Great shots of Hunich Pipe and the Pipe Cleaner and all, Jason. Here’s the story behind these names:
When I was growing up in Newhalem and Diablo (1944-61), I admired Ken Hunich as the one-and-only climber of all the Seattle City Light employees that ran the Skagit River powerhouses and dams out of those towns. Ken was in the party that made the FA of North Despair in 1963. South Despair was Beckey’s very first, FA in 1939. North Despair was done in style by Eric and Rolf in 2014 via the NE “Bipolar Buttress.”
Ken was the second supervisor of Ross Dam and Powerhouse, succeeding my dad Jack Roper in 1954. While we were all living in Diablo in 1953, Ken, my dad, and I (age 9 then) made a try for Pyramid Peak above town before a lightning storm chased us off the mountain. Ken and my first successful peak together was a day-trip of Johannesburg in 1968 (returning in the dark from Gunsight Notch). Back in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Ken smoked a pipe and always teethed it at a jaunty angle under his moustache.
In 1964, the year after Jay Haggerty and I rowed Jay’s one-man duck boat across the Skagit River at Sky Creek and climbed Big Devil left of the waterfall you see from HW 20 (launching in the morning, returning in the dark), Ken and his brother Dick climbed Big Devil via the route Jason’s gang descended. Ken told me then that they went by a “10-foot notch” below the Trapezoid to get to Big Devil. The day after climbing Fallen Angel in 1982, Russ Kroeker, Silas Wild, and I stood at this spot and admired these pinnacles and decided to give them a go. We chuckled at Ken’s 10-foot estimate and came to call these crags “Hunich Pipe and the Pipe Cleaner,” though in retrospect he was probably referring to the width of the gap and not the height of these peaklets.
Another photo here:
( click to enlarge ). Six-foot tall Russ stands on the Pipe Cleaner to give scale to the actual height.