dennyt

Awesome post Dane, that sold me. Nomics are on sale at EMS, $209, no sales tax.

The Alpine Lakes forum is what you're looking for, between North and South cascades.

The hammer or adze is part of the pick, so just buy hammers for spares I got some Awaxes on closeout this summer, love 'em.

Yeah I was wondering about the body hanging off the summit mushroom. Turns out it's a Herzog film. Here's another version of the same clip, with different (worse?) music.

The photo I mentioned:

A silly story for your reading pleasure (grab a drink, it's a bit wordy): Megan had to work a few hours on Christmas day, to earn comp time for a future trip. So, faced with a 2.5-day weekend, clear skies, and no new snow, the first idea that popped into our heads was - Enchantments Through-Hike. Scramble Dragontail while we're at it. I've never done the through-hike, and she's never been up Dragontail, so this was perfect. Go! We left Megan's house around 12:30pm on Friday, Christmas Day. Megan was sporting a new sleeping bag and a jet boil, me a new sweater for the car ride and fleece for the trip. The subaru cruised up Lake City Way to Hwy 2 - I'm working on getting better gas mileage, so I wasn't about to backtrack or go out of my way just to drive 70mph... let's take the shorter, 35-55mph route. No hurry Rolled into the snow creek parking lot, stashed my bike for the optimistic chance that we would complete our through-hike in two and a half days, and continued up the road in the subie. Parked at the bridge creek campground, 1900', and were walking up the closed road by 3:30pm. Upon further examination, there was 4" of snow on the ground, so turned back and left the snowshoes in the car. Make that a 3:45 departure. Strolling up the snowmobile track, making good time, we ascended through fog as the daylight faded. The waxing half moon was up, and as the sky darkened I thought my eyes were losing some pixels - I kept seeing bright specks of light near my feet. Eventually, they were everywhere - moonlight on big fat 1/4" hoar frost crystals. We put headlamps on at the trailhead, and continued up a bomber bootpack all the way to the lake. Arrival time 7:45pm, 17 degrees F, 5700'. We hastily set up camp on the near shore of the lake, began making cocoa and dehydrated dinner and setting up a time lapse photo, and hopped in the tent. We slept surprisingly well considering the temperatures, and had a nice breakfast inside the tent. 12 degrees outside, but no wind, and damn if it wasn't beautiful. Rays of light and hundreds of feet of sun-kissed spin drift coming off the spires of Dragontail and Colchuck. My boots went on with a crackle, time to move! Hating the idea of the dreaded boulder-hop around the west side of the lake with a few inches of snow on it, I hacked away at the lake ice to check its thickness. 2" at shore, 6" 20' out. That'll do. We started across the lake with pack straps unbuckled (just in case one needed to drop 30 pounds fast...), stepping gingerly across two or three tension cracks, which showed up nicely in the snow, no more than 1/4" gaps. I rationalized that this was just a side effect of the ice getting colder & stronger, contracting and cracking. We made it across just fine, and with a sigh of relief Starting up Asgard pass, conditions were great - a solid firm crust, almost hard enough to require crampons. But the 25mph southeasterly up top had been dumping spin-drift down the pass. Halfway up, to the right of the larches, we hit the first bit of wind. I switchbacked off an ice crust area and started kicking steps, deeper, deeper, 8" deep, maybe got 20 steps into it and THUNK, fell to my hands, why is my peripheral vision blurring? F, F, SWIM, we bear-crawled (fast) up the slab as it slid down the hill, like running up the down escalator, and it slid to a stop just as I reached the top. We regrouped, unharmed but a bit shaken. While this was probably just some local deposit of wind-slab, it had been indistinguishable before stepping onto it. The snow went from 2" deep to 8" deep in about 20 feet, and that was enough of a load to fail the slab and shoot cracks 50 feet in both directions. The slide only went about 100 feet, but the debris kicked off a bigger slab directly below the central cliff band. I started up the 'ridge crest' with the thinnest layer of snow to see what it was like above, but soon started shooting cracks again. The sick feeling in my stomach made it clear - this was not a game I wanted to play today. The pass only got steeper and we were just starting to hit the wind-loaded areas. I was pretty sure we would be caught in something bigger if we continued up, so we turned around. The sun never hit the lake, but it did shoot cracks between my feet on the way back across. "Megan, is the lake cracking under your feet?" Nope... guess I need to lose 60 lbs. It was a beautiful hike back through the woods, with sunset light at midday - oh winter solstice. It would have been so great to be in the sun up top, but judging from the now quarter mile of spin drift coming off the top of Dragontail, the wind would have taken the fun out of it. The last half mile of the closed road is apparently the official sledding hill of Leavenworth - it was packed! We made some coffee and changed clothes at the car, retrieved my bike, and pulled out a stuck WRX (18" z-rated tires don't work so well on ice). After the obligatory Munchen Haus stop, we were back on the road towards town, listening to Dirtbag Diaries podcasts, happy to hear tales of worse predicaments. It's been hard to get shut down 3 times this winter - ice on South Early Winter Spire (class 3 lead fall, ouch), snow and a sprained ankle in Red Rocks, and this. But it is winter, and we are home, safe and warm. And scheming... anyone want to climb some ice next weekend?

Went on a lazy scouting mission today. Hubba Hubba is thin... we decided to leave it for another weekend.

Aah, looked like 2/3rds in the screenshots, my bad. Glad to hear this is working well!

Hmm, wonder how many swings before that rear bolt hole in the pick will get ovalized with 2/3rds of its thickness removed.

Click to embiggen:

Here's how it looked from the road Saturday afternoon:

As of last Friday, none. All bets are off this week...

If you get the $5 guidebook, make sure you're looking at the correct topo when you read the route descriptions. All the topos list routes "1-9", but sometimes the descriptions are for the topos on following pages. I went up a really hard 5.6 3-pitch route, only to find it was 5.9+ on the following page. Wrong #6. Fun! Also, go for a swim in Whistle Lake when your'e done. Good cliff diving...

I did that a couple of weekends ago, it was super fun and easy The bees are in the woods about 1/4 mile after you pass the mysterious 4x4 post with no sign.

It looks like there is an ongoing study of four glaciers in the North Cascades: Noisy Glacier on Bacon Peak, Silver Glacier on Mount Spickard, North Klawatti Glacier on Primus Peak, and Sandalee Glacier on McGregor Mountain. (m w.e. = meters of water equivalent, i.e. volume) One more link you may find interesting - a summary of surveys of several glaciers from the 1940's to the 1990's: (PDF)