CMRU Ropes Practice

This month's excercise for CMRU was ropes training in Santiam Pass across from the Hoodoo ski area.  It was tough to get up at 6:30am after 4 hours of sleep to drive the
hour and a half up to the pass alone for the training but I'm determined to learn as much about mountaineering as possible from every resource.  I quickly packed in the morning and had a quick breakfast while slamming gatorade to cure the hangover buzz (didn't help cause I forgot gatorade gives me horrible heart burn!).
At the training was Aaron, Chris, Jonathan, Todd, Drew, and I.  I brought my snowshoes so Todd was nice enough to go with me on his as well.  This worked out perfectly because the distance we had to cover was nothing compared to the workout the guys on skis got.  Jason Wood and Bob showed up briefly as we were gearing up to say hi as they were on Hoodoo cross country ski patrol for the day.  Bob even
asked us to radio in to dispatch at Hoodoo our coordinates to catch them off guard and to keep them on their toes (Bob is the God of mountaineering and training in my mind... everyone respects his authority on any matter in the outdoors).  Todd and I headed through the woods to our first GPS coordinate - an avy beacon buried in the snow earlier by Chris.  We made great time to it with me navigating in the lead and dug up the beacon quickly to find a note saying, "Hi, I'm Tim.. I'm dead,
take me home".. haha.  We radioed in CMRU's code for deceased body (I'm not going to say what it is) and headed back towards our fake "SAR base".  This entailed traversing around a large hill with
great views of Three Fingered Jack to the North and Mt. Washington to the South.  When we got back to the trucks we dumped all our extra stuff to gear up with CMRU rescue gear such as the litter, ropes, harnesses, medical kits, etc as Chris went off into the woods to play a lost hiker with two broken legs at the top of a steep slope we would have to lower him down with a complicated rope setup.  This turned out to be really fun and I learned a lot about setting up anchors and lowering an injured climber.  Plus where we were would be a sick place to build a ski jump next year in some powder... stay tuned for that one.  We got Chris down safe and sound,
packed up and headed home.  When I walked into my apartment Jason looked at me and said, "oh my God, you're fried"... oooohhh yeah... I was burned ridiculous from being in the sun all day and not really thinking about it.  And to top it off I had a long sleeve shirt on pulled up to my elbows so my tan looks ridiculous!  And... I'm off to bed... covered in aloe and in pain looking like a lobster!  hehe.

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