So the short/funny version of this weekend's trip report goes like this: We bailed on Wetterhorn Peak (14,014') about 700' shy of the summit due to exhaustion on the part of Minesh and Laura, while a nun in full habit passed us and summitted. I'm not kidding.

I've been pushing us for a really aggressive training regimen for Rainier because I felt that I needed a lot of physical conditioning to pull it off. Unfortunately, this left Minesh and Laura somewhat overwhelmed with trips and feeling constantly exhausted. When we got up onto the final summit ridge and were faced with 700' of rock scramble and some exposed class 3 terrain, they felt too exhausted to safely summit so we turned back. I didn't get a picture of the nun, but she made it all the way up through very soft snow wearing a full habit, dress and all (plus the... hat thing, I dunno), and light tennis shoes. She was accompanied by her sister, who was wearing jeans and tennis shoes, and their father, who looked like he was getting his ass handed to him by his daughters. I guess nuns must work out a lot or something. Especially considering they had Nebraska plates.

The real bummer of the trip is that Minesh has now decided to drop out of the Rainier bid, so there's going to be some discussion of what happens next.

Laura and I did complete a very high-angle glissade, and I took a video of it:

The video doesn't really convey the scale of this drop, the angle, or the speed at which I was going. It was about 350' of drop at 40° in about 20 seconds, and my voice makes it sound like I needed some clean shorts or something. Moving that fast is pretty scary. And whenever my boots made contact with the snow, a shower of wet snow went everywhere, including all over my face and the camera; so for a lot of this, I couldn't see a thing. Anyway, it was a fun glissade in perfect snow. Unfortunately, when I turned the camera around at the end to show all the snow covering my face, I accidentally hit the stop button so you can't really tell the extent of it and you don't get to see the pan I made showing the route from below. Anyway, let's see you do that in a habit, nun...