ivan

no, actually we were pretty far to the left - the first belay was at a large horizontal crack, it was pretty easy to go left from there and escape onto the main slab up to the regular climb we were actually right under the roof - sky set up a hanging belay on a relatively low angle slab above a couple of bail sling areas holy shit! the glacier down and to the left shows the most dramatic difference! glad to see canada's getting as fucked by global warming as everywhere else...

nice, perhaps your's was the chalk trail we occasionally saw? the evidence of human passage up there is wild, most especially the super deep steps that have been kicked into the moss and heather over the years. nice photo - u look totally gangsta, yo! we drank murphys (after my monster drink exploded on the way in, soaking my pack in taurine-powered goodness) - what were you swilling?

josh, did you ever stop to think maybe nancy reagan was just right? jesus! getting sweated at the border on the way back in was way more fun - shit, whattarathye gon' do? they gotta let us back in... sucked a bunch more in canada customs, as we sat on the Group W bench and feverishly tried to figure out some back up plans. once again, sky's so-big leads cut the # of pitches way down from the topo. nelson showed 25 i think but we did it in something like 10.

good thing whores float...a pity that the tradition of getting loaded 'fore celebrating the murdering of je-sus might have to move a bit further inland

Climb: Mt Slesse-North East Buttress Date of Climb: 8/26/2005 Trip Report: my first trip to canuck-land was a hoot. sky and i drove up thursday, narrowly getting across the border on account of sky's rough n' rowdy past (his rugged good looks sufficing to talk the most sexcellent border guard chick into waving us through despite her best principles). we walked up the trail in the cool of the evenign and bivied by a coursing stream just before the slabs. friday we wanted to climb the entire buttress from the toe. sky led the first pitch, a difficult one on smooth granite. the second pitch was beyond us both - we were either off route or some folks must dig climbing super-steep slabs w/ no hands and no gear. fukdat. we traversed back over onto the regular approach slabs (the complete butt route feels a bit contrived anyhow ). the rest of the climb went smoothly and with great fun. my only stupid moment came after sky lead the 5.10ish pitch. we'd actually put the belay too high, just below the large overhang clearly shown in kearney's topo. sky climbed up, placed gear, then eventually backed down, climbed below the belay, went aroudn the corner and fount he easier ground. seconding, i pulled the piece above me, but couldn't downclimb to get aroudn the corner. facing 30 degrees or so of penduluming, i gave it a shot and failed, swinging way across the face and slamming into a corner - yeah! all was well and we zoomed up the uber-fun textured pitches, catchign this awesome shot on the way. the entire buttress is clearly laid out below me and off to the right, to where it rises out of the great slabs at the base we reached the summit a few minutes before the sun dipped below the horizon. a pleasant bivy followed, though mine was somewhat coffin like (a coffin for a man 8 inches shorter than me though). i hauled 3 liters of water, which was enough to last the climb and the descent saturday. hardman-sky, a highpowered mutant if ever there was one ("ex-rude-boy-nuclear-physicist" is the best handle i've yet to be able to devise for him), got by w/ just 2 liters in fine style. saturday we made the easiest descent off the mountain proper i've had yet on a grade 5 this summer. 2 raps, a gully downclimb till it gets steep, traverse past 2 gullies following cairns, then 1 more rap into the last gully in front of a huge sub-peak led to an easy scree descent and the well stamped alpine trail. unfortunatly, the bastard track led us astray shorlty thereafter and we found ourselves betrayed and above tall grassy cliffs - some cursing and 'swacking later we traversed back onto the "wooded ridgeline" and down to a saddle w/ a trial leading down to the slesse creek. this trail was also confusing and nebolous at first, requiring blind swacking for awhile before we stumbled back onto the well marked, somewhat maintained and heinously steep trail. sky flew down the path like olive oil through a choleric goose while i whined and bitched about my dying toenails that suffered due to a lack of ski-poles or ice-axe to slow the descent. finally we reached the old road at the base of the trail (actually, sky beat me down w/ enough time to take a nice nap by the first water source we'd encountered in a day - a mossy, shadowy dripping cliff) and followed it to the parking lot. my spirits suffered due to the lack of medicine (damn international borders!) to numb the certain pain of 9 miles of stupid road hiking back to the car - a little "gin n' juice" on the mp3 helped somewhat - but then most wonderful serendipity provided a father n' son from chilliwack complete w/ big ass truck willing to give us a lift, sparing us hours of tedium. subway in chilliwack is packed on saturday. bought a sandwhich and got monopoly money back in change - spent it on fat beer which was mostly gone by the time we hit the us border, where we got sweated again. then the long burn back to seattle to the screeching horror-show of my dying brake-pads. fat times - i might just have to come bakc to maple-leaf land again someday...

sky and i did this and got back y-day. thanks for the useful beta. as dberdinka said, a shitty car will get you as far as a humvee. there's plenty of water coursing down the slabs at the base of the route. no water after that until you've descended all the way down the backside, down the hella-steep slesse creek trail, and onto the old overgrown road. very pleasant surprise to find so much awesome granite and wierd, solid, textured rock - awesome climb!

"...is aid" at the end of every goddamn thing...

how can you really judge the lower route when you fucked up getting on it? when you hit the pitches right at the base it's incredibly fun and all the climbing after the first 3 pitches are totally cruiser simul-climbing terrain exactly like the upper ridge.

the 19th amendment?

george bush for president?

if i wanted to watch a bunch of fucking people riding stupid little bikes around, i'd step out front of the suburban shit-dream i live in and watch legions of wee girls driving 'round wearing their hello-kitty helmets while pedaling their funkadelic pink cycles w/ the crazy flags - and i give about as much a shit if they're doped up while doing it as if a bunch of snail eating gauls are (or wannabe texan gauls, for that matter).

no disrespect, and no shitting, there ain't no glory dying on any mountain (except maybe the olympus mons)- still, whatever the truth, adams LOOKS like a shitpile from most vantages... rip bill

dying on adams - now there's some glory for you!

how come none of you foo's said you driven to go car to car so you can get back and give the wife/girlfriend the old pickle-tickle 'fore you explode?

nice. a fun quick outing. go back and do the 2 variations off lunch ledge too!

milosh! the hardcore-every-day-i'm-training-to-be-the-worlds-greatest-russian-clibmer guy! the whole country's gone to hell since he dropped out of site....

actually, after winning the piscine-shaped award, my brother tim commented - "funny, my hand SMELLS like fish" :insert vomiting emoticon here:

joe, an idea came to me as i made 4 solo trips past the big tree y-day - why not just deposit a huge pile of dirt down by the base of the se corner w/ a sign asking anyohe who feels like it to haul a pack of dirt up to the ledge? shit, if there'd been some i coulda left 20-30 lbs up there myself in just one evening and it wouldn't have detracted from my experience at all. the route sees so much traffic i bet in just a month we could get a couple hundred lbs up there. better yet, someone could donate an old shitty pack to leave w/ the pile (i might have one somewhere in my garage) and they could either hike it back down when done w/ the route or chuck it back down when empty. save the tree! it's a very cool thing to have there. leaving a permanent sling around it would elimate the rope burns from those who insist on rapping off it too.

"did i leave the iron on?"

theonion.com close enough to reality to be truly scary though

so, on that note, fuck homeless climbers and fuck icefall! and to think it only took 3 pages to hash that all out... spray on!!!

thanks all

nice read and pics man - i'm thinking pdx is going to ravage your soul when you return...

hmmm - depressing. so all the snow above the bivy is inaccesible/too-high/too-little?

looks beautiful, and it's hard to argue w/ the concept of free!