Adventure from the Past: The Middle Sister Challenge

Oregon is great state for climbers. The Coast Range, Blue Mountains, the Steins, and of course the great Cascades all offer opportunities to climb.

One of my favorite places to climb is the Three Sister Wilderness. Two of the mountains, South and Middle Sisters, are pretty easy climbs. They’re hikes really, no ropes, no cramp-ons, no technical skills needed. With some endurance and some common sense mountain navigation, you’ll find yourself at the top of a 10,000+ ft peak!

I’ve summited Middle Sister twice now, and South Sister once. Very nice.

For me and some of my friends, the “hike” to the tops of these peaks was a good time, but not a great time. We needed something more, but there were many of us not ready for or committed to becoming technical climbers.

Enter Corley M.

Corley M. is called many things, but “Sane” is not one of them. Corley, who may or may not have had help, conceived the Middle Sister Challenge.

Don’t get this confused with the Easy Cheese Challenge. The Easy Cheese Challenge involves summiting one (or multiple) peaks on a diet of nothing but water and easy cheese.

The Middle Sister Challenge, fortunately, has no dietary restrictions. It is a race, actually, between two teams. One team starts on one side of the mountain, and the other on the opposite side. They race to the peak and then back down the opposite side, ending at the other teams starting point.

A group of six of us formed two teams. Myself, Tim, and Blair on one team. Aaron, Lexi, and Corley M. on the other.

And so it began.

My team started out at a great pace, we quickly reached the base of the mountain and started the steep ascent. At this point we were all feeling well, except for some minor blisters that had been opened up for various reasons. We covered the wounds with duct tape and continued.

The ascent started to take its toll on me. I started to feel crummy, a mixture of what I can only guess dehydration and altitude sickness. Tim charged on like a mountain got shot full of PCP. Blair and I slowly followed.

I started to cramp up in the legs, but pressed on. Tim tried to kill me with a rockslide he started. I pressed on. We summited. I was in quite a bit of pain, but managed to snap some pics and eat some food. We spent a quick 10 minutes at the top and then started down the other side.
I realized around this time that I was in fact dehydrated. We stopped about an hour later at a small mountain creek. We filled up the water bottles and bladders. I drank a bunch. I felt better. The other team (coming up the mountain) spotted us at this point and came over for a quick visit. There was much rejoicing.
We parted ways and pressed on. The sun was now set, and it started to get dark.
The next several hours were a crusade of pain and suffering. I’ll give the highlights in a bulleted list here to save time:

-We decided to leave trails behind and “bushwhack” in order to try and cut off a couple miles of distance.
-We found some neat waterfalls in the drainage system we were walking down.
-We climbed down some steep rock faces that, had we fallen, would have meant certain mutilation or even death.
-We didn’t know where exactly we were on the map after about the first hour of “bushwhacking”.
-I lost the map. We were forced to use only a compass to find the trail we had been heading for.
-We walked through marsh and got our shoes and feet soaked.
-Blair claimed several time that he wasn’t going to make it, and to leave him for the cougars. We ignored him.
-We found a trail.
-We followed the trail to the trailhead where the other team had (supposedly) parked their car.
-The car wasn’t there.
-Using Blair’s GPS, and a bit of sleuthing, we found the car.
-We drove to the other side of the mountain to where the other team was camped; I fell asleep behind the wheel as soon as we arrived.

The actual hiking part of the journey took us over 13 hours. We had gone 19 miles, with 2 extra miles of vertical thrown in for good measure. We started at about 1 in the afternoon and finished sometime around 3am.

The other team had finished with a much quicker time, and there was no question that they had won the event, no contest.

However, my team still thinks that in our bumbling, we created for ourselves an epic adventure, never to be repeated. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Blair will probably not agree with me on that part. We did almost die,…
This last picture is from a different climb that I did with Tim and two other dudes. It is unrelated, but is good picture of our South Sister summit, with Middle and North Sister behind us.