ivan

i'm down if i'll have some company - do me good to get spanked cragg'n after all the summer alpine...

my enjoyment of the route has increased dramatically w/ eveyr day that passes to eliminate the true memories we followed the beckey description pretty truly for th en peak - as mentioned, there was a complete gay pride parade to validate our line - that said, taking another line could only be better on the descent, i figur eour first line down would have worked, if we trusted it, but pain appears to be unavoidable - what appears totally unavoidable is the shit that lies in store just 1000 feet above the saddle above lake serene - it's totally cliffed out on the serene side of the saddle - how can this be avoided except by rapping like we did?

come on, only 2 weeks of summer for me left to play with!

"the washing of the spears" is currently playing a nice counterpoint to "one flew over the cockoos's nest"

i can't begin to read all the crap in this thread, but has anyone ventured to comment yet that vanya y mir, as the savage borscht-folks call it, is totally boring? i finished that book out of sheer spite, and laughed my ass off at the death of every major character...

ha! what ma don't know, little brother!

ain't luna bars for bitches though, mike?

sorry, redoubt, i'm actually a crass-bastard who had to stare at his pictures for a while before summoning the requiste obscenties to manage it right

Climb: Mt Index-The Saharan Traverse Date of Climb: 8/10/2005 Trip Report: joshk and i had our own little mini-epic on index last week. we'd climbed the ne buttress of jo'burg the week before in good time and style and felt very confident in the planning stage of this climb, which lasted about 2 minutes, giving me just enough time to make nice w/ the fam, take out the trash, pack and sleep for 3 hours before getting on the road for seattle. we'd read the tr on this route 2 weeks earlier and felt prepared for the whole traverse to be dry. i wanted to bag it regardless so i could get my blue-collar hat-trick this summer (nooksack, j-burg (twice!), and index - who do i see to get my credentials ?) josh brought 5 liters, i brought 4. the view of the traverse from the lake - the route begins on the right by climbing the brushy goodness of the north peak me looking up the start of the north peak - my brush pulling skillz already finely honed after a season on the n cascades most vegetated routes apparently the n peak alone gets climbed a great deal - i can't really imagine way - the most enjoyable part of the traverse comes later and the first 1/3 is sorta ho-hum. as some cunning linguist on this board once put it, the whole damn n peak route looks like a gay-pride parade w/ rap stations round shrubs literally ever 50 feet. here's a picture of the most classic gay-pride tat ever... after a long section of vertical swacking, the route leads to this unpleasant gully. it's low angle, but virtually w/o pro, a funnel for rocks, and pretty slimey. we simuled through it to get it over w/ quickly so we could get to the good stuff. finishing the gully, we swung round right, then back up to this most enjoyable rock rib which we did in one long simul-pitch. la sportiva boots were more than adequate for the entire route. we got a later start then i'd wanted, and with the great heat of the day we found ourselves at the summit of the n peak distressingly tardy - we wanted a sweet bivy to enjoy the evening, so rather than push hard to make the middle peak by nightfall, we settled for the "keebler elf bivy" - a fantastically wierd tree, ancient and shattered, just above the 2nd rap down towards the north-middle notch. an awesome place - the groudn beneath the tree was thick w/ needles and moss and very soft. despite tremendious exposure on both sides, i found a notch shaped like a sea-shell that provided a completely worry free sleep-space. i chuckled to watch rain-man-josh wig out at the accompanying insects. i did not laugh to discover that josh had consumed almost all of his water already (damn you camel-pack!). i had 2 liters left, but knew i'd need 1 for dinner and breakfeast. the route the next day looked straitforward and we ernestly hoped we'd find snow in the middle-main notch the next morning - at any rate, we could see a snow patch just off right of this pic off the main peak in case of emergency (this would be most important the next day) day 2 found us starting out w/ just my 1 liter of water between us (pulled from the lake the day before and treated w/ chlorine - "yummm, pool water!".) we started super-early to try to beat the heat but it didn't matter. by late morning we were deeply thirsty and no longer enjoying life...for a brief while int he morning it was fun though, and i pantomined my best "walk like an egyptian" impression w/ my shadows from the rising sun while josh photographed the most enjoyable pure rock climbing the whole trip came out of the north-middle notch. i stayed on the exact corner and found something 5.7-8ish and satisfylingly terrifying - the pro looked good from below but turned out to be all rotten and unreliable - the rock's very steep here and the holds highly portable. 60 full meters put me on the crest and i put the belay in on the other side since there weren't really any anchors there either (worked well enough, josh fell low down and swung off the route but i stayed well put) my fav pic from the trip. having dispensed w/ the middle peak (very ho-hum after the first tech pithc and a long cool crest climb) we worked down the sunblasted south "easy scrambling" part to the main-middle notch. to our distinct horror there was no snow at all, just hideious looseness and a deep uneasy feeling at the the 1/5 liter we had left to make it to the summit and god know's how long down befor ewe could tank up again. here josh pulls out an empty bottle from the day before and desperately tries to suck out the .05 ounce of water left in the bottom unfortunately my swollen tongue prevented me from really enjoying the rest of the day. the first tech pitch out of the last notch was very short, then turned back into the typical steep heather/forest brush-fuck. we just wanted off and kept lusting at the "idyllic tarns" described int he last tr - i was very cranky at the vague description of the "wedge gendarme" which never really appeared down low. eventually we found something that kinda fit the bill. i think it's the horn below me int his pic. we traversed here, found obviously wrong cliffs, turned back up and left, then found the nastiest gully of the whole traverse - shattered, brittle, totally unprotectable white rock next to terribly crumbly brown-orange rock that had to be crossed to traverse over to heather and forest and easy groudn to the summit. finishing off to the summit and uber-dehyrdated, we found we'd been crawling all day in our water-starved misery. it was 5 pm, we had to gorge on water like camels to reverse the damage done by the heat and deprivation, we were unsure if we'd encounter anything good ont he way down, and regardless we knew we'd be brush-bashing in the dark. prudence dictated we descend 500 feet off the wrong sid eof the summit to the snow patch we'd spotted the day before, gorge, then bivy again for an early start out. we were ashamed and certian we'd lose our cascade-hard-man credentials for spending 3 days on the traverse, but after feasting on ice-cold water and enjoying a much needed safety break, we made our peace w/ the situation. we had enough food to make it w/o getting too thin. here we look back at the keebler elf bivy (1/3 way down the far north peak) in the evening - soaking up the ambience of the 2 below i started day 3 w/ a granola bar and a pack of yummy fruit smoothies, but other than that we were certain we had this bitch in the bag - a quick descent, we feast at jack in th ebox just a few miles away, then i'm home ot make the wife and in-laws happy by being just a day late. well, upon opening my eye-lids to sweet sunshine, i looked down to see solid cloud deck as far as i could see, blotting out everything below 5500 feet. no actual storm weather, but we found ourselves w/o good reference points at the summit and very unsure as to the right way down. this picture of me staring at the beta became most emblematic of the day - "where in the fuck do we go?" this is all that remained of the "idyllic tarns" - just one puddle rapidly dissapearing, though still manned by a squadron of sand-pipers. over the next 2 hours we'd recross this same ground 4 or 5 times trying to sort out where we should start our descent. we began at the far end of the pic on the left, but after going down 500 feet we were firmly in the clouds and could only see a few feet into an impossible steep looking gully. we never saw the fixed rope mentioned int he last tr, so as we became convinced we wer eint he wrong place, we went back up to the sunshine at the tarns. we'd found a desperate bail sling down low off a tiny shrub, but we didn't want to be the guys who followed some other idiot into oblivion. after dicking around forever at the tarns looking for better starts and studying the topo map and the ridicilious beckey map sketch, we decided to just pick something that was probably wrong and go with it. we went south down a very steep grassy/choosy gully, entered a huge talus bowl, climbed up to a shoulder and began working our way counter-clockwise around the mountain, frequently bushwacking and stopping to eat blueberries to fend off The Hunger. eventually we found a promising, though scarry, choss gully pictured here - the clouds were lowering, which made life easier, but the way was still quite uncertain i'm smiling here 'cuz it looks like we might make our escape good. the ridge that forms the saddle above lake serene is behind me - if we can get there we're golden! unfortunately, this shit never went away. it distinctly reminded me of kahiltna pass - a pouring river of clouds through the saddle obscuring the path and leaving everything dripping wet. the topo looked like we needed to get on lake side of the ridge and work our way down. we got there and then it got real nasty. we re-entered thick clouds, the shitty talus gave way to horrific shrubbery, mostly thorns and devil's club, the slope went from managable to cliffs - josh left his gloves at an earlier start and really hated life yanking on salmon berries, so got seperated from me as i started reclimbing upwards tot he ridge to find better ground. i found myself on a bear trail, complete w/ a huge blue-berry studded bear turd, which went up to a soft spot on the ridge w/ an algae-pond where i waited for josh to re-appear. he did a few minutes later w/ his eyes wide with terror after coming up some uber-shit. we proceded donw the ridge hoping we could blindly find our way to the saddle in the fog, but then it became so steep rappeling was the only option. our first rappel featured the epic-essential rope disaster when i threw one of the coils into a tree top projected 10 feet out away from the wall - josh couldn't free it and ended up below the problem, so he got off the line and i approached it like a psychotic possessed - here i balance on the offending tree, prepared for a 10 foot pendulum into the rock if i lunch, and unwrap the problem this is also a great pic, me at the end of our 5th rap down the ridge into the saddle, capturing the dumb-founded emotion that characterized most of this day. "how the fuck did this go so wrong?" i'm now quite certain my wife n' in-laws will lynch me for being so late - the funny thing about index of course is that you're so close to civilization you can call anytiime w/ a cell phone and make excuses... once in the saddle the trip ended rapidly - we got utterly soaked from toe to waist in the mist-mucked brush, stumbled through the moors to the top of a talus field, followed it till the clouds rose above us, and hooted n' hollered n' sang wierd al songs at the sight of the lake. the coolest site of the day was the avy fan at the base of the s norweigian buttress, which featured this titantic snow arch big enough to park a fleet of buses in. the first safety break of the day occured at the lunch rock on the lake, where i ate the granola bar i'd been saving. we mp3ed up and zoomed off down the trail behind a flock of hippies n' faggots in the growing gloom - i knew we'd hit sweet civilization when, in the total dark, i encountered a gaggle of teenage meth-heads who attempted to bum a cigarette off me - the car was just a few hundred yards away and it bore us off to the land of cheese-burgers and malt liquor... so what now? now that i've accumulated all this brush horror stories in so short a summer, to what good use should i put them next? seriously, i feel my ability to evaluate this climb is polluted - the lack of water, great heat of the first 2 days and cloud confusion of day 3 made it frequently unpleasant, but in the right conditions (spring/early summer) i reckon this'd be much more fun.

i'm a history teacher and i don't teach bullshit, though in truth all history contains warped perspectives. i think alpinek hit this as best as can be said - there is no denying that the cold-blooded murder of thousands is wrong, but hiroshima and nagaski did undoubtedly enter into the calculus of statesmen in both the usa and ussr in the cold war in a positive way - that is to say, because hundreds of thousand were incinerated in those 2 cities, the whole world might well have survived those tense moments when both sides felt inclined to dispense of their immediate problems w/ quick actions. yes, the usa could have ended ww2 w/o invasion or nuclear bombs, but who are you to know how history would have proceeded had it gone differently then it did? as it worked out, things haven't been too awfully bad - the nations to fear today are the nations armed w/ such terrible weapons who haven't experienced closely the results of those weapons. ultimately, the collective population of a county must accept the consequences of their governments actions (that does include liberal americans, who liv ein a bush controled world) - if your government inaugurates unholy depradations, then you must expect to reap the whirlwind.

i don't know if i'd classify the glacier travel as "very little" - certainly less than the sulphide, but winnie's slide is steep and dangerous, and the upper curtis when i did it was very maze-like, and of course the upper sulphide itself before the summit is well crevassed. i think it's a reasonable solo, but definetly not pussy shit... bivy atop the chimneys, there's good space there, and from there you can do the whole thing in and out in an enjoyable 2 days.

fisher chimneys!

how can i add to josh's effervescent ebbulience? perhaps a series of serious understatements will be good enough to understand our experience: 1. it was hot 2. it was buggy 3. the approach is short 4. the bivy was scenic 5. the first part of the climbing is brushy 6. the south side is dry 7. if rapping on a single 60 m rope, the first rappel off the red-sling nelson mentions requires 5.13 downclimbing abilities highlights to my mind: 1. discovering the best way to get my pack through the vegetable wall of tree branches was to take my axe off and either keep it in a hand or through a gear loop 2. the feeling of being on an old-school route - there's several places w/ old rotten hemp? rope - it takes no fancy modern gear to climb this monster, just willingness to climb like you're in a continous bar-fight, in sight of civilization but beyond salavation in the event of a serious fuck-up 3. witnessing a half-dozen major serac collapses on the glacier west of the buttress - the debris pile at the base of the mountain was noticably larger when we got back down to the p-lot 4. seeing my first black bear here in the northwest - just below the toe of the triplets buttress while josh and i fervently dried to slurp a few ounces of bitterly foul swamp water out of the dried up streams - he could have cared less about either of us 5. the uber-scenic bivy at the base of the snow arete - a flat space in a world of tilted mean-ness, complete w/ amenities like running water, vertigo-inducing bathroom, cooking counters, gear organizing tables, instant suicide-access, etc. 6. the increasing waves of nauseu resulting from josh's sociopathetic zeal in trundling rubble - every tv-sized boulder that crashed relentlessly thousands of feet down in a cloud of gun-smoke seemed in my mind to resemble the arcs and lines of body heading off to the hereafter - man, i love simul-soloing for hours on end! enough talk! now is the time on sprockets when we show the pictures! our path up the ne buttress, with the coolest bivy ever marked our wending-way up the lower buttress, eschewing hte drama of the gully above the snowpatch for the relative simplicity of tree-humping right to the crest a cascade novelty, harness and helmet on in parking lot and 10 minutes to the route! fun climbing on the slabs just below the snowpatch - josh led right into the swell vietnam-reminscent jungle beyond a frequent image on the lower buttress -note the rope on left leading towards the mystery leader off in search of sasquatch wow, actual rock to climb! heading rightwards towards the crest above the snowpatch emerging from the woods onto the steep heather view west of the buttress at the continously toppling and roaring glaciers typical climbing on the steep heather, frequent rockbands - all easy - pro on the shrubbery - an ice axe works great for getting traction! the view down the buttress, just before nelson's pin and the rotten chimney pitch the pin for rapping into the "snow" gulley (nothing but choss and sand currently, and excellently steep walls for funneling certain death down on top of your head , note the chimney up and to the left - not hard, but not 5.3 for sure - good pro below to protect the belayer, and a chockstone for protecting the crux - the right wall is really intersting, choss overlaid w/ an ancient capstone rock that's almost totally peeled off now view down the butt from the chimney belay the most excellent bivouac in evening's glow tasty dinner! but you can't guess what's going on in my mind right about now... the snow arete just above the bivy leading to the summit summit cheese and fulfilling a favor for a friend traversing under the s side of the east ridge, a vital punch in your quest to become the world's greatest chossmonaut josh in front of formidable, very close to the first rap anchor off the false summit josh in action on rap#3 the world famous "doug's direct" - enough beta-spraying, here's a damn picture - go there! the view south from the cairn marking doug's direct - note the toe of the triplet's buttress at top right (close by our bear encounter) the pleasing, pastoral, buchollic traverse back to cascade pass from the cache glacier (shortly after a much needed safety meeting) who can explain this wacky wonder? just above cascade pass on the climbers trail this apparent frozen waterfall can be found - calcium deposits leaching out of the rock?

mike layton recommends the fishing line replacement technique - pm him for the ultra-sketchy details

2 rangers showed up at my door and questioned me at lenght about a buncha shit that didn't happen till i had to ask 'em to leave - does that qualify?

i don't have a mother, i was cloned from the pus collected from a pimple burst from the ass of god... actually my mom's favorite saw is "i tried so hard...." again, sweet climb!

i think mike made all this shit up in a bad acid-flash-forward - the pictures were cleverly crafted using photoshop from stick figure "concept" scrawlings over a semen stain on a jim bean whiskey bottle label

ha, i gave up trying to share cc stuff w/ my respectable associates years ago! seriously though, good job - climbing shit solo and facing intense personal doubt can be very liberating - true fight club shit (oops, sorry mom!) to good old fashioned christian-values!

solo climbing - oddly better than masturbating!

"put your hand in the crack"

FATHER!...THE SLEEPER HAS AWAKENED!!!

i wouldn't be surprised if the snow conditions are more enjoyable now then when pete n' oleg n' i were up there - but no doubt the objective risks of rockfall are going to be much worse - the upper crevasse/icefall might be real annoying too, but i wouldn't let that worry me so much. at any rate, beware the rangers at shurman - some real low-life characters up there! enjoy your walk through the men's room - don't fuck up or you'll find your little demise the source of endless conversational cluster-fuck here

mmmmmm....mustache...

awesome - can't wait to hear the trip report. if you were truly a cave-man, you'd use the rock to bash the skull of your partner in and take his axe! if i can get juan psyched up enough, we'll go up there in another week and look for your trash

any route on mt. washington mt torment by any route sucks stupid granny's asscrack, in prime conditions...