Darl58 said:
The guides carry bivy bags and gear to stay out, but in all the years have not had to....it's been close a few times.
The last day of our trip when we were trying to get climbing, the hikers were up on the glaciers and we listened to the Helicopter pilot comunicating all day with the guides as he was having a hard time getting to an area for pickup. The hikers had to traverse and get to an area with less wind and a little visibility. We were laughing as we were actually hiking up a Mountain that day and hiking down all the way to the Lodge road...
Fantastic trip report and slide show, Darlene; many thanks for sharing! Brought back great memories.
When my mom retired, my brother and I bought her a two-week vacation to the Canadian Rockies, which included one week of heli-hiking with CMH and a few nights at Bugaboo Lodge (has a much larger green lawn now!). At the time, AMC OH (Old Hutperson) Mark Kingsbury had inherited the position of director of operations from Hans Gmoser, the founder of CMH, after working his way up the ranks beginning as bull cook at Bugaboo Lodge (the AMC huts were good training!). On one occasion the clouds dropped down upon my mom's heli-hiking group such that the helo could not get back down to pick them up, whereby the guide stepped away from the group to converse discretely with the helo pilot about an alternative pick up strategy. Needless to say, many of the retirees in the group were getting a bit nervous, but according to Mark, my mom told them not to worry, that "this sort of thing happens all of the time in the mountains," having seen so many of her sons' mountaineering slide shows over the years.
The clouds eventually lifted and they were picked up after a couple hours of huddling out of the wind, but Mark was tragically killed a few years later in a motorcycle accident (way too young
).
My last visit was in 1983, when we met Peter Croft at the Kain Hut after his enchainment of the NE Butt on Bugaboo Spire (IV, 5.7), the Becky-Chouinard on South Howser (V, 5.10a), and the Kraus-McCarthy on Snowpacth (IV, 5.8+), these three routes involving close to 40 pitches of simul-climbing, after which his partner called it a day and retired to the hut. Peter continued on with a free solo McTech Arete (III, 5.10a) before calling it quits after an 18+ hour day.
In August 2007, Matt Maddaloni soloed all four of the routes above, as well as the west ridge of Pigeon Spire (II, 5.4, but spectacular route!) for 50 "pitches" of steep rock in 15.5 hours round trip from Applebee Campground (see link). In the "old" days, pitches were traditionally 45 m (ca.150 ft) to 50 m (ca.165 ft), but these lose some meaning with simul-climbing or today's longer ropes.
http://www.climbing.com/news/hotflashes/fivebugaboos1day/
