Suz

Alcohol, a climbers best friend... Denatured alcohol (sold as HEET gas treatment or in hardware stores) takes it out of cotton like nobody's business. Saturate the spot, then rub the fabric back and forth to loosen the sap. When you can't see the spot anymore, wet it, then rub in some soap and scrub/wash well. This takes out the alcohol and the dissolved sap along with it. Rubbing alcohol is only 70% alcohol, so should work, but not as quickly. Grain would work, too, but it's a little more spendy...

Hm. Good to know - tried to head up there in February and did WAY too much slogging on the road, both on snow and dirt. We got stumped by a big ravine trying to follow the trail instead of dropping down to the river, too. Sounds great now, though - thanks for the info!

Sadly, my old-school actual-film camera needs to finish its roll before I can post pics. Hopefully my more technologically advanced ski buddy will send hers along soon...

Climb: Mt Baker-Easton Glacier Date of Climb: 4/25/2004 Trip Report: Friends Lin and Jon and I headed up to Mt Baker on Sunday, 4/25 (our Mt Stuart aspirations thwarted by a reported lack of snow), intent on enjoying a great climb and ski down. Heading out Sunday morning, we happily noted that no one else had registered to be on the mountain the next day (Monday), and reached the end of the driveable road about 2.5 miles before the trail head. In typical spring-Cascade fashion, there was one stretch of snow that blocked the road (complemented by a whole mess of snowmobile trailers), followed by another mile or so of dirt walking. I proposed an hour or two of shoveling to open up the worst bumps and a quick advancement of the -no wheeled vehicles beyond this point- closure sign, but this didnt seem to excite my partners... We vaguely followed the alternate Scott Paul Trail, east of the Railroad Grade approach, angling up and west once we hit treeline to reach the upper edge of the Easton. A great bivy site by some rocks provided a beautiful view, almost-warm rocks to cook dinner on, a little windbreak, and a glimpse of sun setting over Puget Sound. Radiant cooling meant hard snow at 5 the next morning despite the forecast 10,000 ft freezing level. Skinning onto the glacier, we made good progress for the first few hours, until the steepness of the hardened slopes made me ditch my skis for crampons. Lin was on teles with ski crampons, and Jon had crampons on his split board, but our three different preferred styles of slope climbing made for some interesting lines... We passed a few opening cravasses on the way up, peeked over the edge of the steaming crater on the way by, and made it to the summit by 12:30, hoping conditions would soften by the time we started back down. A good breeze kept the sun from raising the freezing level, so the snow was still hard on top. A couple of pictures, then off with the skins, and time for some skiing! The first slope off the summit plateau was a little hard but skiable, then conditions softened beautifully for a few thousand feet, past the crater to the lower glacier. Scouting crevasses and doing much-accelerated route-finding was great - much more enjoyable than hiking back down in your own tracks! Mashed potatoes set in around 7500 ft, and we met two snowmobilers who were using them as a backcountry snowboard lift and offered us a run. Thanks! but no thanks. Found our site among the rolling hummocks below the glacier, packed up, and enjoyed cruising down the rolling terrain. Assuming that all the drainages led back to Schreiber Meadows, we got waterfalled-out and had to hike up a ridge or two to find the right one. Oh, well - thats why they call it backcountry skiing... A great first summit ski. Mt Baker is always a beautiful mountain, and even more so when you have it all to yourself - we didnt see a single person Monday until the bottom of the glacier!!!! Go now, before the highway gets tracked in for the summer... Gear Notes: 60m x 8.1mm rope, picket, fluke (crevasses still mostly closed, but a few opening up) next time: ski crampons!! Approach Notes: Road is driveable to within 2.5 miles of the TH, skiable about 1 mile before the TH

Feel like getting out on Monday, or do you have a real job?

How flexible are your dates? I'm hoping to be there June 2 to 20 or so...

Was up there at the end of February for a try at the summit - bad visibility slowed things considerably, so no go, but there was some awesome skiing up there! The road goes most of the way up, then about 2 miles on nice old-logging-road trail. Then up a short way through what is probably your clearcut to a older-growth ridgetop, following that up to the notch leading to glacier. The road-trail looked like it hadn't been used in quite some time! Big boulder smack in the middle at one point... The current description is in the 100 Classic Backcountry book. Have fun!

Remember back in grade school (HS, college, whatever) when you'd stare at the material you were supposed to study, dash in and write it on the test paper, then forget it before you even turned the test in? Same idea here, I think. "Wait, I did this last time I was here for the belay test..." Yikes! I think their idea is that you should have practiced it a couple times before you go in for the test. Probably one of those things that makes more sense if you're making the rules than trying to figure out why they exist.

Feel like going for a 1-day on Sunday?

Whoops - sorry for the misquote. I'm there with you on the FF distinction.

Are you into glacier / mountaineering? I've done a little but not nearly enough and just need to get out there!

"...already stated this opinion of screamers in this thread , but he hasn't backed it up yet, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary." Thanks to Doolittle for some of the only actual numbers here! Lots of comments from this and the above quoted thread seem to back up what it sounds like lots of climbers already know from (mostly secondhand) experience - they do rip when they need to. And from posted observations, much of the time they demonstrate their effectiveness directly - they only rip part way . This means they dissapate the force of the fall to the point that there's no longer enough force to continue activating the screamer. Sounds like it works to me!! cj001f mentions (without presenting backup) "Rigging for Rescue did some destructive testing on Yates screamers. During the drop the force was delayed, but once the screamer was fully-extended, the force went right back up to what it was w/o the screamer in place." Perhaps "destructive testing" is beyond the types of forces dealt with in regular climbing? The long and short of it seems to be that they work in the field, and that's where it counts, for my money. Thanks for the info!! (Maybe it's time for physics class again after all...)