JoshK

Climb: Winchester Mountain & Tomyhoi Peak-West Flank and Standard Route Date of Climb: 3/21/2004 Trip Report: Did a tour up in the Yellow Aster Butte area this weekend. I started up Twin Lakes Road (which is drivable for quite a while but the WSDOT is being a dick about letting people in) and left the road at the summer trailhead for yellow aster butte and tomyhoi lake. I skinned up to Gold Run Pass then started up the "ridge" towards Winchester Moutain. I made camp on a prominant knoll (more like a cliff with one passable side) marked on the topo as 5924. Beautiful night to be out and a comfortable bivy. On the down side I was careless and let my wonderous spaghetti dinner slide down the snow, into a chute and off into oblivion. If anybody is hungry, there is a freez-dried spaghettie meal somewhere at the head of Swamp Creek. IN the morning I skinned and climbed up tot he summit of Winchester mountain, and checked out the lookout while I was there. I couldn't get in and I didn't feel like extracting the snow from around the door. The ski down from Winchester kicked ass beyond belief. Great snow. After packing up camp, I skied back down to Gold Run Pass and started the climb up Yellow Aster Butte. From the top of the Butte I skied down to the "many tarned meadow" a ways south of Tomyhoi. After gaining the very gentle rib ascending to Tomyhoi I dropped all my overnight gear and skinned up. By the time I reached the top of Tomyhoi the lighting had become somewhat flat, but the snow was still decent, if a bit heavy. The ski down was uneventful and pretty fun. I grabbed my gear then skiied down to the road, only having to do about 15 minutes of swearing making my way down through thick ass north cascades forest. The road out sucks balls cause it's literally flat for quite a while. I was looking forward to coasting down, but it wasn't to be. All in all, a very fun tour, I had a great time and the area is gorgeous. The views of the border peaks and the fraser river valley and the peaks up in canada are awesome. That Larabee mountain is also very nice looking, at least with snow on it. And, of course, the views of Shuksan and Baker can't be beat. Hereis a topo map. Climbing/Skiing in red and Descents in yellow. I'll post pics when I get them downloaded. http://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/showphoto.php?photo=3973&password=&sort=1&cat=500&page=1 Gear Notes: Skis, Skins, basic overnight bivy gear. Approach Notes: It's something like 4 miles to start out on road, but not very bad. If you are willing to piss of the DOT and shovel some of their burm out of the way you could drive up probably 1 1/2 miles of that, and it's all the steep part. Something tells me they dont actually have any jurisdiction over national forest land, so I really dont think they could do much. Snow pack get's consistent at 3k (what a bizzare year) and is quite sizeable from 4 up. The cornices up high are mammoth!

FWIW, I did a backcountry tour north of the baker ski area (in the tomyhoi area) both sat and sun and conditions were beyond perfect. The only real slide hazard was slow wet snow slides on very steep stuff below rocks and that was all very avoidable.

Doesn't bother me a bit, junior. Dole was as exciting as a piece of Melba toast...never had a chance. But just for the sake of semantic clearity, Clinton did not receive more than 50% of the popular vote versus HW Bush, hence a 'majority', or I believe, versus Dole. (I'll have to investigate the latter.) Hey, shouldn't you be lounging in New Zealand on daddy's dime right now? How many of those jet-a bottles did you end up tossing into the burn can? Sorry, my mis-type, I meant to say he actually had more votes than his opponent, unlike our current commander in thief. Nope, ended up bailing on NZ due to your stirring arguements.

fairweather, it must just burrrrn you that Clinton was not only re-elected, but elected both times with an acutally majority!!

Funny the folks at Headroom Headphone (some serious headphone audio junkies there!) don't seem to think so. With or without a headphone amp, the iPod holds its own. It's all about the mp3 encode in the first place. I run the iPod with Beyerdynamic 250's and it sounds sweet. OK, fine, whatever. I hooked both the iPod and the Creative to my car's preamp in and tried them both. The iPod got to about 75% before it started to clip and get noticeable background noise. The creative could be played full volume (which lets the volume knob work on the same scale for the MP3s as with the tuner, etc.) without any distortion or hiss. the iPod is great, it's among the best, but for the use I wanted, belive it or not, there are actually MP3 players out there better than the iPod. Additionally, as I said, I wanted a very large player and I wasn't ready to take out financing to get a 40gb iPod.

Why? Even if you are all for the tourons having access (I guess, in reality, I'm prety indifferent) it's a pretty short ride on a bike.

You said exactly what you needed to say. That is a good bit more road slogging than I feel like doing just to have the newbie crap out somehwere on the road.

Damn, I just went back and read that TR and it seems with the road blocked, it's a pretty long haul in there, huh?

Thornton creek road -> thornton lakes. For those of you that have gone up this way in the winter (Klenke, you used this to access Damnnation, right?) how does the road and trail compare between skis and snowshoes. I'm taking a newbie up this weekend and wondering if she'll be ok on skis. Yes, she alpine skis well, it's just a matter if the trail will be very difficult to skin up or not. thanks! -josh

The biggest difference between Clinton and Bush? The majority of the country actually voted for Clinton. And then re-elected him. The jury is still out on the latter of those accomplishments for Shrub, and we all know how he did on the former.

Different players for different uses. The creative was the only one that offered a removable li-ion, which was my selling point, I needed more than what the internal offered between charges. That and the sound quality is better when amplified. If I could have gotten these features + the iPod's UI I would definitely take it, it's my hands down favorite in that department.

I paid $269 for my 40gb creative player. Not exactly priced too good, either.

I did...one of my primary uses for my HD player was as an in-car player. This is why I chose the Creative. My roomie has an iPod (used for the same thing) and when amplified the iPod is inferior, plain and simple. Most people on online review sites tend to agree.

Freshies be dropping every which where, it's great!

The iPods really do have the best interface. I wish another manufactuer would copy it and give us a reasonbly priced alternative. For sound quality tho, the Creative HD based players are still superior.

GPS is still awfully nice, tho. I wouldn't haul a PDA with it up in the mountains tho. For quick and fast navigation through zero visibily GPS rules tho. I think the windows based PDAs definitely have the "cool" factor over Palm, if you care at all.

Cool! I, for one, will be happy to mtn bike an extra 4 miles to rid myself of the throngs of tourons!

Scott, you're an idiot. Go look up your facts on the former Yugoslavia republic war crimes. 100,000 is a fraction of the number of people killed in that conflict. The right has the hardest time admitting that despite not sending in ground troops, Clinton prevented a good deal of further bloodshed and we've ended up with Milosivec (sp?) in The Hauge. The area is now returning to relative stability and the breakup has gone about as well as possible. We won't be saying that about Iraq in 4 years I'm pretty sure, but who knows. Get your fucking head out of the ass. This administration sucks, even worse than the worst I thought the right could put forward.

omfg ! i knew they were lying day one, sorry if you were duped and are just now realizing it! i agree tho that the real pity is that they are all still trying to assert their rightousness and that "WMD will be found!" blah blah. Yes, I clearly realize they were lying, but it's the American voting public, in particular the middle ground that needs this hammered into their thick skulls. My disagreement was that you thought this was a low-blow tactic. This isn't tryinig to trap somebody into a corner about how a blowjob in the oval office went down, this is shit that gets people killed and effects all of us.

You're fucking kidding, right? As Jim said this wasn't a trip up intended to make him look like he was lying over some technicality. If you don't get it, they LIED on why they took us to war. they claimed, over and over, they were an IMMEDIATE THREAT, when in fact, the evidence was faked and they were little threat all. Not only was that a fair move on their journalist's part, but we should see more of this.

Clearly...this is why they can get away with crap like this, nobody seems to pay much attention. I was at least expecting an excuse from one of our right-wing members explaining why this is a good thing.

Screw Saturday, Sunday is going to be the day I think.

To think there are people out there dumb enough to believe that BushCo didn't intentionally decieve the American public. http://www.moveon.org/censure/caughtonvideo/

oh yeah, and its lots of fun to get to that road too. i like to trailrun that descent sometimes, maybe a MTN bike afterwards.

Well, I think the issue is if he will be guiding himself or not. If so, I could quickly see that turning into hurting somebody.