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Stove is always worth the weight on a Rainier overnight.

Glad to hear you'd take a stove next time. Hard to keep reasonably hydrated without one and really cuts your margin for error.

Trip: Glacier Peak - Sitkum Glacier/Gerdine-Cool Trip Date: 05/28/2018 Trip Report: We set off from N Fork Sauk Trailhead buzzing with excitement at 8:30. Making short work of the easy trail to Mackinaw Shelter, we stopped to work the tightness out of our shoulders, adjusting to the awkward load of skis and boots on the pack. After many switchbacks, we soon departed the well-established bootpack at around 5000 ft and Dustin set a skin track straight toward Red Pass. Reaching the ridgecrest, I felt isolated. There were no other tracks as far as we could see–a stark change from the crowds of Memorial Day weekenders we had passed on their hike out. We were venturing into a totally wild and remote route which has seen few ascents since the 2003 flood which destroyed the road. We found a skiable line a quarter mile east of Red Pass on the ridge, so we made a direct descent into the White Chuck River drainage. It probably would have been better to suck it up and climb 100 ft to reach the PCT rather than trying to follow the river, as we eventually got squeezed into a bottleneck and had to pick through the trees and slog through slush to reach trail. The snow ended abruptly at 4700 ft as we walked right by a spot where I camped in 2016 during my thru hike. Changing back into shoes, I checked the PCT app, which I still have on my phone, and saw that we had about 4 miles until we left the trail. Time to cruise. My heart soared with PCT nostalgia as we made our way along perfect dirt trail and fantasized about tranquil forest camping the next night. We hydrated at the many streams and only had one interesting crossing where I moved a log to give us a path across with dry feet. Our fantastically easy travel soon came to an end, though, as we encountered lingering snow patches in the flat, dense forest around 4000 ft. Not enough to ski, but just enough for some miserable postholing. Until this point, it was our plan to climb the Sitkum Glacier on the West side, do some skiing on the South, then re-ascend and return to camp on the West. Dustin had the idea that we should carry our overnight gear over the summit and return via the standard route, but I was still holding on to the original plan for whatever reason. That stubbornness was soon broken by a terrible section of bushwhacking through slide alder as the trail became a rushing stream of meltwater. “There’s no way we’re doing this again.” I decided I’d rather carry all the gear to the top as bushwhacking with such a giant pack was miserable. At nearly 7PM, we finally reached the ridge which was the site of the old climber’s trail up to the Sitkum Glacier, which was only evidenced by a few remnants of switchbacks between overgrown sections. I was enjoying the steep but sparse forest as we quickly gained the 2500 ft of elevation needed to make camp. This didn’t last long, though, as the ridge got narrower and narrower and our skis and boots caught on more and more tree branches and shrubs. We clambered over countless fallen logs and wondered, “When will this end? Why do the trees go so high??” With no daylight in sight straight ahead, we consulted the map and noticed that we could probably access the glacier from the northern slopes of the ridge, which were beautifully snow-covered and devoid of thick forest. Much better. After emerging from the trees scratched and worked, I suggested we camp at the first relatively flat spot on the snow with an excellent view of Mts. Pugh, White Chuck, Whitehorse, and the whole White Chuck River valley. We immediately set to work chopping a platform, making, dinner and preparing our gear as the sun set. After eating, we both promptly passed out at about 10PM after a 12 hour day on the move. After hearing the alarm at 5:30, I peeked out to notice the cloudy but calm skies. We successfully completed our forest-avoiding linkup with some treacherous skinning–our skins had not dried and were not sticking well. At around 6500 ft we decided to just pack the skis and rope up for the remainder of the ascent. After all the tedious route finding and off-trail travel up to this point, 4000 ft of easy snow slopes was an absolute dream. This was my first time walking on an active glacier, but we saw no open cracks on the Sitkum, just on the fearsome-looking Scimitar Glacier to the north. A few golf ball sized rocks whistled past as we made our way to the right of the large block at 8600 ft. Dustin led as I practiced my roped travel techniques and we soon gained the saddle behind Sitkum Spire and started up the pumice ridge, which was mercifully covered in firm snow, toward the summit plateau. My energy started to waver as we slogged up the final 1000 ft, the 10000 ft of accumulated elevation gain starting to catch up to me. Before long, we once again met up with the weekend bootpack on the south side of the summit block and pushed up to the summit. After a windless morning, I got cold in the wind on the top and quickly enjoyed the views of half of Rainier, the Stuart Range, and some peaks around Chelan. Eager to get down, we were soon rattling our bones down crunchy snow in the cloudy afternoon. Within an hour, we were down in the cloud deck that we had been staring at all morning, and some light snow pelted us as we followed a ridge to the standard base camp. At this point, my feet were very unhappy at being squashed into ski boots for a so many hours, and I even thought about just spending the night at the camp, groaning at the thought of continuing the long descent. Since it was only 2PM, we took an extended break huddled behind a rock wall and Dustin made some re-percolated coffee to boost morale. I was feeling much better after that and 600mg of ibuprofen, so we marched on. The upper White Chuck Glacier basin was a gorgeous snow-covered fantasyland and made for easy skin-skiing and traversing. Before I even felt the climb in my legs, I was back on top of the ridge eyeing the traverse to White Pass. As soon as I turned back to discuss the route, we were blasted by wind and huge, wet snowflakes. The possibility of spending the night and hiking out in the morning was looking less attractive. After some more delicate skinning on late-afternoon mush, we reached a high point on the traverse and started the rolling descent to White Pass. The clouds cracked and showed us some rare blue sky as I tried to rip some telemark turns during the ski-skin to the pass. The mood of the death march started to lighten as we left the harsh alpine behind. Back to bootpacking, we downed our good snacks as it became apparent that we were getting to the trailhead that night. We skied a 1000 ft section to skip many switchbacks which we had scouted on the way up. Although it required a 100 yard bushwhack back to the trail, we had a laugh about how easy it felt compared to the trials of the previous day. For the last of many transitions, we packed everything away, downed the rest of our snacks and water, and started hustling down the trail. As my shoulders and feet hurt more and more, I kept accelerating knowing it would get me to the car sooner. I marveled at the variety of rainforest-like plant life knowing that we were on a glacier just hours earlier. We hiked uninterrupted for 2.5 hours and I dropped my pack with a groan just before 9PM. Success. The Sitkum Glacier was a true adventure–not really worth it as an early season ski trip, but it could be a viable summer alternative if you're looking to put in some extra work and avoid the crowds. Gear Notes: Skis, ski crampons, glacier gear, approach shoes Approach Notes: Terrible bushwhacking with skis

Trip: Mount Rainier - Liberty Ridge Trip Date: 05/27/2018 Trip Report: We were also on Liberty Ridge this Memorial Day weekend, climbing from Winthrop Glacier to the summit on Sunday. If you were climbing it on Sunday, there might be some photos of you here! Posting in case y'all are interested! Us: Summit camp: GPS tracks: topoMapsExport.gpx Gear Notes: IPhone Approach Notes: East side to gain Liberty ridge

Thanks for the trip report and photos- you got some good ones of us. We have this one of you and a few more if you're interested.

In an ideal world this would have been posted on the sites anniversary, Oct. 2, which would have been 17 years in existence. Also ideally this would have been posted three plus years prior when I first started working on the migration. We actually started talking about it much further back. Something I’ve learned is things don’t always work out like you planned, you just have to keep moving forward and learn from you past mistakes. I’d like to thank those who are still around, some of you who have been here from the beginning. I’m sorry to those of you who have given so much to this site in the form of great discussion and trip reports, to the moderators that dealt with so much of the not so great moments, and that I let you down in not keeping this place working better and in a more modern state. We'll make it up to you. Porter, thanks for helping keeping the stoke alive with me and being such an amazing friend. Trip Report Tool v1 I’ve got the new trip report search working. In some ways is a few steps back from the old search in that you can’t facet by month or forum. It’s a step forward in that it works and works well on mobile. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/tripreport This only works if you are logged in at the moment. This wasn’t by design just what happened as I added this on the work of the developer I hired who did the TR submission work. We’ll get that sorted out. What we have on deck will be polishing up some of the trip reports and probably adding better geographical data for being able to search trips on a map. We certainly view trip reports on this site as our crown jewel, we are just shy of 9000, and we’d like to make sure they are easy to find and easy to add. I think we’ve nailed the later with the forum upgrade and I’m confident we can come up with better search. The Future Like I said we have now been in existence for 17 years. Not many things on the internet can claim that. But the upgrade of the forum and the work we are doing now is the beginning and not the end. I was 24 when I started this site and really didn’t know a whole lot. I was trained as a biologist and had no experience or really knowledge of web communities. My (still) good friend Timmy and I just decided to create something. I’ll never forget an email I sent to a pretty notable local climber when we first started. I actually don’t remember what I asked him, but I remember his response “Good luck getting traffic, that will be hard”. He seemed pretty pessimistic, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Getting the traffic ended up being easy, managing it was the hard part. There were certainly some real wild west early days with cc.com and it was difficult to know how to handle them, especially our spare time for what was a hobby. We’ve made mistakes. We can acknowledge that. And we have learned from them. There are people and behaviors that will no longer be welcome here. What is sad is many of those people just took their dump and left. I realize we have a bad rep with many people and that’s unfortunate. I also think it is what you make it, and maybe it’s time to give it second chance and be part of the solution. We’ve solicited a lot of feedback, we’ve read feedback posted on Facebook. We’ve taken a lot of it to heart. I understand Facebook is easier to use, they are a multi-billion dollar company with scientists who’s sole purpose is to get you hooked. I get that Mountain Project is a nice tool, I have nothing negative to say about them, but again they are owned by REI now and have huge coffers of money. It was also incredible to read how people met their climbing partners here, or even their partners in life. Yes there has been some bullshit, but there has also been a lot of good. Cascadeclimbers is a unique and local product: an opportunity to interact online as a community rather than as the product. We are not here harvesting you and your information. This is still a hobby for us. We turn down offers every year to sell this site as we know it’s not in it’s best interest, we know what will happen if a corporation take it over. We have turned down advertisers because we have stayed true to our commitment to supporting retailers. We run the site, we own the site, but the content belongs to the community. We will be better stewards of this place and we hope people will give it a second chance. To those sitting on the sidelines, sometimes reading, but not participating. I get that you don’t want deal with the spray, and I assure you things will be different forward. But I also challenge you because the only way to make something better is to make those positive contributions. If everyone just steps away because they don’t like certain things then all you are left with is what people don’t like. This is a community driven site and only works with contributions from the community. We will be better listeners and stewards; please be better contributors. Why we allow anonymity. This is actually pretty simple; we have no way to prove someone’s identity. Facebook doesn’t either. We also made this decision pretty early on because we felt this would make it a safer place for women to contribute, without a bunch of guys stalking them. Again keep in mind these decisions were made 17 years ago, but I still think it’s a valid point. We recently added JasonG to the moderator staff. You probably already know Jason from his Trip Reports and amazing photography. We are always on the lookout for trusted and committed people to help the site grow, so let us know if you are interested. We may have more roles in the future that need filling. And of course a huge thanks to all the existing moderators that have stuck with us through thick and thin. Our current path forward is pretty simple: We expect people to leave things better than you found it. If you can do that simple things you can be a part of this. If you can’t you will not be welcome here. We want the site to grow, in people, in posts, in trip reports, and new personal connections. Thanks for reading. Onward.