JBo6

FYI the highway is closed again as of 4pm on 7/21. I'd expect this closure to last a lot longer since the fire is down close to the highway now.

Great trip Matt. I took a look at your gear list and I'm curious what you think of the Fjallraven G1000 pants? In the hunting world people are in love with those things but I can't quite get over my cotton phobia. How do those pants do with a soaking rain & brush bashing. Will they saturate through or are they pretty water resistant with the wax?

Nice trip! Thanks for the recent bunch of TRs, they have been a great distraction in the office. Just a heads up but using drones are banned in wilderness areas.

Keep them coming eeelip! Thanks for the TR, it looked like quite the adventure.

Hey Bill, seeing this made me take a look back through my emails to see when I bought my set of Fast/Light pants from you. It looks like I got them in January of 2011 and for whatever reason you had mailed the pants to me to try out before I paid you for them. Thanks for the great customer service back then. If there is anything that I can fault about those pants it is that they are too damn durable and they are still my go to pants for nordic skiing.

As an FYI in the Methow Valley the local snowmobile club has multiple warming huts that operate similar to the proposed hut in Canyon Creek. As a relatively decent backcountry skier and absolute hack snowmobiler I really appreciate the chance to warm up and take a breather at the publicly accessible club warming huts. Also in the Methow there are the privately owned Rendezvous Hut system on the Methow Trails system. With the exception of the covid years those huts are always open for public day usage and function as warming huts as well. Plus Methow Trails operates a warming hut that is also on a trailer and is removed as soon as the snow is gone.

I never met Matt but appreciated his work in the ESN forecast area. The few emails I shared with him regard observation reports were always pleasant. My thoughts to the NWAC, Leavenworth and other communities that are missing him.

This is an incredibly delayed response but I believe that "breaker bar" is actually a mining drill bit meant to be hit with a sledge. I've found several stashes in the Pasayten that have that same hexagonal/octagonal shape.

Tom, on the off chance you are looking for a set of 44.0s that are well used I've got a set I'd sell you.

The Methow Valley News had a brief article in print. It was a rappelling accident on the Methow Inspiration route on Sunday and was a young guide from NW Alpine Guides.

Strange timing to see this bumped back up. The navy was doing a helo rescue in Mazama a few nights ago, so I expected to see some news from that incident. No word on what happened.

Rain and thunder currently in the Methow so I think it'll be getting a good soaking up there. I'm optimistic that it'll stick to the current fire perimeter and shouldn't grow much at all this fall.

If you use the "Wayback machine" you can look through cached versions of websites. I clicked around a bit and never saw an article from Marc-Andre but this will take you to some articles from Sky and Colin Haley. https://web.archive.org/web/20180107134605/http://cascadeclimbers.com/articles/

Does this place serve literacola?

Google Earth allows you to look through historic satellite imagery too. In Sept 2009 the lake was pretty low but all other imagery from summer into fall had it fairly full. I'm not familiar with the Buckhorn area but I'd imagine it slowly drains throughout the summer and in years with low precip such as this it winds up close to empty. Interestingly in 2009 there was a relatively decent amount of rain in Seattle, maybe the Buckhorn area was heavily rainshadowed that year? Here is a link to NWS Seattle's recent Twitter post about Seattle rainfall that I referenced.