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Clear skies and a bit of wind accompanied the Four Day Climb July 15 - 18 teams to the summit of Mt. Rainier this morning.  RMI Guides James Bealer, Joe Hoch and their climbing teams enjoyed a bit of time on top this morning before starting their descent from the crater rim around 7:20 am.  The teams have returned to Camp Muir and will take a short break to repack and refuel before continuing the remaing 4.5 miles and 4.500' descent to Paradise this afternoon.

Nice work today team!

Now that we've checked the big goal of Everest Basecamp our sights are set on climbing Lobuche. It is a 20,000-foot peak which towers above the Khumbu valley. Today we departed basecamp after a great breakfast of bacon and eggs, a welcome change. Basecamp accommodations are some of the nicest on the trail with hot showers and amazing food. As we headed down the trail we were impressed with the number of supplies heading up. We saw tables, an oven, and a large mattress all being carried on the backs of porters up to support the climbers. Tomorrow we head to high camp on Lobuche and position ourselves for a summit! Think clear calm skies. RMI Guide Christina Dale

The Four Day Summit Climbs August 11 - 14, 2012 reached the summit of Mt. Rainier this morning. The teams reported a beautiful day with 25-30 mph winds and clear skies. RMI Guides Brent Okita, Tim Hardin and Andres Marin started down from the crater rim with their teams around 7:30 a.m. They will return to Camp Muir and then continue their descent to Paradise later this afternoon. The Expedition Skills Seminar - Paradise crew moved to 9,000' on Monday and set up camp where they will remain until Wednesday morning. They watched a beautiful sunset last night. Today the team practiced fixed line travel on a 60 degree slope and are currently hanging out in crevasses. Congratulations to today's Summit Climb teams!

After enjoying a day of training at Ingraham Flats, 11,200ft, yesterday, the Five Day Climb June 29 - 3 July led by RMI Guides Steve Gately and Emma Lyddan put their training to good use. The teams climbed 4,500' from Camp Muir to the summit of Mt. Rainier this morning.  Steve reported a pleasant day on the mountain with a bit of a breeze towards the summit.  The teams began their descent from the crater rim just before 7:30 am en route to Camp Muir.  Once back at camp they will have a short break to repack before continuing the remaining 4,500' to Paradise.

Congratulations to today's climbing teams!

Avalanche concerns kept our Four-Day teams, led by Mike King and Grayson Swingle, from leaving Camp Muir yesterday. With the recent spring storms comes lots of fresh snow and greater risk for slides.

Despite the loaded snowpack, teams enjoyed a beautiful, clear day for their breakfast and descent back to Rainier Basecamp yesterday afternoon.

The Four Day Summit Climb teams led by RMI Guides Win Whittaker and Geoff Schellens were unable to make a summit attempt of Mt. Rainier due to poor weather. The teams experienced high winds, hail, rain and lightening overnight, fortunately they remained safely tucked in a Camp Muir. The teams will start their descent from Camp Muir later this morning and will arrive at Paradise in the early afternoon. Tyler Reid and the Expedition Skills Seminar Team - Emmons called from Camp Schurman. All is well with the group. They dressed to climb during a small weather window @ 2am this morning but were shut down by hail and lightning. They have around 4 inches of wet snow at Schurman. I estimated about a foot of new up high on the mountain and Tyler says it is probably more. They are training intermittently today and will head down tomorrow morning.

Hello, This is the Dhaulagiri Climbing Team and once again we wanted to apologize for the lack for the lack of communication, but as we said before we have been having a few problems with the satellite “sat” phone. But, right now we can send a dispatch. We have been discovering the worst weather that we have ever witnessed. This Himalayan peak is pretty much keeping us working really, really hard. We are getting snow storms every day. The only time we have not had afternoon storms have been when we have all day storms! But, that hasn’t kept us from climbing. The last two days we have been working very hard being the only team on the mountain breaking trail to establish Camp 2. In the next few days we are going to be looking at the route between Camp 2 and Camp 3 which is one of the hardest parts of the climb. If that is a go we’ll have a summit bid. Like I said, we have been receiving anywhere from a foot to two feet of snow every other afternoon and it has made our job hard. A couple of other teams have arrived, but they are not as ambitious to work up high yet. We are not going to quit until our plane leaves. We have a little bit less than 10 days here to make it happen. We have a really good weather forecast and will keep our fingers crossed that we are going to have a shot at it. So if the sat phone keeps working for us we will keep you posted as much as we can. So please keep your fingers crossed for us. This is Dhaulagiri and we hope you all take care. We hope to communicate good news soon! RMI Guide Elias deAndres Martos

Despite moving to 14,000' yesterday, we all slept soundly in Ang Nuru's lodge here in Pheriche and the clear morning revealed the stunning panorama of peaks that we find ourselves amidst. With a day to hike and acclimatize here around Pheriche we left the teahouse and began ascending tight switchbacks up a ridge to the north of the village. Quickly gaining altitude, we were able to catch our first views of Island Peak, known locally as Imja Tse as we looked to the east up the Imja Khola valley below us. Standing proudly around Island Peak rose Makalu, Baruntse, Ama Dablam, Lhotse, and Lhotse Shar, creating a grand panorama surrounding the mountain. Focusing our attention back on the trail, we continued uphill, eventually reaching the rocky outcropping Nangkar Tshang at over 16,500'. It felt good to push our bodies to these new altitudes and the team climbed wonderfully, moving smoothly up and back down the steep hillsides above Pheriche. As we stood on the summit, looking out at the views around us and watching the clouds gradually roll up the valley from far below, three Himalayan Eagles soared past us. It was an incredible sight to see, these massive birds playing in the thermals at such altitudes. We watched them fly back and forth before gradually moving up the valley. We returned to the teahouse in the afternoon, just as the clouds rolled in. Legs tired after a solid day of walking, we kicked back in the dining room and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. Today is Mark's birthday and unbeknown to him Karen has convinced Ang Nuru to prepare a birthday cake up here for him, we are looking forward to surprising him with it this evening. RMI Guide Linden Mallory

The itinerary of this Aconcagua climb has been anything but ordinary. The weather saw to that ever since we first tried to move to Camp 1 and promptly had to do an about-face back to Basecamp. Since that day, the guides have had to stay on their toes, rearranging, pivoting, and scraping together a plan that would give us the best shot for the summit. Well, this group's ability to adapt to the changing circumstances on a moments notice may just payoff. Today was originally our day to summit, but the wind had other ideas. So now we are once again resting, eating, and acclimatizing at Camp 2. However, this means that tonight is our night. The last night in fact! The wind and temperatures look ideal for a successful summit attempt. But don’t get excited for us just yet, having had to push the summit day back as far as possible to improve our chances with the weather means tomorrow will be a monster of a day. We will launch our summit attempt from Camp 2 instead of high camp, a move not possible with any other group I’ve climbed this mountain with. If we are successful and make it to the top, we then must head back down to Camp 2, pick up the gear the porters didn’t carry down and continue downhill all the way back to Basecamp! A summit to Basecamp in a day itinerary is no small feat, but having seen how well prepared these climbers are, I firmly believe they can pull it of in good style. Everyone one of them trained hard and came prepared for a difficult climb. Tomorrow will be extremely hard, but if we can pull it off, it will make one hell of a story! Wish us luck!

RMI Guide Nick Scott

This is the second of a two part series looking at the benefits of improving rates of fat metabolism to prevent or delay bonking in endurance sports. For week one of the series, click here.

Last week, we introduced the idea of training or developing fat metabolism to preserve glycogen stores, utilize our body’s largest energy store, and ultimately prevent “bonking” while climbing. This week we’ll look at how to accomplish it!

There are two main components that we can alter to affect our body’s use of fat: diet and training. The two work hand in hand – a change in diet without a focus on aerobic training volume is of little use, as anaerobic workouts require glycogen by definition, and aerobic training volume while continuing to eat a high carbohydrate diet will cause little change in your body’s metabolic pathways.

Diet

The key to training fat metabolism is to adjust your diet to take in more calories from fat than carbohydrates. This doesn’t mean you need to take in more calories overall, but instead, shift the nutritional balance of your diet. These diets have taken on the moniker LCHF or low carb high fat in studies and the media. There are a number of specific diets out there that align with this description (the paleo diet, the Atkins diet) but the specific diet is less important for the purposes of an athlete than the nutritional balance. Some articles suggest about 15% of your daily calories coming from carbohydrates, which is a significant shift for those of us that have trained under the paradigm of carbohydrate loading!

Changing our diet to make carbohydrates more scarce, and fats more plentiful accomplishes several things that will ultimately help our fat oxidation rates. The first is that when sugar is present in the bloodstream at high levels, insulin is released to control rates of blood sugar—extremely high rates of blood sugar are treated as a toxin by the body—and consequently insulin is a fat oxidation inhibitor, as the body wants to burn off the excess sugar and uses the opportunity. If we keep our levels of blood sugar lower with diet, our body releases less insulin, and fat oxidation rates are not suppressed.

Second, while sugar is easily transported across cell membranes and into cells, fats require transport by specific enzymes. Reducing our blood sugar and allowing fat oxidation to take place stimulates the production of these fat transport enzymes, so that fat can be brought into the cells at higher rates and utilized.

Finally, mitochondria are responsible for oxidizing fat and producing the ATP that fuel our cells. By reducing our carbohydrate fuel and relying more on fat, we stimulate the growth of mitochondria in the cells. Studies of athletes that are efficient fat oxidizers vs. sugar burners show a significant increase in mitochondrial density in the muscle cells.

Training Type

Our body is able to burn fat as fuel during aerobic exercise – those workouts and efforts that stay at level 3 or below. Once we cross the anaerobic threshold into lactate production, glycogen is the only fuel source that the body uses for energy production, so the stimulus to oxidize fat is gone. Thus fat oxidation is best trained during an aerobic base or volume phase, when the preponderance of workouts focus on relatively lower intensity, higher volume (hours or miles).

This isn’t a process that can be changed overnight. The cellular development that is required to shift your metabolic pathways takes time and sustained stimulation to change. With dedication to diet and training, studies show marked improvement in rates of fat oxidation after 8 to 12 weeks, so stick with it!

It’s often tempting as athletes to take things too far: if more of something is better, even more of it must be better still. Fat oxidation alone isn’t enough to keep up with our energy demands when we are training heavily for a climb. Therefore, maintaining some carbohydrates in your diet is important. Think of it as replenishing the fuel you spend: a workout of harder intensity will deplete your glycogen stores more; a 4 hour workout will require some carbohydrate fuel intake during the workout to prevent depleting glycogen stores as well. For those who want to really dig into the numbers, Alan Couzens has a calculator for balancing your nutritional intake depending on the phase of your training plan, hours, etc. It is designed for ironman triathletes, but can provide some interesting numbers for us as climbers as well!

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For more reading Alan Couzens has a number of interesting blogs on the subject. A good one to start with is Improving Fat Oxidation. Also see Deborah Schulman's Fuel on Fat for the Long Run.

Questions? Comments? Share your thoughts here on the RMI Blog!