JoshK

Enjoy the early season turns at keystone. By February you'll be enjoying another lovely Colorado ski season; a whopping 30" base and lovely groomers! Talk to me in July when I'm still touring on awesome terrain with plenty of sweet corn snow! BTW, Dave, are you getting your base repaired this week? From the weather it is looking like next weekend might be some pretty good touring. I think I'm gonna hold off for a few weeks and let them fix all the damage at once!

Sweet. I figured chinook pass might be good. We drove near by (over cayuse pass) on our way up the stevens canyon road (now closed). Oops, I meant to post this too: We toured about a mile on the stevens canyong road, then the trail up to pinnacle saddle. We traversed from the saddle to beneath the castle-pinnacle col and over onto the pinnacle "glacier" We did a few runs there and then toured back out to the car. It wsa a great day! Really beautiful too.

Who got out for some early season turns this weekend? If you did, where and how was it?

I added 3 pictures of our trip up to the price glacier this past weekend. You'll find them in the "north cascades" folder of the photo album. The quality sucks due to the 150kb upload limit and unfortunately I don't have an web site I could upload them to. -josh

"Another Yugoslav holds the record for surviving a fall from the greatest altitude without a parachute. Air hostess Vesna Vulovic plunged 33,330 feet into a snowbound forest in Czechoslovakia in 1972 when the airliner she was on exploded. " DAmn!

Heinrich, fortunately the spiciness was kept to a minimum due to the fact that we weren't high enough to make retreat impossible. I will post some pics (hopefully later today), however, as I know a few people showed interest in seeing some current pics from this seldom visited side of the mountain.

Lambone, to answer your question directly, there is no real good excuse for it. I was pretty embarrased by the mishap, not to mention pissed about losing a $100 crampon and having to downclimb with one crampon on. As to why mine came off, my guess is I loosened it when I jumped a **large** crevasse moments before. I landed hard on the ice and tripped myself up a bit on the crampon, requiring myself to spin around, hit the deck, and get a tool in. It was fairly low angle ice, so it wasn't a big problem, but I think it may have loosened the front bail a bit. As I started to backstep to the other side of a second crevasse we were climbing in and out of, the crampon popped off and the safety strap didn't do a damn thing. I made a very similar observation as paco; the charlet moser safety straps don't seem to work so hot. I've popped a grivel before and it held fine. My partner's BD Bionics also seem to have a much better design for their safety strap. So...here are the lessons I took away from this little episode: 1.)It never hurts to double check your crampons after doing something that could have possibly loosened them. This would have saved my butt. 2.)I'm rigging up my own safety strap configurations on these crampons that I am comfortable with before I use them again.

Nice climb guys. That looked like an awesome line when I saw it a few weeks ago. Sorry about the crampon, the same damn thing happened to me on the price glacier this weekend.

I went down in it 2 weeks ago with aluminum crampons and a rock for an "ice axe." It was icy but low angle enough that I walked right down with the aluminum crampons no problem. This was just my experince; make sure you adjust for your personal comfort level, etc.

Go for something light, IMHO. I have a Marmot climbing jacket, and despite the fact that I got it brand new for only $120, I don't take it too often because it's so heavy. It's great for the winter tho as the things is bombproof. I also have a marmot precip and I take that thing everywhere. The Arc'Teryx clothing, IMHO, is overpriced fashionwear. The stuff looks great, and their quality is good, but the prices are just ridiculous.

matt, very generally, what was the north ridge like this time of year? -josh

I have a Nikon 5700, which I'm extremely happy with. It's basically the same "back" as the 5000, but with a larger lens. One very nice thing about the 5000 is it's wide angle capability which goes down to 28mm. This is very very nice for capturing landscapes. I often miss this on my 5700, which only goes as wide as 35mm. Of course the 5000 is also a higher resolution camera (5mp vs. 4mp) which is nice if you plan on printing your pictures. As for the battery life, I've never had a problem with my 5700's battery, and I think it uses the same thing as the 5000. An extra rechargable for it was about $40, and between those I can make it easily through a 4 day trip. -josh

Hey, you try staying upright with the ice the way it is right now.

The glissade down snow creek glacier is a great one if it's covered with snow. In the condition it's in now, you'll do little more than tear up pants and your ass.

Hey Lambone, Dave and I were on both the colchuck glacier and the snow creek glacier when we did serpintine this past weekend. The colchuck is *very* icy. I only brought aluminum crampons and a 9oz all aluminum axe and it wouldnm't have been fun to have to ascend it. As for the snow creek glacier on the other side of dragontail, it was very hard snow with little bits of ice. It is much less steep however and we walked down it with crampons but no axes. It is fairly low-drama.

Dave, I'll email you... Lambone, yeah, it really wasn't *that* cold for being October. Dave's puffy coat (big FF thing) ruled at the belays as did a pair of fleece gloves I brought. After the technical pitches we simulclimbed fast and got very hot from that point on.

quote: Originally posted by freeclimb9: Whatever. Skiers in Utah and Colorado already have made turns this season. Loveland has already opened its ski resort... Yeah...by making snow, which is what they have to do for a good portion of the season. [ 10-23-2002, 02:20 PM: Message edited by: JoshK ]

I want...Snow! Snow! Snow! Snow!

Thanks 'bone. BTW, on a random note, if anybody likes to use handwarmers (I did on this climb) while climbing on cold rock, Costco has boxes of 40 pairs for something like $16. [ 10-22-2002, 01:39 PM: Message edited by: JoshK ]

I'm assuming he is referring to the Lake Serene just northeast of Mount Index? Topozone Link

Skisports (David) and I were aiming to get one last climb in before our apparently late snow finally gets around to covering the cascades. We originally aimed for Price glacier or the Torment-Forbidden Traverse. The plan was to meet at my place Friday afternoon, check the new weather report at 3:30 and decide from there. When David got there we checked the weather and much to our dismay what was "partly cloudy" earlier in the week, then "mostly cloudy" wsa now "rain likely, 8000 ft snow level" for Sunday. Hrmmm...ok, that sucks. We really don't want to be in any sort of weather for the Price glacier and getting rained off the traverse didn't sound so fun. (Ask Alex about this to be sure. :-)) Time to head east. Washington Pass or Leavenworth? We both had routes we wanted to climb in both places. In the end we decided on Serpintine Arete on Dragontail peak. We took of late Friday afternoon and slept at the trailhead that night. On Saturday we got a (very) liesurly start and hiked up to colchuck lake and set up a camp at the end of the lake. We then headed up the colchuck glacier to go play around. We ended up climbing 2 pitches of easy 4th and 5th class on some rock between the two glacier lobes. On Sunday we ended up sleeping through the alarm and didn't wake up until 7:30. We weren't so thrilled with this because we'd heard that serpintine can have tricky route finding and take a while. I also wasn't thrilled that I left a bag of gorp out and the snaffles ate the entire thing. We ate some breakfast and climbed up the moraine to the start of the climb. I think we stated the actual climb around 10 or so. We simulclimed until the first of 4 5.6-5.8 pitches described in nelson's book. I led through the section that I belive is the 5.6 and 5.7 in Nelson's book??, which brough us around the big ledge traverse and right next to the tower Nelson describes. David then climbed a very nice lead of the 2 5.8 pitches, combining them into one long pitch and *almost* making it to the next suitable belay. I took a low-drama fall right after the crux of the first 5.8 pitch when I reached my hand up and attempted to pull up on a small ledge. What my cold-numb fingers failed to tell me was that this ledge was covered with sand. As soon as I pulled, my hand slipped and the rope stretch was enough to take me to the bottom of the pitch again. Back on the rock, I followed up then led about 20 feet above David to where he was trying to reach before the rope ran out and set a belay. From that point we simulclimbed the rest of the route, which was quite enjoyable 3rd to low 5th. There were only a couiple of unsavory loose bits. We topped out around 4 or so as I remember, took a couple of summit shots and headed down the snow creek glacier to the awaiting ass-master...err...aasgard ...pass. All and all I thought serpintine was a great route, despite some people's mix reviews. Neither one of us thought the route finding on the top part of the route was hard, just as long as you stay on the ridge. It felt great to get sneak in one last climb this season. -josh

has anybody done it this year? Most recent post i saw was from alex & dps when they got thundered and hailed on. Due to lack of recent beta I think we're gonna bail on trying price glacier this WE. It's down to either this traverse or dome peak (both summits) and sinister NF.

BTW, ropegun, where along the traverse were you able to find water? That's one concern I have being so late season...

Hrmm, I was debating between tennies+rock shoes and boots. From your description, ropegun, it sounds like I might want the boots so I can actually get my toe in to the ice....

If we do it...and it starts raining...there is going to be a lot of swearing. I think a non-climber friend of mine summed it up best: "why the hell would you want to climb 2 mountains called 'torment' and 'forbidden'. That sounds stupid"