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Trip: The Brothers - Brothers Traverse Trip Date: 05/13/2018 Trip Report: Our merry band of chosstronauts climbed both of the summits of the Brothers on the 13th of May to celebrate Nathan successfully completing another trip around the sun. There’s enough beta out there already on the traverse, so I won’t get much into blow by blow of the climb, but I wanted to share some pictures and info I would have found helpful to know before doing it. The trail up to the lake is a highway and very well maintained. On our way up, we passed a friendly WTA work group who was working on blocking switchback cuts. If you haven’t hiked this trail, there are 19 switchbacks in the first 1700ft vert. We were thankful for them on the way up, only to curse them on the way down. Such is the duality of climbing… The next few miles through the Valley of Silent Men was just as memorable as the first time I hiked up the S. Brother 8 years ago, and even more so! There’s a section of fierce blowdowns and mandatory schwacking for about a mile shortly after leaving the lake. Lots of log hopping and trying not to fall into the river all while fighting devil’s club and other pointy foliage. There is a “path” that is flagged through the wreckage, but it’s pretty much a choose your own adventure affair. I didn’t remember this section from my last ascent, so I wonder when all of it occurred, or if it’s just been a deteriorating trail for many years? Anyway, once navigated, the trail again becomes easy to follow to the Lena Forks/climbers camp. We stashed our trail runners and swapped into mountain boots here, but you could probably belay that for another mile or so until after you get through the burn. I’m sure there’s a path through there somewhere, but we didn’t find it. There is a snow finger that follows climber’s left of the burn that we used to bypass some of the bullshit, but this is melting out fast and should be trodden with care. It’s quite thin in places and the river flowing underneath is cold and fast. I punched through on the way down, but was lucky to land upright with my feet on a big rock and my hands out of the hole, keeping me from being swept underneath too far. Be careful! Don't fall in a hole The snow eventually widens into the large south couloir at the top of the burn, and it’s easy going and continuous up the slopes. We chopped a bivy around 5500 ft at some relatively “flat” spots and settled in for the night. In all, from TH to camp was about 5000 ft of vert and 10 miles. Not having done this sort of approach in quite a while, we were all pretty knackered and settled in pretty fast. The night was uneventful, save from the massive stomach cramps my dinner gave me. I usually don’t do dehydrated meals anymore for these climbs, but I found one in my kitchen and the convenience of it won out over going to the grocery store. All I’ll say is that there was a very different sort of alpine aire happening all night in my sleeping bag, which made for a very restless night. Good night south sound Woke up at 430AM the next morning to aim for the 6100” notch in the S Brother SE Ridge with the goal of gaining the Great Basin, the North peak, and then traversing to the South peak. There’s no real good description of what to aim for, and each TR seems to gain a different notch. So here’s a picture of what to shoot for, unmistakable marked. This notch seemed to match the approach notes on the Mountaineer’s website, and we found some rappel tat while climbing it, so I think it’s the correct way to go. There was only a thin finger of snow up the gully when we did it, so it may be gone by now. I’m not sure what climbing up the rock of the gully would be like, but the short sections we had to do were attention grabbing. The backside is steep snow down to the Great Basin, but nothing five minutes of face-in down climbing can’t dispatch. The great basin is quite beautiful, and it’s a really cool feature to traverse across. This is the prominent snow slope visible from far across the sound. It’s amazing to be able to look at from far away and know that you walked across there. Decent to the basin from the notch The ascent couloir to the North Brother was dispatched quickly on slightly mushy but continuous snow all the way to the ridge top. The snow will probably last for a little while longer at least. This deposits you almost right at the summit; a quick few rock moves away. The summit register on the North Brother is gone, but the anchor chain is still there. Wonder what happened to it? From here the traverse begins. Follow all the other beta that’s out there along with your own intuition and you won’t go awry. Every feature that looks impassable or sketchy from afar has options aplenty when examined up close. The climbing was all very straight forward and wasn’t difficult; if you’re doing 5.7+ moves you’re off route. I will note that we went an alternate way to finish the traverse. Instead of going through a cave/moat, and then up the steep NE face of the South peak as described in the beta, we continued to traverse to the NW face, over a rock rib, and up the NW couloir. The route described in other TRs wasn’t in for us; the snow was too unconsolidated and thin at the steepest section and it would have been asking a little much of it to hold on for 4 climbers to pass through. Our alternate way worked well with an exposed move or two of 5.choss. There’s a semi-decent crack to build a quick anchor to protect the leader during these moves here. Be careful if going this way; the snow traverse is quite steep and the rock is very loose and not trivial. There are a few very large loose blocks on this portion waiting to take out a careless climber and a fall here would be catastrophic. It goes though! From the top of the exit couloir, a short 100” scramble puts you on the summit. The traverse took us about 3 hours from the time we roped up to the time the second rope team topped out (2:15-2:30 moving time for each group). We simul climbed almost the entire route, with one static belay over the 5.choss rib. From the South summit, we were back at the TH in 6 hours, including picking up our camp on the way out and lounging around at Lena Forks swapping shoes. Overall, it was fun and a great first climb of the season. The route holds a lot of alpine challenges which all felt real, but never felt too sketchy. It’s a long way back in there though, so bring strong legs and good shoes. Gear Notes: 30m rope 2 pickets 2-3 small cams deez nutz Approach Notes: Too many switchbacks.....

Trip: South Sister - North Face Trip Date: 05/22/2018 Trip Report: Edit: See post below by Drocka on a June 2011 ascent which I believe should be credited as the FA. Sometime ago I noticed a blank spot on the map on the north face of South Sister. If one looks at Oregon High on page 109, there are two routes on the face, the Silver Couloir (22) and North Face Couloir (23). Further to the west is the Northwest Ridge (24). The blank spot is between the North Face Couloir and the Northwest Ridge. As such, on Monday I decided to ski over for a look about. I started up via Green Lakes and the Prouty Glacier, traversing at around 8200-8400 foot level of the glacier til the North Ridge. Unfortunately, it did not have as much snow as I hoped so I carried my skis for the last bit til I reached the Skinner Glacier which sits below the face. The lack of snow was an issue because I had planned to ditch my skis and bivy gear, descend the north ridge, and ski back out. As such the option was now to carry everything up and over. Which in hindsight worked out but at the time I did know if such idea was going to be amicable given the route was a blank spot. In the morning after a crack of dawn start, I skied up to the base of the face, swapped out skis and poles for crampons and ice axes and started up. Initially it was nevé and canning, then plunging picks, to eventually swinging tools. Overall the slope was 45-50 degrees with a short 10 foot ice step just below the gap. The gap is the critical bit and cannot be seen on some photos. After the gap, I traversed up and left until it was possible to gain the Northwest Ridge which I followed for the last 300 feet or so to the summit rim. Had there been more snow one could probably continue up and left even more. But given I was climbing solo (in tele boots) and carrying skis I did not want to have to deal with crappy rock or rotten rim ice. After reaching the summit, I hung out for a bit before going down the south side. I descend til I was on the Lewis Glacier where the snow soft enough to be enjoyable skiing. I skied out until about the last mile. Where a couple picked me up and shuttled me back to the Green Lakes Trailhead. One photo of the routes and one from my bivy - sorry there are not more. I have marked all three routes on the face. From left to right Silver Couloir, North Face Couloir, and what I did. As you can see for May there is not a lot of snow.. Gear Notes: Crampons, two tools, screws and pickets if climbing roped Approach Notes: Via Green Lakes and Prouty Glacier

Trip: Mt. Hood - Cooper Spur - Climb and Ski Descent Trip Date: 05/19/2018 Trip Report: I’ve been tossing around the idea of starting to write up trip reports for a while, and finally decided to start. Jake and I had skied together once before, but hadn’t been able to put together a trip for a few months. When the weather and schedules finally aligned, we decided to go for a route we’d been chatting about for a little bit. The forecast looked OK for Saturday AM, but there was another front blowing in later in the day and Sunday was supposed to be worse. We met up for some pre-climb burgers and beer in Government Camp Friday night, and decided to try the approach from Meadows and then crossing the Newton Clark glacier instead of the hike up Tilly Jane. I had been up to ski Wy’east face the weekend before, and figured I couldn’t get lost in the dark since I had my GPS track. We slept at the Meadow’s parking lot, which apparently is closed at night even when the resort is closed. Fortunately, the security guard there let us crash for the night, but not before giving us a radio to use “so that he felt more comfortable”. I think both of us slept with our ice tools nearby. The sky was clear and we were feeling pretty good about our chances with weather the next day. We got a 2:00 AM start and started skinning up the resort. There was still enough coverage that we could skin right from the base, and we made it to the bottom of Cascade in no time. Somewhere after that I decided to take a more “direct” route up instead of hanging a left to go toward Vista ridge. That went well enough until we ended up on a steeper snow slope that quickly became loose boulders mixed with the soft ashy dirt that that makes up Mt. Hood. “I’m pretty sure we’re right near the top of Cascade… somewhere around here”. After some exciting scrambling up the loose dirt and managing to kick down only a few large boulders we got onto vista ridge proper and hiked up to where we were going to cut across the glacier. The snow had frozen pretty well at this elevation, so we decided it would be faster to rope up, put on crampons, and just walk across the glacier. Jake was more than a little excited about his homemade second whippet, AKA a big old ice axe strapped to his second pole with a ski strap. Crevasses have started to open up, but we found a straight line across Newton Clark and stashed the rope and started climbing up onto Cooper Spur proper. By this point it was light enough to see, and clouds were staying pretty low so we had pretty decent visibility. We had great climbing conditions, with firm snow covered in a thin layer of rime. We were feeling pretty good that the snow would soften up enough to ski down in a little while, but would have been comfortable skiing the lower angle part of the route in the current conditions. On the way up, we spotted a group of climbers coming up from the Tilly Jane approach. If you squint you can see them in this photo. By the time we topped out, the weather had fully blown in and the summit was wrapped up in a cloud. We hiked over to the true summit and decided to wait out the weather. We stayed up there for about an hour, and though the sun teased us with little breaks through the clouds we never got the break we were hoping for. Eventually we ran out of optimism for the sun and jokes for other people on the summit (“Wait, this isn’t Rainier?”) and decided to head down. Our plan was to ski Cooper Spur if everything looked good, with a backup plan to ski the south side and cross over the White River glacier. Even though the weather wasn’t great, we decided that worst case we could just downclimb Cooper Spur and that we didn’t really want to do the traverse over the White River glacier. We downclimbed the first three hundred feet or so and took a break in a large platform that had been dug out by some prior party at the steepest part of the whole route. After a bit of discussion if we wanted to downclimb a bit more, Jake responded with, “Well, I’d like to ski some of it at least”. We tested the snow (it hadn’t really softened much, but the rime looked like it would take an edge decently) and decided to go for it. It was a little treacherous transitioning from crampons to skis, but before long we were all locked in and ready to go. The sun still refused to shine, and I got one quick photo before dropping in to the descent. Its always a good idea to have your first turns of the day be the steepest, and so a few slightly puckering jump turns got us warmed up. We picked our way through about 1200 ft of jump turns until the angle cooled down a bit for some more relaxed skiing. We passed the group of climbers from earlier on the way down, who were short-roping their way up with pickets and a running belay. We definitely lost whatever karma points we got for making them a nice booter by raining rime down on them from above. As we passed them one of the climbers asked “Are we through the steep part yet?”, to which the leader of the group gave a chuckle. They were friendly and we let them pass before finishing up the descent. The visibility decreased the lower we got, and we had to ski pretty close together so we didn’t get separated. We skied down off skiiers right of the ridge and tried to find our tracks from earlier. We knew we had some crevasses on this edge of the glacier to navigate around, and our visibility had gotten even worse. Here’s a photo of what it looked like crossing back over the Newton Clark. Fortunately we had our GPS track from the way up, which made it marginally easier to find our way back. Crevasses had a nasty habit of popping up a few yards in front of our skis, which prompted many “Do you remember this one? I think it’s bigger than before”. It took a while, but we eventually found our tracks and found our way to the base of Wy’east face. Of course, once we were out of danger, the weather cleared and we spotted a few skiers coming off Wy’east. Harvested some nice corn on the way through Superbowl and dropped back into the resort through A-zone. Dirty slush back to the car for some Fresh Squeezeds. Overall, great trip. It would have been pretty cool to ski the spur when we could actually see our position, but the snow ended up being decent and we got good turns in. The next day I was biking in Post Canyon and caught a glimpse of Hood. Of course, it was perfectly clear. So it goes. Gear Notes: Crampons, one axe, one tool (didn’t use), one whippet. 30m rope and glacier gear. Approach Notes: kin the resort, cut over the Newton Clark wherever looks best.

Greatest hits? I prefer Wayne's B-sides