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May 29 In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed Hiring Machine - NYTWorking with a number of start-ups, and launching a new company, I think this article by Miguel Helft in the New York Times offers some interesting observations on how competitive the landscape is to hire talent, but more important, what a new company can offer that may be a lot more appealing to the best of the best! In Fierce Competition, Google Finds Novel Ways to Feed
Hiring Machine (Picture: Alice Yu-shan Chang will work for Google after
she receives master’s degrees in computer science and management science from
Stanford.) To lure talent, these companies have expanded their recruiting
arsenal far beyond the traditional job fair to include a growing number of
events like technology lectures, cocktail parties, pizza parties, treasure
hunts and programming contests, dubbed “code jams” or “hack days.” Much like
the Google Games, these are no-pressure recruiting occasions meant to create
excitement around their companies and impress potential recruits as young as
college freshmen. “It comes down to just getting them introduced to our
culture, showing them that, hey, being part of Google could be a lot of fun,”
said Ken Krieger, a Google engineer who had volunteered to supervise the
Lego-building contest. Google, more than
any other company, looms large in this latest chapter of Silicon
Valley’s talent wars. The company has been vacuuming talent wherever it can
find it to keep fueling its torrid growth. Its work force has roughly doubled
every year for the last several years, to more than 12,200 at the end of March.
Google is now adding about 500 workers each month. Its Web site lists nearly
800 open positions in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. If Google is hungry for top talent, the class of 2007
seems to think that a Google job offer is a prized commodity. Stories about
Google’s notoriously tough and sometimes off-putting recruiting process
continue to surface. Even so, the company was considered the most desirable
employer for all undergraduates this year, and for the first time, it edged out
the blue-chip consulting firm McKinsey & Company as the most desirable
employer among M.B.A.’s, a position McKinsey had held for the last 12 years,
according to surveys conducted by Universum, a research firm. “Being in an environment where you are going
to learn a lot is the most important thing to me,” said Alice Yu-shan Chang,
one of hundreds of recruits who are graduating this year and heading for
Google. “With Google, you don’t have that much face time with
high-up people,” she said. But there was some wining and dining on the part of
Google, which Ms. Chang would not discuss in detail because she had signed a
nondisclosure agreement. Eventually, Google won, in part because it had agreed
to permit Ms. Chang to rotate positions every six months in the first year and
half, and because, for her, it was a better cultural fit. “There are a lot of young people there who
are very creative,” Ms. Chang, 25, said. Many of her peers at Microsoft would
have been in their 30s and 40s “and more family oriented,” she said. In the last two years, Google has expanded its university
recruiting programs to nearly 200 campuses from about 70. But the ubiquity of
its events has ruffled some feathers. Max Levchin, the chief executive of
Slide, a technology start-up in San Francisco,
said he used to have good luck recruiting from his alma mater, the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign, by going there in midyear and persuading computer-science
students to defer graduation and join him in Silicon
Valley. “Now all I hear about is Google holding a puzzle hunt
this, or Google campus pizza that,” Mr. Levchin said in an e-mail interview.
Chief executives at other start-ups had similar frustrations. Stanford does not keep an official tally of where its
students go, and even informal numbers are not in for the class of 2007. But an
unscientific, voluntary check of students run by the university’s career center
showed that Stanford had funneled more of its graduates to Google than to any
other employer in the last three years.
While playing down the rivalry with Microsoft, which is hiring at an
even faster rate than Google, albeit into a company nearly six times as large,
Google has not shied away from bringing the competition for talent to
Microsoft’s door. Google has more openings in the Seattle
area than anywhere else in the country other than California
and New York. “I think it’s unlikely that you’ll see us back up a truck
to their parking lot,” Google’s director for staffing programs, Judy Gilbert,
said. “We have done a lot of things to engage with the local talent in an
appropriate way.” As an example, Ms. Gilbert, a former recruiter for McKinsey, pointed to a lecture this year at Google by Kaifu Lee, the president of Google Greater China, which was intended to appeal to the “large community of Chinese ex-pats” in the Seattle area. Mr. Lee used to head Microsoft’s research organization in China. After Google hired him in 2005, Microsoft sued Google and Mr. Lee, accusing him of violating a noncompete agreement and misusing inside information. The lawsuit was later settled. Google’s efforts notwithstanding, Microsoft and Yahoo say they are able to hire the candidates they need. “Our competition is really the market for top talent, not a specific company,” said Scott Pitarsky, Microsoft’s general manager for talent acquisition. Similarly, Yahoo, which held a hack day at its campus that was attended by about 500 programmers, as well as smaller ones elsewhere, said its recruiting strategies were working. The company also opened a research center at Berkeley in part to attract student interns. “Dozens of people have come from the labs into Yahoo,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice president for product strategy at Yahoo. All three companies say their toughest recruiting challenges come from start-ups, who snap up people like Nitay Joffe. Mr. Joffe, who had summer internships at Google for the
last two years, expected to go to work there. But before Mr. Joffe, a recent
computer engineering graduate of the University
of California, San
Diego, accepted a job, a friend suggested he check out a San Francisco start-up,
Powerset, which is trying to build a rival search engine. “Powerset had everything that Google had in terms of what I was looking for — smart people, interesting projects, great amenities,” Mr. Joffe said. Powerset also had one thing Google could not offer: the potential to strike it rich with the Internet equivalent of a lottery ticket. “When you get a stock option at 5 cents and it goes to $50 ...,” Mr. Joffe said, before his voice trailed off. With Google’s shares hovering around $480, it no longer offers the same potential. “Google isn’t going to $4,000,” said Mr. Joffe, who began working at Powerset recently. For every recruit who gets away, Google hopes many more enter its pipeline of potential employees at events like the Google Games. “We never say, ‘Come work for us,’ ” said Ronner Lee, who is in charge of Google’s university programs at Berkeley. “If they like what they see here and they want to approach us with questions, that’s great.” If the goal was to impress this crowd, it did not hurt that the games were held inside one of Google’s cafeterias, where the food is free, healthful and plentiful. Or that students were picked up at their campuses by Google’s free shuttles, which are outfitted with wireless Internet access. Or that many of the puzzles were created by the No. 2 Sudoku player in the world, who, by the way, happens to work at Google. David Nguyen, a doctoral student at Berkeley who went to Google for the games, said the company clearly understands its target audience. “This is exactly the kind of person they want,” Mr. Nguyen said, “someone who is going to work and solve problems on a Saturday and enjoy it.”
May 26 resume gaffsSeeking to hire a super star Executive Assistant, i posted on CraigsList.org and received over 100 letters and resumes. It appears the idea of proofing your resume for a job that requires good communication skills is not quite accepted by some people. Examples of the more interesting statements included: Seeking a position to perform all my full potential worked with a high range of executives from the CEO of a top stationary comany I employ the opportunity to take on new and exciting task I am actively seeking an executive assistant within your company my secretarial skills, I am an adept event planner, having served on the committee for Halloween/Christmas Ball while working at XXXX Partners. I am very detail oriented and a very quick learner. Answered and transferred phone calls Sort and deliver faxes, mail and packages; Prepare labels for UPS and FEDEX i am great with the interenet I have strong experience in retail and restaurant operations. i am a well organize self-starter I decided it would be a good idea to find employment outside the gambling industry. While I enjoyed living and working in a foreign country, the work lacked meaning and was arguably dangerous. Convinced British strangers to rent out their personal information for business purposes Served and greeted customers in fast-pace environment full of swank high rollers willing to buy $14 cocktails served in plastic cups I love my job, but i am looking for a new opportunity kind of a square peg in a round hole in terms of working in Investment Banking, however i thrive being in a supporting role. I am a recently retired ballet dancer that decided to go 9 to 5, but now i am looking to find a more suitable area of business. majoring in Marketting and minoring in English have a Positive attitude and a "can do" and "will do" attitude, great personality, great writing skills, strong computer skills, administrative and excellent communication skills , MS-Office Suite, Photoshop, Outlook, Html/ Web design, Final Cut Pro, Pro Tools, and Mac. "interested in working for your organization and i have attached my resume as a first step in exploring the possibilities of employment. As an employee for your organization, I guarantee to perform professionally, accurately, and ...." Distributing incoming mail within the office I have done it all, weather it be corresponding on my employers behalf with permission, making expense reports, prioritizing projects, brainstorming May 21 Mt Rainer Training Schedule - from John Clover @ RMIMount Rainier 16 Week Training Schedule powered by
© adventX 2006 For questions or permission to reprint contact johncolver@adventx.com 206 219 3686 May 14 CEOs Are Spending More Quality Time With Their Customers WSJSent this to one of the CEOs running a company I'm on Board of .. LESSON: You have to touch the customer! IN THE LEAD By CAROL HYMOWITZ CEOs Are Spending More Quality Time With Their Customers WSJ May 14, 2007; Page B1 When Intel made a bid to become the microprocessor supplier for Apple's new Apple TV, Chief Executive Paul Otellini told his top engineers they needed to make some swift design changes. Intel's microprocessors, which the company had begun supplying for Apple computers in 2005, met performance specifications but their traditional packaging had to be thinner and smaller to fit Apple's small set-top box that connects TV sets to a computer or the Web. He heard grumblings that this change wasn't possible -- at least not anytime soon -- but Mr. Otellini pushed ahead. "Instead of saying no, we can't, let's say yes and figure out how," he recalls telling his senior team members. He won them over and soon had a new packaging design to show Apple, which chose Intel as its supplier. It was a lesson in change and in how to approach customers, he says. "We're adjusting and tailoring products for them and moving much more quickly," explains Mr. Otellini, who came up through the sales and marketing ranks. Top executives like Mr. Otellini find they are working more closely than ever with their customers, and listening and responding to their requests for product customization or service and training. They are becoming involved even in the nitty-gritty of contract negotiations. "Ten years ago, a sales executive would have given a pitch, but today big customers want the CEO's commitment that if they buy from you, you're forming a partnership with them and will deliver exactly what you promised," says Ed Peters, chief executive of OpenConnect, a Dallas company that makes software that uncovers business-process inefficiencies. "And if you don't, your failure will be broadcast on the Internet and quash possible deals with other customers." Mr. Peters says he spends at least 60% of his time on the road meeting with customers. Last week, he sat in on a sales presentation with a large global customer. His managers knew the client's business processes inside and out. But his customer wanted to hear from him how they would save on costs. Next, he'll meet with the client's top executives to give them more information. Having the CEO make a "ceremonial visit" to only the biggest customers to tell them, "You're important to us," isn't cutting it anymore, says Kevin Coyne, a Harvard Business School professor. "They're getting substantively involved in the biggest deals, showing up for key parts of a negotiation," he says. And they're following up to make sure employees deliver what they've promised. At a time of product proliferation, they're thinking about customers around the globe, he adds. Nike CEO Mark Parker recently met in Shanghai with 50 Chinese artists, fashion and industrial designers, and photographers who gave him "insights I wouldn't get reading an article about China," he says. "The message that came through was they want their own voice" and were concerned about being overwhelmed by Western products, he says. He hopes Nike's concept of personalization appeals to them. The company has Web sites that allow anyone to customize a pair of shoes with different colors, trims or team names. "I enjoy connecting with people" who influence the taste and cultural trends, adds Mr. Parker, who was named CEO last year. He says it is critical for all business leaders to connect with customers. Clients today, he says, are "highly individualized, want products that excite them -- and have more choices than ever." For Mr. Parker and other CEOs, the must-see list is growing in number and variety. Nike has long used team sponsorships and star athlete endorsements to market its products and sought advice from athletes for its designs. But he also spends time with musicians, graffiti artists and other creative talent. "I meet regularly with our biggest retail customers but I also go off the beaten path where I can stimulate the right side of my brain -- and discover new tastes in music, fashion, cuisine," he says. At Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy maintains a list of 50 large customers. His relationships with some of them have spanned his whole tenure at the company he founded, although he is now chairman, not CEO. "I have 25-year relationships with a lot of these people," he says. Since stepping down as CEO last year, he has created a new job for himself circling the globe to keep in touch with his customers. Just this past Saturday, he had plans to fly to Japan to meet with clients, and to do the same in India and Germany before returning to the U.S. He estimates he does about eight or 10 events each day when he's traveling: scheduling lunch or dinner with scores of people, plus some one-on-one conversations with others. Company CEO Jonathan Schwartz gets reports daily from Mr. McNealy about what happens in those meetings. Even so, Mr. Schwartz also spends time with the customers. "But unlike Jonathan, I don't have 15 direct reports who each want a piece of my mind, and I don't have to come back jet-lagged and run a staff meeting," says Mr. McNealy. May 13 Beliefnet - NYT ArticleI was out of the country but heard about the recent article. I had the honor of working with Steve Waldman and John McIlwraith of the Blue Chip Ventures. This is a great story about smart people investing in people with the passion to succeed. TALKING BUSINESS; Keeping Faith In a Venture Built on Faith By JOE NOCERA Published: May 5, 2007 ''I found the Chapter 11 period exhilarating,'' Steven Waldman was saying the other day. Mr. Waldman, 44, was sitting in his mildly shabby office in Manhattan, smiling from ear to ear. Atop a bookcase next to his desk stood a brand-new Ellie, that oddly shaped trophy that symbolizes a National Magazine Award, which Mr. Waldman's Web site, beliefnet.com, had won Tuesday night in the General Excellence Online category. This small, independent voice of religion and spirituality, which had been a finalist three times before, had beaten out better-known brands including ESPN, People.com, businessweek.com and Slate. Beliefnet calls itself a ''multi-faith'' site, meaning it has sections devoted to every religion, from Buddhism to fundamentalist Christian. It also has areas devoted to health, relationships, inspiration and so on. It produces daily e-mail newsletters and offers a place where like-minded people can create communities. One of the most powerful such communities, for instance, was begun by a mother whose child died in his early 20s; she wanted to create a place where other parents who had suffered the same awful pain could find support and comfort. Beliefnet is an editorially rich site, with diverse voices, and a nice mix of high-brow thinking and low-brow entertainment. Advertisers have warmed to it. ''It is hard to be both ecumenical and ambitious and aggressive at the same time,'' said Newsweek's editor, Jon Meacham, who has a strong interest in religion and whose magazine once had a business relationship with beliefnet. ''Steve has succeeded in that.'' Indeed he has. Mr. Waldman, a former magazine writer and editor, conceived beliefnet in the late 1990s, and has been its guiding light and editor ever since. In March 2002, he also became its chief executive. And in that latter fact lies the story I want to tell this morning. Born during the dot-com boom, beliefnet is a company that by all rights should have died with all the other failed ventures when the bubble burst. That it is still here -- and is now thriving -- has a lot to do with the fact that Mr. Waldman isn't just a good editor. He has turned out to be an awfully good businessman as well. THOUGH I'm not a regular visitor to the site, I've been following the beliefnet story for years, largely because the company's other co-founder, a consultant and a longtime magazine executive named Robert Nylen, is an old friend and colleague of mine. (I've also known Mr. Waldman for years, though not nearly as well.) Mr. Waldman had been working at U.S. News & World Report during the brief editorship of James Fallows. He had long had an interest in spirituality and religion and had noticed, both at U.S. News and at Newsweek, where he'd been a writer, that religion covers always did well. (''The old joke was that if you could put the Jesus diet on the cover, you'd have your best newsstand seller,'' Mr. Meacham told me.) When Mr. Fallows was axed in 1998 by U.S. News's owner, Mort Zuckerman, Mr. Waldman decided it was time to pursue his dream: a magazine about religion, which he planned to call Belief. But as he and Mr. Nylen, who was going to be the magazine's publisher, made the rounds of venture capitalists, they heard the same refrain: ''If you ever decide to turn it into a Web site, give us a call.'' Needless to say, they decided to turn it into a Web site. That decision gave them two things. The first was money; from the fall of 1999 to the spring of 2000, they raised $26 million. And, as Mr. Waldman soon realized, it also gave them more editorial flexibility than they would have had with a magazine. ''One of the iron laws of magazines is that you have to have a voice,'' Mr. Waldman said. But beliefnet needed many different voices, which was much easier to do online. It could offer interactivity and community. And it could allow people to explore other faiths -- or dig deep into their own religion. What that decision didn't give them was a business model. It was not obvious back then that advertising was going to be the engine that drove Internet profits. So while beliefnet had ad-supported editorial content, it also had a Web hosting service, an e-commerce division and a number of other businesses. None of them generated much revenue, though the company's backers didn't seem to care. ''The V.C.s kept saying, 'There's a new paradigm,' '' recalled Elizabeth Sams, beliefnet's executive editor. The point, everyone believed, was to get big fast, to plant the flag as the dominant site in the category. You know the next part of the story, right? Boom turns to bust, and all the backers who didn't care about revenue suddenly care about nothing but revenue. They stop handing over checks. Beliefnet goes through several rounds of painful belt-tightening. First go the free lunches and short-lived masseuse, the only two dot-com perks the company ever had. Then the layoffs begin. By March 2002, the company is bankrupt. There were those on the company's board who wanted beliefnet to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy -- to liquidate, in other words. ''We were a bankrupt dot-com with content, which wasn't cool, about spirituality, which was thought to be non-monetizeable,'' said Mr. Waldman. But he was determined not to give up on his idea. ''It was six months after 9/11. I thought, 'This is not a time for a multifaith religious Web site to go away.'' During a contentious climactic board meeting, he argued that the site had one million unique visitors a month, and some steady advertisers, mainly in the dieting and dating category. The board finally agreed to let him take the company into Chapter 11 instead, where it would be protected from creditors while it reorganized, and would at least have a fighting chance. Here's what Mr. Waldman did next. He laid off everybody except a core group of five people, including Ms. Sams, and he offered them the following deal. If they would work for minimum wage, he would give them equity in the company to make up for the huge cut in pay they were taking. (Once the company filed for bankruptcy, of course, the original backers lost all their equity.) They all agreed. As Mr. Waldman notes now: ''The people who were left were the ones who really wanted to be there and totally believed in it.'' They then sold most of the company's furniture, and even canceled its contract with its cleaning crew. The beliefnet executives cleaned the bathrooms themselves. Here's a surprising truth: if Mr. Waldman had succeeded in his original desire to start a magazine, it would surely have gone bust. The fact that beliefnet was a Web site had a lot to do with why it stayed alive. The ''pay for performance'' ad model, which largely doesn't exist offline, meant that it didn't matter to advertisers that beliefnet was in Chapter 11, or even whether it would stay in business: If they ran an ad and viewers clicked on it, that's all they cared about. And the site never went dark, not for a day. There was one venture capitalist, John C. McIlwraith of the Blue Chip Venture Company, who also still believed. Though his firm had lost $5 million on beliefnet during the bubble, he put in another $250,000 at a time when the company desperately needed the money. By the time Beliefnet emerged from bankruptcy six months later, cash flow was positive and growing. And Mr. Waldman and his small staff had learned an enormous amount about their business. ''It was in that period that we realized that vitamin ads did well for us, and we realized that health is a big category for us,'' he said. So he began doing more health coverage, and soliciting more health-oriented ads. Ms. Sams recalls the period after bankruptcy as a time when ''we had the luxury of limited choices.'' What she means is that with money tight, the company had to focus its efforts on what made the most sense; it could no longer throw business models against the wall to see what would work. In the subsequent four years, beliefnet's revenue has grown by at least 50 percent annually. Last year, it had $12.6 million in revenue. Its advertisers include giants like Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Disney. And in 2005, it could finally breathe a little: Softbank made a $6.5 million investment. (Softbank and Blue Chip Venture together own a little more than 40 percent of the company; Mr. Waldman and the employees own the rest.) Mr. Waldman did not use the money to get fancier offices. He used it to upgrade the company's technology. Someday, beliefnet will probably be sold to a larger company; as Mr. Waldman concedes, Softbank is going to want to cash in with ''a liquidity event.'' He told me he was fine with that, and why wouldn't he be? If beliefnet were sold tomorrow, my guess is that it would get somewhere in the range of $100 million. At which point, Mr. Waldman will probably give up the title of chief executive and go back to being a full-time editor. Which is a shame, in a way. Mr. Nylen, who remains on the beliefnet board, said one thing that most impressed him about Mr. Waldman was his calm nerve. ''He's a skinny, frail-looking intellectual who turns out have a steel heart and gut. He's the best entrepreneur I know.'' Ms. Sams described him as ''a very understated leader; he's not a rah-rah cheerleader.'' But, she added, his passion is palpable, and in both good times and bad, he never lost sight of his mission. As I was preparing to leave his office, Mr. Waldman took me down a flight of stairs and into a conference room, where he showed me some hideous orange chairs. ''We had these chairs in the old days,'' he said with a wry smile. ''They're so ugly that when we were selling the furniture nobody would buy them. We kept them and they became an emblem. They remind us to remain humble.'' Everyone should have a boss like that. For all those who think scrabble is just a game....Addicted to L-U-V By NORA EPHRON Published: May 13, 2007 ABOUT three years ago, I stumbled onto something called Scrabble Blitz. It was a four-minute version of Scrabble solitaire, on a Web site called Games.com, and I began playing it without a clue that within 24 hours — I am not exaggerating — it would fry my brain. I’m no stranger to this sort of thing: one summer when I was young, I became so addicted to croquet that I had a series of recurrent dreams in which I was whacking my mother’s head through a wicket. The same sort of thing happened with Scrabble Blitz, although my mother, who has been dead for many years, was left out of it. I began having Scrabble dreams in which people turned into letter tiles that danced madly about. I tuned out on conversations and instead thought about how many letters there were in the name of the person I wasn’t listening to. I fell asleep memorizing the two- and three-letter words that distinguish those of us who are hooked on Scrabble from those of you who aren’t. For instance, while you were not paying attention to Scrabble, the following have become words in the Scrabble dictionary: ka, qi and za. Don’t ask me what they mean, but my guess is that in the tradition of all such things, they are Indonesian coins. Luv is also a word, by the way, as is suq. Remember that ad — “This is your brain ... This is your brain on drugs”? That was me. My brain turned to cheese. I could feel it happening. It was clear that I was becoming more and more scattered, more distracted, more unfocused; I was exhibiting all the symptoms of terminal attention deficit disorder; I was turning into a teenage boy. I instantly became an expert on how the Internet could alter your brain in a permanent way, especially if you were a teenage boy, and I offered my opinions on this subject at all sorts of places, where, as I recall, no one was particularly interested. The Scrabble Blitz site was full of other deranged Scrabble Blitzers, who dealt with their addiction by writing comments about it in the Web site’s chat room during the two-minute break between games, the two-minute break being a perfect time to log off and stop playing Scrabble Blitz for good but you didn’t because you were totally hooked and besides you were only going to play one more game, or maybe two. The comments consisted of things like: “I’m an addict, lol” and “I can’t stop playing this ha ha.” My contempt for these comments led me to think I was somehow different from the people who wrote them, but the truth is I wasn’t — I was exactly like them except for the lol’s and the ha ha’s, and even I have used an lol and a ha ha from time to time, though not in a chat room, and most of the time, I hope, ironically. (But to be perfectly honest, not every time.) The game of Scrabble Blitz eventually became too much for the Web site. Lag was a huge problem. From time to time, the Scrabble Blitz area would shut down for days, and when it returned, so did all the addicts, full of comments about how they had barely withstood life without the game. I began to get carpal tunnel syndrome from playing. I’m not kidding. I realized I was going to have to kick the habit. I thought about kicking the habit. I promised myself I would. After one more game. After one more day. After one more week. And then, one day, out of the blue, I was saved by what’s known in the insurance business as an act of God: Games.com shut down Scrabble Blitz. And that was that. It was gone. I went back to online Scrabble, a mild and soporific version of the game. I restricted myself to two games a day — no more. I wandered from one Scrabble Web site to another — there are several — and recently found my way to a place called Scrabulous.com. I’ve been playing there for just over 50 days — I know because I recently received a congratulatory e-mail message from “The Scrabulous Team” on the occasion of my 100th game. It crossed my mind when I got the message that even two games a day was too much. But it didn’t stop me from playing: my habit was under control. But the other week, I had a major setback. I went onto the Scrabulous site to play my customary two games, and to my amazement, right there on the entry page, was a chance to play Scrabble Blitz. Only it wasn’t called Scrabble Blitz. It was called Blitz Scrabble. It was back. It was working perfectly. And not only was it back, so were all the people I used to play with, all of them making their sad little jokes about being addicted to the game, followed by lol or ha ha and even an occasional :). I decided to play just one game, or maybe two. An hour later, I was still there. My heart was racing. My brain was once again turning to cheese. I was hooked. It’s now been several days — several days when I’ve either been playing Scrabble Blitz or thinking about playing Scrabble Blitz. Several days that ended with tiles dancing through my head as I fell asleep. Several days of turning into a teenage boy again. Last night I had dinner with my husband, and while he was talking about George Tenet, I was thinking about the letter X. I was thinking, hex, lex, rex, xi, xu, exude. My husband moved on to talk about Iraq, and I moved on to Q: qat, qaid, qua, quae. There’s only one solution: I have to stop. If I can’t do it by simple will-power, I may have to go to the Parental Controls page on my computer — I’m sure there is one — and put Scrabulous.com on the Don’t Go There list, or whatever it’s called. So goodbye. I’m going. I am definitely going. Any minute now. But first, I’m going to play my last game of Scrabble Blitz. Nora Ephron, the author, most recently, of “I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman,” is a contributing columnist for The Times. May 05 Climbing Rainer is an enormous test but you can reach the topNews article from CB from the Seattle Post
Seattle Post Intellegence
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Last updated 1:59 p.m. PT Climbing Rainier is an enormous test but you can reach the top By GREG JOHNSTON
P-I REPORTER Paradise, Mount Rainier National Park -- For all its breathtaking beauty, Mount Rainier is a massive creature, a noisy, moving, steaming mass of rock, ice and tectonic energy, and if you want to know it as one who has climbed it, the mountain will take a little piece of you. · Rainier Guides: Park grants access to two more companies · See more photos from the climb You will leave the mountain sore from your toes to your temples, you will feel drained, your feet likely will be blistered and your lungs may feel congested from labored breathing of the thin air at more than 2.7 miles high. This condition might cling to you like a hangover for a day or more.
But you'll look back on it as an epic adventure, as the day you stood on top of the Northwest.
Considered an active volcano, Mount Rainier is a dynamic mass of earth and elements that generates its own weather, kills people almost every year and swallows entire airplanes and helicopters -- over the decades several have been left on its shoulders to disappear. That's why the mountain is sprinkled with place names like Cadaver Gap and Disappointment Cleaver.
Mike Kane / P-I Climbers head out from Paradise on their way to Camp Muir. Although just the third-highest mountain in the lower 48 states at 14,411 feet, Rainier is the most burdened by ice, with 25 major glaciers covering 34 square miles of its slopes, its crater frosted with wind-sculpted forms, pocked with steam vents and undercut by caves and tunnels.
To get up there, you must travel these glaciers and -- by any of its 12 main routes -- gain 9,000 feet of elevation.
Simply put, scaling Rainier is one of the greatest mountaineering challenges in the contiguous U.S. states.
At the same time, it's entirely attainable for those in good physical condition.
"As dangerous as Mount Rainier is, it's not insane to climb it," says Mike Gauthier, the head climbing ranger for Mount Rainier National Park. "You're not hanging out over thin air dangling from a rope. It's an exciting, adventurous endeavor. It is an attainable goal, if you put in the training."
Certainly you feel a sense of accomplishment standing up there on the icon of everything Washington -- along with fatigue and the stress of knowing you have to get back down over the same wicked, sketchy terrain. As our guide Brent Okita says: "Going up is voluntary; coming down isn't necessarily voluntary."
As the peak Rainier climbing season commences in the next week or two, three guide companies will be leading climbers to Rainier's summit, mostly via the two most popular routes -- by way of Disappointment Cleaver on the southeast side and Emmons Glacier on the northeast. The road to Paradise is scheduled to reopen May 5, after repairs of winter storm damage. That also will reopen access to independent climbers, hundreds of whom attempt the summit each year.
Mike Kane / P-I Susan Reid and Martin Schmaltz listen to a guide discuss the summit attempt in the bunk house at Camp Muir. About half of the approximately 10,000 people who try each year reach the summit. The rest are turned back by fatigue, altitude sickness, bad weather or accidents. Over the past five years, according to the National Park Service, the guide companies have put about 60 percent of their clients on the summit. The success rate of independent climbers has been about 44 percent.
Climbing Mount Rainier is something almost every serious outdoors person in the Northwest wants to do at least once. Especially for a native who hikes and backpacks, it is a quintessential Northwest achievement.
"For some people in the region, it's kind of a pinnacle of backpacking and climbing," says Gauthier. "They see the mountain and something about it inspires them and they realize it's a somewhat attainable goal if they put in the training.
"There's another class of people who are looking to climb all over the world. Rainier is accessible, they get altitude exposure, glacier experience and gain all these skills they can go on to the Himalayas with, or Alaska, McKinley. It's a great training experience."
I put it off as long as I could, using the perpetual excuse that I needed to get in better shape before considering it. However, in 2006 my life took a stressful digression, and I responded with a steady schedule of the therapy that works best for me: running, hiking and bicycling. When Mike Kane, a young and talented photographer who was at the P-I on a fellowship, asked why I had never climbed the mountain -- and if I wanted to -- I had run out of excuses. The time had come.
Neither of us were trained mountaineers, so we decided to climb with a guide service, and for me there was only one option: Rainier Mountaineering Inc., or RMI. That wasn't because the other guide services on the mountain were less skilled, but simply for the opportunity to climb with Okita, an acquaintance who happens to be my best friend's brother-in-law and who I knew had summited Everest in 1991, had climbed Mount McKinley more than a dozen times and Rainier more than 300 times.
Mike Kane / P-I Climbers inch their way toward the summit of Mount Rainier just before sunrise. A typical summit trip led by RMI leaves Camp Muir at about 1 a.m. and reaches the top around 8 a.m. I had heard stories about Okita. If Rainier is a real mountain, then Okita is a real mountain man, and his life revolves around that volcano. In winter, he is the assistant director of the Ski Patrol at nearby Crystal Mountain ski area.
"It's my home," he told me later. "I've spent 21 years establishing a career on that mountain. I'm rather fond of it. I think I know it pretty well and I love it."
That's about as sentimental as the no-nonsense and soft-spoken Okita gets. He is one of the best guides on the mountain and I wanted him leading us.
We purchased RMI's three-day summit climb program, which is actually a two-day climb preceded by a day of training in the use of an ice ax and crampons (clawlike traction devices that attach to the bottoms of boots), self-arrest, climbing in a rope team, and the techniques of rest-stepping and pressure-breathing.
That last item allegedly helps your blood better absorb oxygen at high altitude, although while climbing I suspected our guides urged us to do it just to take our minds off the fact that we were traversing damn steep slopes and gaping, yawning, fearsome crevasses.
We had already experienced a little crevasse drama earlier. Most RMI climbs are via the Disappointment Cleaver route, and on the first day of our climb, our party backpacked from Paradise to Camp Muir, a rocky outpost on Cowlitz Cleaver at 10,188 feet. Here a little collection of stone and wooden huts serves as base camp for summit attempts.
Not long after we arrived, an Austrian climber, part of an independent party, slipped and fell into a "moat," a crevasse that can form between ice and rock. This one, right at Muir, had been covered by thin ice, which the climber broke though, plunging 20 feet.
Led by Okita, a team of guides and rangers rescued the guy, dropping him a helmet and climbing harness, then setting up pickets in the ice and pulling him out with a rope.
The climber lost his ice ax but was OK, and I was impressed by the guides' skill and efficiency. However, it was a vivid illustration of what can happen on Mount Rainier.
"That's what distinguishes Rainier, even from the other volcanoes in Washington," says Okita. "It is quite a bit more glaciated and higher and therefore a bit more serious. You face more of the objective dangers of ice fall and rock fall, coupled with altitude and weather considerations.
"Baker and Hood are easy. You're only going to 10,000 feet. That's like going to Muir. Baker does have some glaciers. Hood, you have a little bit of steeps and two or three crevasses, but not two or three hundred crevasses."
Our day at Muir was short. We arrived in the early afternoon, lounged, ate dinner (RMI provided hot water), and then Okita delivered an hourlong briefing about what to pack, what to expect, the route and schedule. At 6:30 p.m. it was lights out and sleepy time in the small Muir bunkhouse, within which were crammed 24 climbers, coed.
Only those who sleep like a bear in December got more than a few winks. People were snoring, passing wind, getting up to relieve themselves, tossing and turning. Who can sleep at 6:30 p.m. anyway?
Okita returned and turned on the propane lights at 12:30 A-freaking-M. More hot water was provided, we all ate, drank, pulled on our boots, helmets and headlamps, then headed outside into the dark to put on our crampons and split into four-person rope teams.
Under a sky full of brilliant stars we set out, crossing the Cowlitz Glacier and then climbing up and over a rocky ridge, or cleaver, just below Cadaver Gap. At one point I looked back and saw several strings of rope teams snaking up the mountain, defined by their glowing headlamps. Above we could see the lights of independent climbing teams.
Mike Kane / P-I Guide Stuart Robertson rest-steps his way up Mount Rainier's east face soon after sunrise. The spooky stuff started on Ingraham Flats, 1,000 feet above Muir, where the route hopped directly over several narrow but deep crevasses. Nearby were bigger crevasses in Ingraham Glacier -- fearsome, gaping, yawning fissures. I was almost happy our vision was confined to the narrow beams of our headlamps. Off in the dark corners were things I really didn't want to see at that point, such as the Ingraham Icefall and Disappointment Cleaver.
Later I would learn that this is the riskiest part of the climb. The route runs directly beneath the ice falls, with dozens of massive, house-size blocks of ice seemingly teetering precariously above you. One of the worst accidents in American mountaineering occurred here in 1981, when a giant ice avalanche buried an RMI guide and 10 climbers. Their bodies were never recovered.
Just beyond are two less-than-appealing stretches, an area prone to rockfall known as "the Bowling Alley," which is the approach to the appropriately named Disappointment Cleaver.
(After we were off the mountain, I joked with guide Stuart Robertson over beers about the fortuitousness of starting in the dark -- maybe it's best you don't see that stuff on the way up. "Can you imagine coming out on the flats and someone telling you, 'You have to go up there, and then there,' " he said with a chuckle.)
Perhaps the hardest part of the climb was Disappointment Cleaver. This is a steep and sketchy, 1,200-vertical-foot crest of loose rock, dust and ash that divides the confluence of Ingraham and Emmons glaciers on Rainier's east slope.
The route twists torturously up this messy ridge, with footing just a little less slippery than a greased hardwood floor covered with ball bearings -- and you're wearing crampons while roped to three other people. As soon as we got onto the cleaver, I knew a slip here could be disastrous.
In June 1998, 10 people in two RMI rope teams were descending when they were caught in an avalanche and swept down the lower part of the cleaver, with one fatality.
Okita promised that beyond the cleaver, the route was all snow -- a 2,200-foot, lung-searing grunt indeed, but no more rock. It was eerie climbing that cleaver in the dark, the spookiness punctuated by heavy breathing, the clang of ice axes and the metallic scraping sound of crampons on rock.
But we made it, taking our next-to-last rest break at its top. Here, three climbers decided they could not go on. While one of the guides took the three back to Muir, our rope team took on an extra climber who wanted to push on.
I was a little uneasy about this. As Okita had said earlier, a rope team is only as strong as its weakest link. We didn't know this guy and now our team was five, with more opportunity for human error. But he proved up to the task.
As we marched laboriously up the icy slopes, at 12,500 feet we first saw the sunrise, its faint red glow lining a 9,000-foot ceiling of clouds on the eastern horizon. It was a gorgeous sight, but difficult to appreciate while focusing on the climb ahead, and simply trying to breathe. At that altitude just standing up and taking a step saps your breath.
The rest of the way was intense but uneventful, and I was surprised when a couple of hours later Okita announced, "We're here, you made it!" It seemed like we should have a good way still farther to climb, but we stepped into the mountain's East Crater and that was that.
Mike Kane / P-I Jonathon M. Venzie, a lawyer, rests in Rainier's summit crater. The crater was carpeted with thousands of pointy and peculiarly shaped white ice moguls, with a trail beaten through them to the summit register on its far side. The sun was bright above a puffy quilt of clouds, and in the distance we could see the tops of the neighboring volcanoes: St. Helens, Adams, Hood.
I sat and rested, ate a candy bar and drank some water, then walked over to check out the crater's steaming caves before making my way across the icy bowl to the summit register.
Here we still could not breathe easily -- literally or figuratively. I knew the way down could be even more perilous than the way up, since fatigue makes a slip more likely.
I was surprised later to learn from Gauthier that tunnels and caves cross beneath the crater from one side of the summit to the other. And that there's an airplane in the ceiling of one of the tunnels. Late in 1990 a Cessna crashed on the summit, was later covered by snow and by spring had melted into the crater ice.
"This place is so full of stories," says Gauthier.
We didn't dally, spending just an hour on the summit and then roping back up and beginning the descent.
It was warm and sweaty work, winding and twisting down the dusty, rocky cleaver, and scary even walking the route below the Ingraham Icefall in the daylight. You can see these bus-size blocks of ice above, and you know that one day they will fall. You hope it's not while you're there.
I was running low on water, having consumed more than I thought I would need. When we reached Ingraham Flats under the triangular stone countenance of 11,138-foot Little Tahoma, a remnant volcano, Okita asked if anyone needed water. I gulped mine down and drank some of his.
Muir was 45 minutes away and finally I let myself relax.
We spent an hour resting, eating, drinking and packing at Muir, then dropped the remaining 4,800 feet to Paradise and the waiting RMI van. There, after the 9,000-foot descent from the summit, I kicked off my boots and saw that I would be losing the big toenail on my left foot. My lungs were congested, and they remained so for a few days.
But I felt good, like I had achieved something most people never attempt, and I had seen my native state from an essential perspective. Plus, I knew some frosty, foamy beverages awaited down the road in Ashford.
"It is an awesome achievement here in the Northwest, to stand on the highest point in the region," says Gauthier. "It's a place like nowhere else on the planet really. You can't help but be inspired."
Summit resources
"Mount Rainier; A Climbing Guide" by National Park Service climbing ranger Mike Gauthier (Mountaineers, 245 pages, $18.95) is the book you need. Also see Gauthier's climbing blog at mountrainierclimbing.blogspot.com.
Mount Rainier National Park's climbing pages are full of information -- you might want to skip the accident reports until after your climb. They're at nps.gov/mora.
The companies that guide on Rainier have lots of good information and advice on planning and preparing: rmiguides.com, alpineascents.com, mountainguides.com.
Training tips
Gain elevation -- The best way to train for mountain climbing is to climb mountains. They need not be technical climbs, but take alpine hikes that gain serious elevation, and do it at least once a week for two months before your Rainier attempt. Before my climb, I hiked Mailbox Peak, Mount St. Helens, South Navarre Peak, Dog Mountain and hiked to Annette Lake, North Lake (twice), Top Lake and Malachite Lake, plus other hikes with less gain. Some recommend you wear a full pack while training; I carried a heavy day pack.
Aerobics -- In his climbing guidebook, ranger Mike Gauthier recommends an hour of aerobic exercise at least four times a week, but he is called on to save lives and must be in peak condition at all times. I tried to get four days of serious exercise every week for more than two months before the climb, typically running two or three days for a minimum of 35 minutes, bicycling one day for at least an hour and alpine hiking at least once a week. If you are in poor shape, begin your training four to eight months before the climb.
P-I reporter Greg Johnston can be reached at 206-448-8014 or gregjohnston@seattlepi.com. |
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