G-spotter

Trip: Dewdney Creek/Coquihalla Hwy - FA Toll Free - 200m WI3 M5 Date: 2/8/2009 Trip Report: I did a little bit of ice scouting on Saturday up the Coquihalla. There is very little snow up there except right around the pass. Looks like it was cold enough for ice to form last week from snowmelt, and it is melting out a bit. Jarvis Bluffs had a bunch of rotten ice. Shady stuff higher up was in - Drool In the Lotus, Thinking Outside the Box and the shadier stuff in Box Canyon looked fat and blue. The Box Canyon approach is not in great shape, though, due to the low snowpack although someone was parked there and maybe climbing on Saturday. Driving back down the highway I saw some unclimbed ice up high on the north-facing side of the Dewdney Creek drainage and ended up enticing Doug out to climb it on Sunday. From the road it looked like a large flow of blue ice with a couple of separate possible finishes. I guessed maybe 2 pitches at WI3-4. Sunday morning I met Doug in Agassiz at 7 and we were parked and hiking not long after 8. We wandered up the north side logging road in Dewdney Creek about 2km until right across from the climb then found logs to cross the creek on. The approach is up a shallow drainage betwen two heli-cutblocks, and was easy walking on old avvy debris. Looking up from the logging road at the route. At the top of the cutblocks the drainage splts into two gullies; we took the right-hand one. There was melting rotten ice in this drainage, low-angled but hollow; we had to avoid a couple of short sections in the forest to the right. We gained about 200m up this drainage and then got to fatter ice where the route started. Doug in the approach gully. The route turned out to be a lot longer than I had estimated. The first rope-stretcher pitch (61m WI2+) went up an easy flow to a short wall of steeper ice, and got us into a large bowl with three massive, blue flows of ice in it. The right-hand line was the lowest angle but longest while the central and left lines were shorter but steeper. It was starting to warm up noticeably as clouds rolled in and we saw a bit of ice- and rock-fall so decided to climb the lowest angle line. We climbed a 60m WI2 pitch, then a 40m WI3 pitch to a ledge below the final pillar. It was Doug's fourth ever day on ice and first multipitch ice route - I kept offering him the lead and he kept declining. Maybe the fact he was using my old Pulsars had something to do with it. Doug seconding the long second pitch. We moved the belay 20m left on the ledge to the left side of the final pillar, then I led off. The ice was steppy and rotten on the left but solid and blue just to my right so I was able to get in a few good screws. I got to what looked like the top of the route (25m WI3) only to find it had melted out - I was balanced on the rim of a hollow tube. Between me and the nearest solid belay tree there was a 5m gap consisting of moss-covered, unfrozen vertical and overhanging choss with a couple of perched detached ice blobs about 2m diameter. I tiptoed across the lip of the ice tube and started grunging around with my tools looking for drytooling holds. Everything was pretty slopey and the moss was not frozen enough to turf-tool. I balanced up a couple of holds, ripping out massive clods of moss and mud, and at full reach managed to hook an incut flake under an overhang; it flexed a bit but held my weight. I mantled onto the head of my hooked tool and was able to reach up with my other hand and snag a thick devil's club stem over the overhang and then pull on it like a madman and beached-whale over into the forest above. I got up to a solid cedar tree and carefully felt the back of my pants to see if I had shat myself or not. Just then two of the ice blobs below that I had tiptoed around cut loose, funnelled down the route and laid a beating on Doug at the belay, giving his pack a good pounding while he cowered under it. Doug climbed up to me, climbing the ice easily but using some of the rope to yard his way through the mixed section. We sat down in the forest above the climb and had a bit of a breather to calm down and stop shaking. Rapping back down the route now seemed out of the question so we decided to try and walk off. We found a decent set of benches and ledges to descend to the west of the drainage, although there were a few sections of face-in frontpointing on frozen moss to link the benches. At around the same elevation as the base of the climb we got cliffed out and had to rap 30m off a tree. Forest rappeling. We grabbed our poles from the bottom of the gully and hiked out the way we had come, arriving back at the car around 5. It's great to have the longer days in February Ride'em cowboy log crossing. Overall this was a pretty fun climb except for the last 5m, which were definitely some of the hardest, chossiest and most scary mixed climbing I have ever done. Probably a colder day with the top of the route bonded would be a much better time to do this climb. Gear Notes: Screws and draws and helmet. Thick gloves help when yarding on Devils Club. Approach Notes: Park at Carolin Mines u-turn route and walk south on the highway about 300m to the narrow strip of land between the Coquihalla and Dewdney bridges. Cut into the forest to pick up the gas pipeline and follow it back to Dewdney FSR. Walk up Dewdney FSR to an open gate at around 2km, and just beyond the gate look south to see the route. Cross Dewdney Creek on logs and plug c.500m up the hillside to the route, which is at c. 1000m elvation.

I can remember watching The Cramps videos at midnight on SOUNDPROOF New Years Eve c. 1984. Lux Interior was like the archetypal rock star. Damn. Live hard, die young, stay pretty.

The best place for the rescue pully is the one having the most fun?

please return to "irrational exuberance" immediately

now he's getting sized for a ball cast

you're a matroschka with no other dolls inside

Climb harder.

It looked like a low angle super polished pitch and then a bunch of rubble walking on the terrace.

I thought this was gonna be about Fear "Let's Have a War!"

In fact - here's the full quote:

funny - whenever i hear anyone talking about anythign i wish they'd STFU and read "the stranger" Wishing for a CP Snow Quote from the above work, were you? Here you go: "A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had." "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it."

HAVE A THUPER DAY TOMORROW1!

Samurais. They kick ninja ass, they kick pirate ass.

SOCCER MOMMA KITTY IS IN UR MINIVAN

http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/581693/Re_TR_Jupiter_Tower_ne_face_7_

pdxers talk about bolts like 13 yr old boys talk about boobs

Good work Inspector Klenke!

Maybe the last glaciation plucked off some sweet granite blocks from the Renton Batholith and carried erratics south to Olympia.

Hair and kidney pie?

Scvarpa Omegas are the lightest plastics out there, give them a try

Ummm... those are for the South Ridge (the other side of the damn mountain) not the NE.

If you mean, is there an easy way for you to get to the top on that - No. you might want to check out Bert & Ed's Crag north of Whistler. It is most definitely TRable and all of 20m from Highway 99.

It's basically the highest snow ledge going left, like if you were standing at the very base of the shadowed north face and followed the moat left.

Sunlight/shade line in this photo. Guidebook description: Also if you can track down the 1998 BC Mountaineer there is a funny story involving a bumbling party getting benighted on this route in a thunderstorm.