Leaderboard

How many of you have been to the beaches in Costa Rica? It seems there is always a dude with a BIG boom box trying to shove his music into everyone around him. It doesn't seem to bother the locals. It bothers me...and I am not a local...which then tells me...Am I the cranky old guy now? Yeah, that stupid boom box shit on the trail. Yes. That is inconsiderate too. Wear fucking headphones people. Yes, it is inconsiderate if there is a "cultural" norm. The norm is not to do the boombox on the trail....and the norm may be okay for boom boxes on the beaches of Costa Rica.

yes, here, a decade ago already (!?):

Trip: Mt. Hood - North Face Right Gully, Reid Headwall, Wy'East, Pearly Gates Enchainment Trip Date: 12/29/2019 Trip Report: I'm back in Oregon after my first semester of college in Canada! Over the last few months I have spent too much time ice and mixed climbing, not enough time in the mountains. Since I'm back home I figured it would be fun to do a bigger objective on Hood. The coolest thing I could think of was doing a link up of all four faces of the mountain in a push. For the routes, I decided to do the North Face Right Gully, Reid, Wy'East, and the Pearly Gates. I chose the North Face gully because it was the most striking line on the face, Reid because Leuthold looked lame, Wy'East because I didn't want to solo the Black Spider, and Pearly Gates because it was the route that got me into climbing. Link ups are new too me so I thought the whole trip would take around 30 something hours. After watching the weather carefully, a window appeared and I knew it was go time. At 4:00 am I started the hike up to the north face. Cool temps and no wind made the approach go by quickly and comfortably. There's a good trail all the way to the shelter and the snow on the glacier was pretty firm. Cooper 30 is in fat and some of the other drips on the glacier look good too. At around 7:30 I geared up and started up the bergshrund. To my surprise, the shrund was almost completely filled in. I just walked across some stable snow and the bergshrund was over. Climbing the first ice pitch was some of the best ice I've encountered on Hood. The sticks were solid and there wasn't much dinnerplating. First ice pitch Slogging up some more snow brought me to one of my favorite parts of the whole trip. The second ice pitch was in interesting shape which made for such fun climbing! I'll let the picture of the pitch speak for itself. . More neve took me to the cloudy summit by 10:30. I was pretty surprised in how quickly the route took. In my head I had planned for it to take somewhere around 10 hours. Although it was exciting to finish the north face, I still had a long day ahead of me. I had the choice of doing either the Reid or Wy'East next. Initally, I thought I would do Wy'East because I have never been on the route and it had more vert. I have been up the Reid a couple of times now, each one uneventful. As I was descending I asked a few people if they knew the condition of a few routes. The group said the Reid wasn't in which immediately piqued my interest. Now it was settled, Reid first, Wy'East second. I walked down to illumination saddle and got my first look at the west face in the winter. It was so beautiful. Yocum demanded a solemn respect and a thin veil of clouds gave the face a sense of wonder. Looking up at the West Face I charged up the Reid with some mixture of apprehension and excitement. The first 1000 feet or so was simple snow climbing. As I got higher, I developed a rhythm where I would take 50 steps and then rest. Sometimes I would get gassed after 20, sometimes I would push and lose count. When the clouds broke, the Reid got interesting. Simple snow climbing turned into an exhausting swim as the snow turned warm. Quickly, my 50 step rhythm diminished into 5 or 6 steps of making little to no progress. It was no big deal though, I missed the simple joys of effort in the hills. Things got really fun when I reached some ice steps. Firstly, my feet were uncomfortable and my socks were approaching soggy from all the sweat I was making. Secondly, the "ice" was basically rock with some rime over it. I pulled some cool stemming moves and swung for the fences into the choss. My Grivel picks took it like a champ. After pulling a short but steep ice step, I climbed a mixture of alpine ice and snow to the ridge and then summit. By 3:00 I was on the summit for the second time. With the clouds now gone, I was rewarded with the typical Mt. Hood panorama. Now time for round 3. Snow early on the Reid Suns out guns out On top for the second time that day I was pretty stoked at this point. I felt like the hardest climbing was behind me and I knew I was well ahead of schedule. As a reward, I took another sip of my water supply and ate another GU. On the way down I ran into Walter Burkhardt who gave me some more stoke and energy to get the project done. Instead of walking to Palmer to get up to Wy'East, I traversed across the White River glacier. Traversing the glacier allowed me to save a some vert see a little more of the route in the last hour of sunlight. Walking up to the ridge on Wy'East was good snow climbing. When I gained the ridge, I encountered thin layers of snow and ice over rocks. Sometimes I would step on a seemingly normal spot of snow only to have the snow collapse and hit some rocks. Annoying but non-lethal. Climbing on the steel cliffs brought a whole new perspective to me. The sheer size and steepness of the cliffs is especially noticeable when you're on top. The traverse was easy and by around 7:45 I was back on top for the third time. Cool rime formation on the White River On the ridge Last steps before the summit I was feeling so great by now. All I had to do was run up the southside and the four faces of the mountain would be complete. Going up the Pearly Gates brought back the memories of climbing for the first time. So much had changed in the past few years except for the feeling I have in the mountains. Finishing the trip on the route that started it all just felt right. Ice step on Pearly Gates. I reached the summit for the fourth and final time at 8:40. What a trip it had been. I called my mom and she came to pick me up at Timberline an hour and some change later. (I have the best mom ever). Car to car, the trip took 18 hours 10 minutes and 5 seconds. I still had a bunch of food left and about half a liter of water. Reflecting on the trip brought me mixed feelings. I wanted it to be longer. I had envisioned some feat of endurance that would bring me to the depths of my inner self. Instead, I got home in time for (late) dinner. I'm happy that I got it done and thankful the mountain was kind to me that day. All in all I would highly recommend this trip to anyone interested. I would love to see someone beat my time or do different routes. Happy new year everyone. Gear Notes: 2 liters of water, 1200 calories, hardshell, synthetic jacket, and that's pretty much it Approach Notes: Approach to the North side is good and crevasses are easily manageable

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.

if you just want to test gear placements of all sorts, do it on cracks that are just off the ground - place'em, put a runner on them, then load the shit out of them to see how they hold. don't hammer at crags that are developed unless you're ready to kill some sport-climber