Leaderboard

Trip: Mount Stuart - Girth Pillar Trip Date: 07/31/2018 Trip Report: Updated with video After having a good time doing the Center Stage/Flight of the Falcons linkup in Darrington last month, I convinced my friend Kevin to climb the Girth Pillar c2c. I've got 3 little kids at home in Seattle and Kevin lives in Oregon, so we like to pack a lot of adventure into our infrequent climbs together. Turns out this adventure was heavy on the walking and scrambling, but the novelty of doing a new route (for us) on a big mountain made the effort worth it. We left the parking lot at 4am and hustled to the base of the North Ridge. Roped up and simulclimbed 6 pitches until the ridge narrows and flattens out. At this point the access ramp (easy walk down) breaks left and deposits you a few meters above the seracs on the upper Ice Cliff Glacier. We walked down, scoped the rest of the approach, and put on our crampons while watching RV-sized ice chunks tumble down. The upper glacier held soft snow with the only difficulty requiring a climb into and out of the massive crevasse that spans the width of the glacier. We hopped over the moat onto the rock (red) and proceeded to climb up through 500 feet of choss, death blocks, and grit. Up to 5.9X and time consuming. Pretty sure we were not on the recommended approach, but rather climbers right of it, as we had to move back left to finally access the bivy ledge. The actual pillar pitches (green) were quite good and the overall position is incredible. Route finding is obvious because it follows a single crack system the whole way. Mostly hand jamming mixed with flake pulling, although nearly all of the pitches lean to the right so they can feel a bit strenuous. Kevin led all 3 pitches onsight. I offered moral encouragement and tried not to short rope him despite our fuzzed out workhorse and GriGri2 combo. We topped out the pillar and simuled to the false summit. After taking time to eat and refill our water bottles with drips from snow patches, we started down the Cascadian Couloir for the long slog back to the car, finally arriving a few minutes before midnight. Just about 20 hours total on the move. Gear Notes: singles to #3, 2x #1, 3x #2 60m rope approach shoes, aluminum crampons, 1 technical tool per person Approach Notes: Standard southern approach via Ingalls Lake. Access upper Ice Cliff Glacier from ramp on lower north ridge.

Trip: Juno Tower - Clean Break Trip Date: 07/30/2018 Trip Report: It seems like Gabe and I have had a track record this season of finding the most marginal weather in the state, then choosing to go for it anyways. From plenty of wet and cold days in vantage last winter to an early season one day climb of prusik in a Blizzard, and a very cold and rainy day in the liberty bell group. This climb was no exception. On Sunday we drove over from Seattle and after cragging a little in the shady icebox canyon we stashed a bike and some Gatorade just off the road at the wine spires pullout. On our drive down to Winthrop for dinner we stopped by the Cutthroat lake rd to chat with the ranger who was stationed there. He informed us that the fire was under control and that it likely wouldn't impact our climb the next day. The next morning we woke up at 3am and left the car at 3:30 in an attempt to get to the base at first light. With a weather forecast of 90 on the summit of Silverstar we knew it was going to be a hot one. It was. Gabe trying to get us un-lost on the approach. The route basking in some nice alpenglow as we cross some slabs below the base. The first pitch is the stellar tight hands splitter on the right side of the blank wall. We got up to the base by scrambling up the chossy gulley to the left of the snow. There was an exciting 5th class mantle at the top that some might want to rope up for. No need for snow gear! I quickly learned on the first pitch that 1.)over 3 liters of water is heavy. 2.)warming up on 10c with a heavy pack is hard. And 3.) it's already damn hot and i'm sweating a lot. Somehow I managed to pull off the OS and was glad to have triples in .5 & .75. The rest of the route went pretty smoothly despite feeling like shit while baking in the sun. Luckily our packs were getting lighter really fast! Gabe styling the 10a roofy slabs. Gabe fighting with a tree on the 5.6/5.8 traverse pitch Pretending to be having fun while trying not to vomit from heat exhaustion. Moments before Gabe threw a hissy fit because our friend Jeff told us we didn't need a 4 for this pitch. The perfect rack would be one 3 and one 3.5. We had 2 3's and the crack gets wider than a 3 at the lip. Gabe didn't like that. Some of the first shade encountered on route. Trying to use the cold rock to cool down. More shade on the big ledge before the simul block to the summit. This was a real life saver though a big time suck. You're apparently supposed to stay right of the ridge crest here for more enjoyable climbing. I think we passed the only spot to get over so were forced to climb the lame sandy gullies to the left. Can't say I recommend them, but they get you to the summit. Summit stoke! We topped out at 1pm for a time of 9:30 C2S. Not too bad for how crappy we were feeling. Looking up Vasiliki ridge. One hell of a traverse! The descent follows the "obvious gully" then traverses left and down A LOT back to bench camp. There is plenty of kitty litter on slab skiing along the way to keep it exciting. Overall Clean Break is a stellar route with high quality rock and not a whole lot of routefinding issues to be had. This makes for a relatively fast 15 pitch 5.10 in a rad location. We really learned our lesson not to climb big routes on such hot weekends, and to bring a filter, not iodine if we end up doing it anyways. Half an hour is far too long to wait when you are that thirsty. Gear Notes: Rack: Doubles .2-3, Triple .5 & .75, A few nuts, 2 microtraxions. Either replace the second 3 with a 3.5, or just bring a 4. We brought 4 liters of water each. We should have brought a filter, chugged water at the base, filled up 3L, then refilled at bench camp. 2 UL poles, no axe Approach Notes: Silverstar creek trail is not super straight forward to follow in the dark so I definitely recommend having a GPS track on your phone to follow, it helps speed things along a bit. Same goes for the descent.

Awesome! Congrats on it all working out this time and getting up there! That route is definitely in my top 3 of all time climbs I've done. So beautiful....

Pretty cool stuff! Pretty amazing how far climbing has come. http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web18c/newswire-first-female-free-ascent-of-city-park

You were well ahead of us. We didn't start hiking from High Bridge until about 3:30, arrived at North Fork around 6. We both had absolutely perfect weather. Not a cloud in the sky for days on end, no smoke, not too hot. Truly magnificient. On our trip, I snapped photos of 31 different types of wildflowers in bloom.

Trip: Forbidden Peak - North Ridge Trip Date: 07/15/2018 Trip Report: From July 15-17, Tom and I climbed the beautiful North Ridge of Forbidden in a slow but safe/deliberate fashion. The ridge was the longest alpine rock route either of us had attempted yet but we hoped to be able to pull off all the technical climbing in two days. We left the Eldorado Creek parking lot around 9 AM and reached the base of the Sharkfin Col bypass gully around 1:00 PM. The gully is in great shape, still filled with lots of snow. We crossed to rock below the top of the gully and made the mistake of climbing to a notch that was too high and too far east along the ridge. We found no sign of a rap station and had to downclimb to the notch to climber's left of this higher one to find a spot to rap over to Boston Glacier. The Sharkfin Col notches & Bypass Gully Right now a single rap brings you safely to a large pile of icefall debris that you can navigate to get onto the Boston Glacier without difficulty. There were multiple other rap stations along the way down to the debris from the notch. The traverse to the North Ridge from the rap was easy and took us about an hour. The Boston Glacier is in great shape. The gully to access the bivy notch on the North Ridge is almost completely melted out but the moat is still passable. We crossed to the rock and found a third class move and then a short second class scramble to gain the notch. Bivy Notch center-left We found another pair of climbers enjoying the afternoon at the notch. Their goal was the NW Arete and we had a great time watching them fly up that route the next day from our positions on the NR. Great meeting you guys! After a quick dinner and a birthday cookie for me, we settled into the two smaller bivy spots for the sunset and sleep. I did wake up around 2:30 to find a snafflehound gnawing away at the brim of my hat so be careful out there with your salty things, kids. We think the same little guy took a pair of socks that mysteriously disappeared overnight. Sunset on Buckner from the bivy notch We started off the next morning at 7:50 AM and quickly moved through the 5.6 crux left-leaning corner that rises almost straight out of the bivy notch. It was just fine leading it in mountaineering boots with an (overly) heavy pack. From there we encountered mostly moderate, super fun third class scrambling all the way to the lower snowfield. We simul-climbed to the lower snowfield, but there were stretches where the rope didn't feel necessary. Tom follows shortly after leaving the bivy Both snowfields are still completely covering the ridgeline, so a bypass on rock on climber's left isn't available. We put crampons on to cross the first snowfield, which was pretty flat and easy to get across without an ax. The climbing above the first snowfield felt harder than the lower ridge and we climbed mostly on the left (east) side of the ridge on ledge systems and in gullies. We almost exclusively simul-climbed and placed a lot of cams and slings. I felt there was at least one low/mid fifth class move to get back up onto the ridge crest from the left side of the ridge. Once back onto the ridge crest we found lovely, exposed, knife edge climbing on solid rock all the way up to the second snowfield. The ridge between the lower and upper snowfields We reached the upper snowfield around 12:30 PM and stopped to melt snow to refill our 6L of bottles. This turned out to be a good move because we didn't encounter snow again until midday the next day. The upper snowfield has a much steeper angle and an ax and crampons were definitely nice. The climbing above the upper snowfield felt like a significant increase in difficulty from what we'd encountered along the ridge between the lower and upper snowfields. We slowed down and pitched out the climbing in short pitches several times. We carefully considered our route-finding decisions. Teams with more simul-climbing experience in fourth class terrain could move through this section much faster than we did but we felt better with a belay on several occasions. We climbed on both sides of the ridge as well as on the ridge crest itself following good cracks and solid rock. The climbing was steep but mostly third/fourth class with a few moves that felt like low fifth. We watched the pair we'd met at the bivy notch dance up the upper pitches of the NW Arete which was great entertainment as we slowly but surely moved up our ridge. Just below the summit we left the ridge to scramble up a third class gully on the right (west) side of the ridge before reaching the top at 6:20 PM. The North Ridge from the Summit We quickly began our descent of the West Ridge with three single rappels from obvious rap stations. After the third rap we lost all sunlight and stopped to bivy for a second night about halfway down the West Ridge. We found two relatively flat spots to lay out our packs and some rocks to make for a surprisingly enjoyable night in a relatively precarious spot. Some trail mix and beef jerky served as dinner but we fortunately had plenty of water left. We watched a beautiful moonset and headed to bed. West Ridge Bivy We were up by 6 and could already see several teams starting off up the West Ridge from the notch. After a Clif Bar, we made one more rappel down to ledges that we could scramble along to get down to the West Ridge notch. Two full 60m rappels got us down the Cat Scratch gullies to Boston Basin. Gear Notes: Two half ropes (only used one, except in the Cat Scratch rappels) 9 cams from 0.3 to 2 with alpine draws (used every one) Rack of nuts (used two, didn't need them) 8 slings (used every one) Mountaineering boots Approach Notes: Don't climb to the highest notch in Sharkfin Col