take a de-route from the standard path as lot of crevasses had opened up. After solid hour and half of climbing we were at 13400ft and there we saw the hope of summitting!!! We kept up the pace and at 8:30am we were at the lip of the crater, booyaa!!! We all then shot for the true summit at the other side of crater. Very strangely the whole journey seemed to have a very satisfying resemblance to life, I enjoyed each moment of it but never was really crazy about a great end, but you know if you play it well you do succeed!! Soo.. we took a log of summit pics, signed the log, eat, drank, relaxed, Jeff and Larry even sh*?ed :) at 10am we headed back to the base camp!!!
From Summit to Cleaver to Ingram flats to Camp Muir we were back !! The down climbing had really killed me, my inned thigh muscles and calves are still sore!!!! We got at the base camp at 3, Barney had graciously melt us some water. I immediately guled a bit and stared packing for way down!!! We left Camp Muir at 4pm and reached cars at about 7:00pm, I was really taking it slow and for last mile i almost baby stepped! Robert and Garette hung out with me all the while testing out all the possible trail benches!!!!
From Saturday 9:00am to Sunday 7:00pm the whole journey was blissful!!! I'm really glad to have done this and lucky to have a great team and amazing weather!!
I did the climb to fund raise for a non-profit clinic for the needy in my home area, Nashik. In case you are interested to help out to help this clinic get started please give me your donation checks. This effort is not under any US-NGOs but I’m trying to get this running myself – with local help and charities. Will let donors know about the progress of project as it un-rolls.
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Ready To Go To Work!
Today is the national ride your bike to work day! We had one at Microsoft too! I was there with my Mathilda. Check out the pics at my flickr page. There were folks frequenting at 2fast, WMRRA and other track organizations! You can see it from there scrapped out left-side of tires - all tracks with left turns, well apparently tracks in Portland have right turns:). Any ways some one actually when to this http://www.ononewheel.com to do flip baby!! Looking forward to more riding this season, oh hoo.. now that my cycyling and mountaineering are almost gettin over! Party time...
Monday, July 17, 2006
STP 2006 Story
Myself, Leonard and Murari set to do the 206.2 miles STP in a day this year. We were doing pretty ok but lost a bunch of time owing to late start, broken seat replacement and slowing a little after midpoint. The accumulation put us to finish the ride probably an hour or so after sunset. We didnt want to be un-safe so made a decision to stop at 155th mile with about two hours of sunset left. Myself and Murari came back to start at the same point and finished the ride in about another 3 and half hours, Leonard had a commitment on sunday so couldnt come back to finish it. I was glad to join Raji, Sudarshan and Vijay at the finish line on Sunday. It was fun ride both days with weather being audaciously generous!
You can find our cyclysm details at http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/episode/view.mb?episodePk.pkValue=1061962, thanks to Murari's awesome GPS!!
There were some tough decision we made on our day of ride. We wanted to be safe more than anything but on hindsight it seems that if we would have kept going we could have definately made it. When i went to portland to pick our bags up, I saw people finishing the ride until 11:00pm and many of those who finished at 10:30pm we had left behind. But sure having a better speed would have give us more confidence to go for it.!! My climbing mentor Ed would have so called this as the "Sahalee Clusterfuck", two times in a row they were so close to peak of sahalee but couldnt do it for some reason or other, but hey alteast we did it!!!
Check out the more pics at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/wheelsofchange2006/
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Sahalee Peak - Glacier Cimb
The weekend of July 4th I did the Sahalee peak climb through Quien Sabe glacier. It was such an awesome day, my most scenic climb so far. We slept under the huge and threatening Johanesburg mountain and then hauled about 12 hour day to complete the glacier climb, the last portion of it was a class 3/4 scramble. In this picture I'm traversing a very narrow and exposed ridge making way towards the last pitch! I was holding my breadht - dont fall, dont fall dont fall!! But hey now i'm Mountaineers Basic graduate!! hurray I have completed all my required alpine, glacier and rock climbs!!
Monday, June 05, 2006
My First Summit!!!
So my first summit!! I summited Unicorn this saturday with my mentor Ed. We traversed from the trail head on Unicorn glacier to reach the base of peak. From the base we did a roped rock climb of about 40 feet to the summit. The whole round trip was about 6 hours and the weather was awesome!! This picture is the stichted panorama from the unicorn peak and as you notice the prominent feature in the panorama is Mount Rainier :). Climb on!!
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Social Networking Phenomenon
Alrite! Alrite!! I'm admittedly late here. But yep i killed a couple of hours today to get on all the possible social networks my friends and family have been wanting me to. So you can find me on myspace at http://www.myspace.com/vaibhavb, Friendster at http://www.friendster.com/profiles/vitraag and on Orkut. The demographics of the whole _social_ phenomenon quite clear all my indian friends are on orkut while many of my American friends are on myspace and friendster. I still have to send invites etx for my buddies to link up, but i'm not really sure if can keep up with all that. So largely this blog is going to be my little window to the world! Yeah some-day i'll update my homepage and integrate all this but until next time, so long.
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