JayB

https://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/profile/20452-donnybaker/

Cool idea - thanks for sharing the route and all of the beta.

Based on your requirements, I'd rule out just about anyplace west of the Cascades for an infinity of reasons. Focus on Leavenworth/Mazama. If you are willing to live up to 30 minutes away you may find that rates are a bit more reasonable. Probably not much of a singles scene in Chumstick or Cashmere, but life's all about tradeoffs. Also - if you are mostly into rock climbing, then Walla Walla is worth a look. Between the wine scene and the presence of a small liberal arts college, it punches above its weight culturally for a town its size, has reasonable access to crags, is right next to the blue mountains, etc. There's a geology professor at Whitman named Kevin Pogue who's been active for decades that could give you a pretty good rundown on what it's like to live there.

Have you noticed any seasonal pattern with the rockfall? The story I've been telling myself is that most of the "exfoliation" out there happens when things start to heat up in the spring. Water percolates in to the cracks in the winter, repeated freeze thaw cycles lead to frost-jacking, and when the melt kicks in during the spring the ice-shrinkage plus lubrication provided by the liquid water plus gravity equals big-time rockfall followed by a quieter period once the annual shed is over and done with. Does this story I've been telling myself fit in with what you observed or is this just a baseless fantasy that I've cooked up?

Great find - thanks for posting the link.

Sort of surprised to see the data point from the Willis Wall in 2011. The only WW climb I can recall was Loren and Jens' ascent as a party of two around that time. Anyone recall any other WW ascents? Kind of interesting that most of the activity on Willis Wall, from what I can recall, was in the early 60's through the mid-70's, which coincides with the post WWII cold period. My sense is that it's just a coincidence that that period of time just happened to be when the rest of the mountain had been climbed out and Willis Wall was the only place left people seeking out first ascents could go for FAs on big lines. Having said that, I wonder if the colder, snowier conditions made those lines more or less dangerous. I could see it going either way. Always Russian roulette, but interesting to contemplate from an armchair a long way away from that face.

Tragic. Unless you're one of the loved one's left behind here's something ineffable about the vast and never-ending spiral of grief that you know that incidents like this are going leave in their wake. Sort of like the emotional equivalent of dark matter. You know it's out there, and it's massive, searing, and life changing, but if you're far enough removed from the incident you can't really see it, feel it, or appreciate its true magnitude. ------------------------- I think I can remember a TR from Alpinfox from way back that mentioned sitting in their tent when a garbage-can-lid sized wheel of death that ripped right between himself and his partner when they were sitting in their tent. Literally just chilling in their tent one second, certain death pass inches away from both of them a second later, both of them getting eyes wide as saucers a second later, then spending the rest of the night crouched low in their tents with their helmets on, with their full packs braced between themselves and whatever else might come raining down in the middle of the night. Terrifying.

Hey, who's this guy? "Hydrologist and geoscientist Drew Brayshaw, who has climbed extensively in the area, says it appears the first slide sent a flow of debris more than four km down Cerise Creek, east of Joffre Lakes Provincial Park." https://www.citynews1130.com/2019/05/18/major-slides-rip-away-north-face-of-joffre-peak-near-pemberton-b-c/

I always wondered about those routes when I looked at them in the Beckey guide. Anyone know if there are any recorded ascents other than the FA's?

Did the a lower part of the Girth Pilar on Stuart fall off ~10-12 years ago? Think the route still goes but the lower pitches changed?

Great story of a N. Cascades pioneer at the link for those interested in such things. "Morovits' renown as a mountaineer began to spread through the Northwest after July of 1908, when Seattle's Mountaineers, bent on ascent of Mount Baker via a new route pioneered between Park and Boulder glaciers by Joe, camped 54 strong near Baker Lake on the long pack-in from the terminus of a logging train then reaching through to Concrete. "He strode into camp with a 100-pound pack on his back like the mountain itself in human form," wrote one of the club members. "A Bohemian, he wore the mustache of a French Canadian. He wasn't more than 5 feet 9 inches in height, weight around 170 pounds, but he was of a close-knit, muscular build with remarkable girth of chest, belling out immediately under his chin and tapering to a small waist. His great arms hung near his knees. An impressive man of swarthy, wild appearance, he had a look of will power and determination about him to match his physical prowess. Without equipment of any kind except for a long pike of fir tipped with. a self-made contrivance of steel shaped like -the bowl of a large spoon, he had made all the major climbs of the area, seeking out the most violent routes up the mountains as a 'pastime' compared to the hardships of running a one-man mine and stamp mill." http://www.croatia.org/crown/croatians/www.croatians.com/MOUNTAIN MAN MOROVICH.htm

The Ptarmigan Traverse seems like a good candidate for you. https://www.mountaineers.org/activities/routes-places/ptarmigan-traverse

Great find - thanks for sharing! Kudos to you for making the discover and getting after it. My hunch is that it probably takes the somewhat unusual combination of conditions that we've had recently to bring these lines into shape, and that may have at least something to do with the lack of activity. Having said that - you had the boots on the ground, so what do you think? Are these lines that will reliably form up and be in condition most winters? IIRC - there was an area that was discovered in the early 2000's that seemed to get lots of interest at the time, and I haven't heard much about it since. Not sure if it's because the conditions needed for it to form up were kind of ephemeral, or that I haven't swung a tool since 2008. Maybe some folks that have been more active can chime in. http://www.alpinedave.com/ice/ice_climbing4/ice_climbing4.htm

Way to get it done - thanks for the cool TR. That one's been on my tick list for far longer, and will probably stay there for the next decade or so. In the meantime, TR's like yours help keep the embers glowing...

Sent a message to your Gmail account.

-Picked one of these up recently for a trip in BC. Glad to hear the real-world testing was favorable. -Any favorite river trips in Alaska? Kind of over the horizon for me, but it's on the list. Would probably opt for a frame-raft based trip, and emphasize scenery and fishing. Rapids up to mild class IV would add to the fun but wouldn't be necessary.

Sounds like it's time for you to take up kayaking, Bob.

-Totally agree about the political barriers standing in the way of any expansion of nuclear power. My theory is that nuclear power became intractably associated with nuclear weaponry (even before Three Mile Island, etc) and that ossified into a sort of a (mostly) uncritical hostility to nuclear power in the public mind in general and the left in particular. What's interesting to me that that in that period the France of the 1970's embarked on a crash program that saw them go from getting next to none of their power from nuclear at the onset of the 1973 embargo, to something like ~50% by the mid eighties, and 75% now. As far as I know, they have an impeccable record when it comes to safety, but the French example rarely figures into the public discussion. Ditto for the fact that our carrier and submarine fleets have been powered by nuclear reactors since the 1950's with an equally outstanding safety record. There are ideological obstacles to any kind of a rational, non-utopian response to climate change on both the left and the right, but I think there's an unfortunate asymmetry between the two when it comes to nuclear power. If the left suddenly adopted the ideological priorities of the right and put economic growth, material abundance, etc ahead of reducing CO2 emissions, we'd basically just continue on the same path since fossil fuels are the least expensive, most abundant, and most reliable source of energy. If the right adopted the current framework of the left, including its stance on nuclear power, there'd be a consensus that we need to shift to non-emitting renewables and zero chance of that ever happening because scaling up solar, wind, etc to the level that would be required would be physically, economically, and technically impossible. It'd also very quickly prove to be politically impossible once the cost of power went up enough to cause significant economic dislocation, unemployment, and miscellaneous other human suffering. -I'm also glad to see someone injecting consistent mortality calculations into the discussion. AFAIK nuclear is literally hundreds of times safer than other conventional power sources, including hydropower, wind, and solar. If you take the math behind deaths per-unit of C02 emissions seriously, you could conceivable argue that over it's life cycle the reactor saved far more lives than it took as a consequence of preventing X^n millions of tons of C02.

I think the argument is is that, at least on the West Coast, there are some dams where the cost/harm they inflict on salmon stocks equals or exceed the value of the power they generate. There are some cases like the dam on the Elwha where that analysis seems plausible, and others on the mainstem of the Columbia where it's much less so, even though the cost of mitigating the damage they do to salmon stocks runs into the hundreds-of-millions per year. You'd also have to add in flood control, irrigation, and shipping benefits to most of these analyses, which more or less makes removing those dams a non-starter. If you are interested, there's are a couple of great books that do a deep dive into the history/politics/economics of dam building in the Western US as part of a broader analysis of the overharvest-and-habitat destruction story that lead to the widespread collapse of salmon stocks (at least from historical levels). The first is "Salmon without Rivers," and the second is "King of Fish." Both highly recommended if you're into PNW history.

There's nothing wrong with "being the change that you want to see in the world," even if the tangible effects of doing so are indistinguishable from zero. The only downside I've seen is that peoples and societies can use these things as sort of a mental fig-leaf they use to hide from the reality of what's driving their personal emissions, and what'll actually move the needle in terms of global emissions. Carbon taxes, the expansion of fracking, and a massive increase in the number of nuclear power plants are about the only things that have the potential to reduce global CO2 emissions enough to have any measurable impact. When you look at reliability, power-density, scalability, and storage-capacity it's clear that the odds of expanding wind and solar enough to cover more than a fraction of our requirements for base-load power, much less increased demand in the future are zero. Unfortunately, most of the folks that I meet who are the most concerned with global warming can't stomach the idea of making carbon taxes revenue neutral to give them a prayer of actually being passed into law, hate fracking despite the fact that the natural gas produces ~1/2 the CO2 per BTU of coal, and have an uncritical hostility to nuclear power. Until that changes, everything that happens in the realm of global warming activism isn't going to amount much more than a kind of therapeutic theater.

Outstanding - thanks for sharing!

There's been a decline in traffic across all message boards, some of which is due to the advent of social media, some of which is due to people accessing the internet with their phones most of the time. If you happen to be on a social media platform and encounter a story or beta about a route that you think would be interesting or helpful to other folks, encourage whoever contributed to put it up here or ask their permission to post it here so that it gets added to the archive.

Great TR, pics, and intel. Thanks for adding this to the archive!

That's quite a line! Loved reading about the mud placements. Maybe the PNW volcano equivalent of ascending the white cliffs of dover with ice tools...

I think that any time spent intensively contemplating the risks associated with climbing, and how to mitigate them, is time well spent. I know that for myself at least, then I'm out climbing I don't have the bandwidth to process anything more complex than a few rules of thumb or vivid stories from ANAM that pertain to what I'm actually doing at that particular moment. Can you elaborate on some of the ways that you feel that framing your risk analysis in terms of equations helps you climb more safely? Not calling your claims into question here, just hoping to learn something that I might be able to put to use.