Dru

Climb: Mount Outram-Ghost Passenger (FA/FWA East Face) Date of Climb: 3/12/2005 Trip Report: I have been scheming to climb the East Face of Outram for a couple of years now. The large, gullied face is hard to see from most roads but you can get glimpses from some other peaks, and the view from Snass (Justin Brown has some awesome shots on bivouac.com) is quite impressive. In August 2003 Fred Touche and I hiked up the standard route on Outram and I took a look see down the face and deemed it possible. In 2004 Merran and I hiked in in May planning to go up the standard route, drop down a gully at the S end of the e face and climb back out up another gully. However this approach, due to weather and also the fact that all the gullies are too steep to be comfortable descents, failed and we ended up bagging the standard route once again. I know Justin and Jordan also made one attempt and had the same problem. For 2005 I decided to head in via the old Ghost Pass trail and up the creek draining the east face. I gleaned some beta on this approach from the usual online sources and prepared for windfall and thrashing. The nice descent down the standard route means the best climbing choice is to carry over bivi gear and I packed accordingly. No stove, cold food, two tools, crampons, a few jacket layers, a -7C sleeping bag for a possible long night bivi and a 3/4 length z-rest. I parked at the wooden marmot around 12:30 on Saturday and started hiking the Ghost pass trail. this leaves the old Engineers' Road about 2 km east of the Outram Trail and cuts over the ridge into the valley of Eighteen Mile Creek. The trail was overgrown and had lots of windfall but wasn't as hard to follow as I had feared it would be. After about three hours of hiking I left the trail and cut up an obvious side valley towards Outram. By the time I reached treeline it was getting near dark and I was tired. There were lots of possible lines so I elected to bivi overnight and make an early start instead of picking one line and giving it by headlamp Fred Touche style. There were no real flat spots to bivi not covered in wet snow but I found a good hollow in the ground, filled it in with dead branches and laid the z-rest down on that; it was quite comfortable. For some reason all I could think of all night long was zombie movies and wild animals. I had found fresh cougar tracks not far from my bivi site when approaching and kept waking up in the night in a state of mild panic whenever the wind blew through the trees. Around 5 AM I got up, packed my bivi up and got out of the trees onto the approach slopes to the east face. The face is a very large one with numerous gullies, and is composed of a long face on the SE ridge, and a higher face directly below the summit, in a bit of a cirque. Because of the slanting valley and ridge slopes pretty much all the options on the face are about 400 to 500m high and there are at least a dozen unclimbed gullies here, They pretty much all had a mix of ice and snow in them too. It was hard to make a decision but I ended up heading up to the headwall, mostly because I couldn't see it from lower in the valley and didnt want to pick a good looking line only to find out that the headwall had better lines that I couldn't see. East face at sunrise from treeline near bivi Unclimbed gully with WI3? step Narrow and potentially mixed unclimbed couloir line. When I got up into the east face bowl there were three options... a shady, scary looking couloir and chimney line with chockstones on the left, an open face with a couple of vertical water ice steps in the middle, and a slanting line on the right. The slanting line looked the easiest and had the smallest cornices above it so that was what I chose. It had one narrow kink but most of it looked like snow climbing. East face headwall. Arrow marks line climbed. NS and SS are north and south summits (I had no idea where the summits were when I took the photo). Details might be too small to see in thumbnail, in that case check the gallery. I climbed up into the couloir and the climbing turned out to be awesome with well-frozen neve and little bits of ice where seepages from the sidewalls came in. It was mostly 45 degree climbing with short steeper steps. There was a constant flow of 'hail' on the gully bed as ice fell off the sidewalls and broke up, but almost nothing larger than golf ball size...only two fist size chunks came down and both of them bounced well clear of me. Looking up the gully from near the bottom. I was not climbing too fast and I was also worried about the cornices. The climbing was fun but I wasn't enjoying it much. I came around a corner into the kink I had seen from below and found a 25m step of 70 degree WI3. After climbing this I got above most of the falling ice and the snow relented to 45 degrees again. A few hundred meters higher I got close to the ridge exit and came very close to a big looming house sized cornice. Fortunately the cornice line was not continuous. I picked a line up to where the lip was amost non existant, and although the angle steepened through 50 to almost 65 degrees (tools over head) the exit move was only vertical for less than a bodylength. I pulled onto the ridge to find I was exactly half way between the two summits, which was the point I had been aiming for, but did not know I was about to arrive at. Also, the ridge between the two summits, which is Class 2-3 rock in summer, and that I had thought might be scary and double-corniced, was pretty much a broad easy walk. Almost immediately on topping out my fear went away and I felt a great sense of happiness and relaxation. Tracks on the ridge with north summit behind. By the time I got to south summit it was probably 11:00 or 11:30 AM. I drank the last of my water, ate some PowerGels and took a few photos before starting to descend. Rideout and Payne - Sumallo Valley Mt. Grant, Eaton Peak and Cheam Range behind. The uppermost slopes were pretty wind-blown and icy, then as I went lower the snow softened and the temperature rose. I shed crampons and layers as I descended and even got in some good glissading. It is a very long way back down to the highway (almost 2000m) which I reached around 2:30 for a car-to-car time of 26 hours or so. Obviously that includes a 12 hour bivi and so theoretically a day trip is doable, but if I did it again I would still biv in order to get good early morning snow conditions. The approach is not onerous but does take about 5 hours all told. Since there are so many other unclimbed lines on the face I decided to give the climb a name to distinguish it from other routes that will later be done. I ended up calling it "Ghost Passenger" since the approach is via the Ghost Pass trail and because I was somewhat scared for a lot of the climb. The overall difficulty is probably Grade III, Alpine Grade AD+, WI3 and snow to 65 degrees. The climbing felt quite similar to Central Couloir on Joffre, not as sustained and no rockclimbing exit but with a slightly harder crux than existed the one time I climbed CC on Joffre. Gear Notes: 4 screws, 2 pickets and 2 pins would be an adequate rack for a party of two. Approach Notes: Via Ghost Pass trail, 4-5 hours in. Plan on taking bivi gear up and over. Food notes: In 26 hours I ate 5 powergels, 1 halvah bar, one chocolate bar, a couple of fruitleathers, and a sesame snap packet. I think this is the least amount of food I have ever eaten on an overnight trip. Certainly for most of the climb I did not want to eat at all. I'm still not very hungry. it is possible thatt if I had eaten more and had higher blood sugar levels I might not have felt so scared, I have noticed before that I start to get spooked sometimes when climbing and not eating.

I'm still writing it, you will have to wait

road looks to be melted out to near the head of the valley zero gully and minus five looked fat payne was quite impressive see photo from outram in outram TR

as long as the haul loop is full strength it's no big deal of course when you fall off you assume the "peter pan" position hanging from the rope, facing down and horizontal

Sea otters are to Sea lions what boulders are to mountains

Sea Lion Caves, plenty of steep roof problem and a crowd of fish-eating spotters

I'm actually surprised that it lasted as long as it has. I figured it would last about 3 issues due to the small size of the target audience...it seems like 90% of today's climbers are sport, trad-crag, or boulderers with no interest in long or alpine routes. More or less the people that Urban Climber mag is aimed at in other words.

I stole this one from Trask Wal-Mart announced that they will soon be offering customers a new discount item: Wal-Mart's own brand of wine. The world's largest retail chain is teaming up with E&J Gallo Winery of California, to produce the spirits at an affordable price, in the $2-5 range. Wine connoisseurs may not be inclined to throw a bottle of Wal-Mart brand into their shopping carts, but "there is a market for cheap wine", said Kathy Micken, professor of marketing. She said: "But the right name is important." Customer surveys were conducted to determine the most attractive name for the Wal-Mart brand. The top surveyed names in order of popularity are: 10. Chateau Traileur Parc 9. White Trashfindel 8. Big Red Gulp 7. World Championship Riesling 6. NASCARbernet 5. Chef Boyardeaux 4. Peanut Noir 3. I Can't Believe It's Not Vinegar! 2. Grape Expectations And the number 1 name for Wal-Mart Wine: 1. Nasti Spumante The beauty of Wal-Mart wine is that it can be served with either white meat (Possum) or red meat (Squirrel).

A vulture boarded a plane, carrying two dead raccoons. The flight attendant stopped him and said, "Sorry sir, only one carrion per passenger." NASA recently sent a number of Holsteins into orbit for experimental purposes. They called it the herd shot round the world. Two boll weevils grew up in South Carolina. One took off to Hollywood and became a rich movie star; the other stayed in South Carolina and never amounted to much. He became known as the lesser of two weevils. Two Eskimos in a kayak were chilly, so they started a fire, which sank the craft, proving the old adage that you can't have your kayak and heat it too. A three-legged dog walks into an old west saloon, slides up to the bar and announces, "I'm looking for the man who shot my paw." Did you hear about the Buddhist who went to the dentist and refused to take Novocain? He wanted to transcend dental medication. A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel, and met in the lobby where they were discussing their recent victories in tournaments. The hotel manager came out of the office after an hour, and asked them to disperse. He couldn't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer. A woman has twins, gives them up for adoption. One goes to an Egyptian family and is named "Ahmal" The other is sent to a Spanish family and is named "Juan". Years later, Juan sends his birth mother a picture of himself. Upon receiving the picture, she tells her husband she wishes she also had a picture of Ahmal. He replies, "They're twins for Pete's sake!! If you've seen Juan, you've seen Ahmal!!" A group of friars opened a florist shop to help with their belfry payments. Everyone liked to buy flowers from the Men of God, so their business flourished. A rival florist became upset that his business was suffering because people felt compelled to buy from the Friars, so he asked the Friars to cut back hours or close down. The Friars refused. So the florist then hired Hugh McTaggert, the biggest meanest thug in town. He went to the Friars' shop, beat them up, destroyed their flowers, trashed their shop, and said that if they didn't close, he'd be back. Well, totally terrified, the Friars closed up shop and hid in their rooms. This proved that Hugh, and only Hugh, can prevent florist friars.

In many places where people are starving, better environmental stewardship would have prevented conditions from deteriorating to the point of widespread starvation.

you could always try using a pterodactyl

The more crappy rock that is covered with solid snow, the less crappy rock is available to generate rockfall. If I can get funding, I will establish several hundred ramdomized quadrat sampling sites along Liberty Ridge and use photogrammetric measuring techniques to quantify the number of rocks impacting per square meter under high and low snow levels. A simple heteroscedastic two-tailed T-test should serve to verify or reject the hypothesis concerning rockfall and snow levels.

Somehow I knew fishstick was going to work in a reference to the Piranha

Source? Seems similar to the micro cracks in cams myth. No- I had read this one in one of the climbing rags a few years back. Some of the ropes tested were over 5 yrs old but had been kept out of UV range. These failed on the first UIAA drop test. provide magazine name and issue # or it's still a myth. anyone having old ropes they are scared of - send them to me - i can dispose of them properly.

even girls can fly

TNF has a new shoe called the "Buildering"

meanwhile in da Rockies they skiied and teled the Aemmer couloir on Temple

... Post deleted by Minx

$50 rental! large rubber feet extra.

Not to mention Tauntauns

First winter* ascent Ebutt SEWS?

When I take I have sometimes levitated, up to 176mm above the ground.

Gym climbing is aid

i have size 10.5 (UK) koflach verticals with a size 10.5 liner in them.

no cause the 'Hood keep the spray in the email instead of online.