mwcjak

I was also on scene and was likewise impressed at how well the climber, his wife and the bystanders handled the incident. He climbing on Crackmaster Lambada. It would be nice to hear an update on how he's faring if anyone knows.

My snowshoes finally moved on to greener pastures with multiple breaks in the aluminum frame and I am in the market for some new ones. If anyone has some snowshoes that they don't use anymore I might want to buy them off of you. I like the MSR Denali design but I'm not particularly picky and I'm 160 lbs so I'm looking for ~25 inches long. Thanks a lot!

I think we saw you up there, did you top out around three? If so that looked like a killer line. Nice work! Also, we saw some gear stashed under a big debris chunk, was that yours?

pm sent.

Partner found.

Thanks for the tip Genepires! Ok now that I got them uploaded they're still irritatingly tiny.

Does anyone want a partner for backcountry skiing tomorrow / a passenger to pitch for gas? My skiing is solid and I'm in decent shape but this is only my second year touring. I live in Ballard and I have avi gear but no car.

That looks like so much fun! Nicely done.

Shoot, I'm having trouble getting the images to show, at least if anyone's really interested they can copy and past the url to the photos in picasa.

I tried to upload photos from my computer earlier but that didn't work, lets see if I can upload them from Picasa... It looked like rock plastered with shallow, hard snow. I'm sure there are tons of people out there who would go for it without batting an eyelash, but I'm not one of them yet. Jonah about halfway up the gully. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689652965476434[/img] The summit block. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689664620811874[/img] The final section that we didn't do. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689673402709458[/img]

Trip: McClellan Butte - North Gully. Date: 1/19/2011 Trip Report: With a bluebird day, unprecedentedly low avalanche danger and brutal ski conditions, Jonah and I decided to climb the N Gully of McClellan Butte and found phenomenal snow conditions. Our boots sunk in a bit in the lower section but a few hundred feet up avalanches had swept off everything soft leaving hard snow that only our points penetrated. We climbed most of the way up unroped but did a running belay on the last few hundred feet to work out the kinks in our system before getting onto the summit scramble. From our final tree belay about 50' below the summit we decided to turn back because the last bit looked more intimidating than we had hoped. With just a few stoppers and pickets we were afraid of reaching an impasse and then having no protection opportunities. We pulled out or second rope, did six or so rappels, then downclimbed the trees on climbers left of the gully back to the trail, rapping once more on the way. A few things I learned: Do more French steps and less front pointing, don't hit yourself in the knee with your ice pick while chopping a stance so you can take a picture and eat/drink a little more during the ascent. All and all a terrific day! At some point with, softer snow, I would like to put on my man pants an return to the gully with skis. Gear Notes: Axe, 2 30m ropes (longer ropes would have been nice on the descent),pickets, trees, and crampons. I tested the conventional wisdom that vertical front points perform poorly in snow by wearing mono-point G-14s. I'd need to reclimb it in similar snow conditions with horizontal front points to be sure, but preliminary results suggest that indeed the wisdom holds true. Approach Notes: Snowshoes, and choosing where to leave the trail (~3,500 ft) would have been difficult without an altimeter.

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I went to college straight out of high school, plowed through, graduated and then went to Patagonia and Peru for a couple months. Now that I have my bachelors, it turns out that jobs are really tricky to acquire and many employers don't value degrees like they did a generation ago. I wouldn't recommend going to college without knowing where you want it to take you. South America was great, I flew but sailing would have been cooler. I have a lot of fond and irreplaceable memories from that trip. I would suggest adventuring now and then seeing how you feel about school. Everyone's experience with college (and traveling) is different and when or if you end up going to school, I hope you love it. But you don't want to pay for tuition and housing and spend all your time wishing you were out climbing, or worse climb too much and flunk out. On the other hand tuition's only going up...

I'd wait a month or two. As of last weekend it looked like there was some thin ice higher up, but you would have to surmount some difficult to protect looking rime coated rock bands to to get to it.

Thanks for putting this up Felix, that was a fun climb.