tvashtarkatena

Is that gulley snow free or hard ice?

Going back out that way for another six day spree as soon as the wedder settles out to torture another noob.

Tinnitus: during the past six day Pasayten trip I enjoyed the uninterrupted hum of distant machines. They're coming for us....

your to stupit fer figgrin

This may require a double plus dot com secret mission of exploration

BTW, I found a more complete pic of the Craggy feature in my folder. Turns out the meandering folds I thought were at head of the cirque (based on my originally posted photo) are actually at the terminus of a much larger feature.

Austin looks like he might have a hidden glacier or two in that beard. Well, I guess that clinches it. What a cool surprise. No pun intended. Thanks for post. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera during last year's (or was it the year before?) trip up Bigelow, so no pics of that one from me. No Dice Lake (just below the rock glacier in my photo) is quite pretty and looks like it probably contains a few fish (white wine recommended)...a trip up to the Craggies 'glacier' would probably be a nice outing.

Bringin The Word to the mulletudes

Couldn't find current road conditions anywhere. Can you drive to 30 Mile, or is the road still closed at Andrew Creek?

WTF is your sorry ass still doing in town? A little wedder keep you from the alpine goodness, or was it the bonus hike?

you mean The Couv?

Last time I checked the dumber half of Merka wuz still around.

or would you call it more of a rock glacier?

The answer here is clear. Not only is the feature a rock glacier; its also on Mars:

Just ban pre-frontal lobes. Problem solved.

So, the question is, do any of these features still have ice underneath them, or are they dry fossils of previous glaciation?

....and its Gspot by a length....

Someone's gonna have to go back in there and get a core sample. Klenke! Front and center!

The debate rages on! The real question is: who bakes a better apple pie?

Duplicate post from the climbers forum: Jessica Lundin of the UW Glaciology Dept was kind enough to send this prompt reply to my inquiry: "I believe your photo is not a rock glacier for 2 reasons: (1) there appears to be a tree growing on it, which would not work on any glacier. (2) glaciers don't typically have a lumpy surface topography similar to soft ice cream, as in the photo. I'm not a geomorphology expert, but I diagnose this as debris flow (mud, rock, etc). It dawned on me that this probably isn't a moraine feature, as it appears at the top, rather than the sides or bottom, of the cirque. It probably is the result of material coming directly off the peak...annual snow from the gulleys above and the resulting melt/slides, for example. I wonder if the top layer of rock rests on an underlayer of mud/silt, which sluffs underneath it during the spring melt.

Jessica Lundin of the UW Glaciology Dept was kind enough to send this prompt reply to my inquiry: "I believe your photo is not a rock glacier for 2 reasons: (1) there appears to be a tree growing on it, which would not work on any glacier. (2) glaciers don't typically have a lumpy surface topography similar to soft ice cream, as in the photo. I'm not a geomorphology expert, but I diagnose this as debris flow (mud, rock, etc). It dawned on me that this probably isn't a moraine feature, as it appears at the top, rather than the sides or bottom, of the cirque. It probably is the result of material coming directly off the peak...annual snow from the gulleys above and the resulting melt/slides, for example. I wonder if the top layer of rock rests on an underlayer of mud/silt, which sluffs underneath it during the spring melt.

Located on the north side of West and Big Craggy peaks in the Pasayten Wilderness at about 7000'. There is a similar one located on the NE side of Bigelow in the Sawtooth Chelan Wilderness, at about the same elevation. It looks like a rock glacier, but both locations seem too far east for that (although the topo marks the Bigelow with a 'moraine' symbol)

Maybe its a feature caused by avalanche/melt cycles. I should do a little research. In any case, I don't see this feature very often.

That's kind of what I thought, too. Pretty far east for something like that, but then again there is a very similar feature just as far east below Bigelow in the Sawtooth Chelan range. I wasn't about to go down there to check it out, though.

While shooting, I use the manual mode almost exclusively so I have more control over things like exposure, color balance, etc. Then I shamelessly post process the living shit out of everything I do. That mostly means: Adjusting brightness and contrast (post processing can fine tune this far more accurately than your camera can). This, in part, replaces what lens filters used to do. Cropping (of course). Occasionally adjusting sharpness when it gives the effect I want. Creating cutouts to adjust brightness and contrast for different parts of the photo (basically doing with a mouse what Ansel Adams did with hours in a chemical filled dark room). Also partly what filters used to do. Using the transparency brush to blend and the clone brush to remove distractions and unwanted marks, etc. All of the above is essential for stitching panoramas, which I do 'by hand'. Three of the images above are stitched panoramas of up to 4 images each. I think nothing about removing something distracting, like a stupid tree branch, from the image if it strengthens it. Occasionally, I swap the whole sky out for a different one if it makes me feel groovy (very occasionally...that's a lot of work), or ad a phalanx of alien spacecraft descending to destroy the angry hairless monkeys of this planet. I don't care at all about 'accuracy' or other myths: these images are not reality; they are creations which become even more fictional when your brain starts interpreting them. It's all about trying to deliver to the viewer something that will have some impact using the minimum amount of the image (and images) possible, which means most images and much of each image get tossed. By way of example, this TR is the distillation of over 300 photos. Yeah, there was a bit of weeding and tweaking involved.