ilias

Trip: Vesper Peak - True Grit Date: 6/27/2016 Trip Report: On Sunday, Nick, Jim, Brian and I climbed True Grit on Vesper, a new route put up last year as described in this TR: http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1143286 Great new route, thanks for developing this! We had a really fun time. Traversing steep snow on the approach added a bit of alpine spice to the day: We chose to put on crampons and use ice axes and actually rope up for the traverse of that snow patch in the center of the photo. The snow was firm and fairly stable, so you could definitely do it unroped but we had plenty of time in the day and decided to play it safe. Due to the layout of the snow, we ended up doing a variation on pitch 1, as shown in purple in this route overlay: This variation involves less traversing of bushy ledges under the face so may be a decent option any time of year. It is also low 5th like the original pitch 1. Beautiful views while climbing all along the route, it's got great position: The chimney on pitch 2: This chimeny is a distinguishing landmark but we didn't actually climb it like a chimeny, there are a ton of holds on the outside. Above the chimney was a fun short slab pitch, it's got cool holds and features in the rock: Pitch 4 is definitely the funnest pitch of the route and the finger crack is very enjoyable, with ample pro in the cracks and bolts where you need them on the pitch: The last pitch is a short section of easier terrain to reach the summit ridge, where you can belay off some blocks/horns. Other thoughts: - It seemed like pitch 2 and 3 could definitely be linked into a single pitch without issues. - You could probably link pitch 4 and 5 if you have enough slings - With some snow on the descent route, you can make it from the summit back to the saddle from which you traverse out onto the face in like 5 minutes, so climbing both True Grit and Ragged Edge in a day would be very doable and make for a great moderate outing with ~10 total pitches - It looks like there's potentially room for another route or two on this face, out left of True Grit... Gear Notes: We brought: - Cams: Doubles of 0.3-1, and a single #2 (too many, the climbing is easy and could definitely be done with a single rack 0.3-2 by leaders comfortable at 5.8) - Nuts: single set (used a fair amount) - 12 slings (you'll need all of them on pitch 4) Approach Notes: Plenty of snow. Until the steep snow patch melts out, I'd say mountaineering boots, crampons, and axes are highly recommended. The road says it's "closed" at 1.2 miles in but it's actually open and totally passable to the trailhead. However, it is in danger of washing out at the marked location and could disappear in the next major storm or next winter.

Nice work! Looks like it was a perfect day up there.

A very concise report!

Several parties did it the weekend of April 16-17 and had good conditions with the runnels in nicely. Don't know if anyone's gone up after that though, and it's generally been pretty warm the last few weeks.

Nice! Looks like a fun day! Seems like it's about to be rock climbing season up there.

Thanks! It was certainly up there! Tons of fun.

Trip: Colfax Peak - Cosley-Houston Date: 4/30/2016 Trip Report: With the road to the Heliotrope ridge trailhead just opened, on Saturday, Jeff, Priti, Allie and I headed up to Colfax peak. Jeff and Priti were planning to climb Ford's Theatre (which turned out not to be in, and neither was the Polish route) and Allie and I were headed for the Cosley-Houston. There were a TON of cars parked at the end of the road, clearly everyone had heard the news about the road... at least 20 separate parties heading up there, most of them just skiing the Coleman-Deming route or portions thereof. We started up from the car at 4:30 am. We used skis for the approach which were a pain to carry most of the way up the trail until the forest opens up onto the glacier. But the skinning was nice after that: We left our skis where the approach to Colfax splits off from the ski route on the Coleman: The Cosley-Houston route was in but other routes on Colfax did not look in: There were 2 parties ahead of us on the Cosley-Houston: At first, we were a bit frustrated because it seemed like they were going really slowly and we had to wait about an hour and a half before we could get on the route. But once we got on the crux pitch, we realized it wasn't because those parties were slow but because the pitch was freaking hard! We ended up being even slower than the parties ahead of us, fortunately no one else was waiting behind us! Here is the last person above us climbing the crux pillar: From what I can tell looking at photos from reports from prior years, these are relatively thin conditions. The pillar doesn't look like such a big deal looking at it but once I got on lead I realized it was actually slightly overhanging for the first 6 meters or so. I have led probably like 20 pitches of ice in my life but never before had I led any overhanging ice. I definitely need to work on my overhanging ice technique! I ended up half-aiding off screws for the first 5 meters or so before I was able to start actually climbing. Definitely the hardest pitch of ice I've led so far in my climbing career. From there, we continued up the gully to the corner just before the ice curtain, where I set up a belay out of the way of falling ice: You can't see it in that photo but just around the corner to the left was a beautiful ice curtain bent in a bit of an arc so you could stem up it. Unlike the crux pillar, this ice step was pure type 1 fun! So good! Too short! Looking back from above all of the ice steps: Going up the snow bowl, I chose poorly where the bowl split into a left gully and a right gully. Spindrift had covered over the footsteps of the prior parties which had all gone left, but for whatever reason I thought right looked better. Oh boy! The right gully turned into ~60 degree sugar snow where feet and tools kept blowing out. After much struggling, I topped out only to find myself on the top of a razor sharp snow ridge about 100 feet away from flattish snow near the summit. With both sides of the ridge falling away at ~70 degrees or so, I chevaled along the top to get to the flatter snow. Sketchy! Sadly, with the stress of the situation, I did not get a photo of this area. Finally on top at 5:30pm, I belayed Allie up. Beautiful views up there: From the summit, we quickly descended back to our skis as the clouds rolled in: Fortunately, with our skis on, dropping ~3000 ft of snow took about 15 minutes worth of relaxing fun, and we made it back to the car at 8:30 pm, for a 16 hour round trip. Gear Notes: We brought: 2 pickets - could have used 3 8 ice screws - used every one of em multiple times on the pillar! 3 pitons - tried to use these but whenever I did, the rock just crumbled apart on me 0.5, 0.75, #1 cams - used the 0.75 once as part of the anchor above the pillar nuts - never used Approach Notes: Trail doesn't have much snow until you come out of the trees onto the open snow slopes below the glacier.

I don't know about typical latest time but I can say it was in in the middle of May in 2014, and at the time looked like it would still have been in for at least a few weeks more.

Nice work. Glad our TR from last weekend inspired more trips out there

Just read their description, that sounds right. Cool! Looks like it's in much better condition now than when they did their FA!

Trip: Mt Shuksan - North Face Date: 4/16/2016 Trip Report: On Saturday, Andrew and I climbed the North Face of Shuksan. Calling this climb the North Face of Shuksan is a bit of a misnomer... out of the 18.5 hour climb, 2 hours and 40 minutes were spent climbing the north face. What it really is is the circumnavigation of Mt Shuksan and the traverse of 5 of its glaciers. http://www.hillmap.com/m/ag1zfmhpbGxtYXAtaGRychULEghTYXZlZE1hcBiAgICwkJOgCgw We started from the car at the White Salmon lodge gate at 12:45am and got back at 7:15pm. The approach to the base of the North Face included one interesting creek crossing but was generally snow-covered after that, with little/none of the bushwhacking I'd read about in other trip reports. We made it to the traverse that leads you out onto the face just before sunrise: Andrew started us up the face: The face was in great (though variable) conditions and we never took out the rope, soloing up the face in good time. We encountered everything from very firm snow where only the frontpoints of our crampons would go in, to soft snow where our legs went in up to the calf. Looking down and up the face at different points: We topped out of the face on the relatively flat upper part of the Hanging Glacier: From here, we traversed around the E face of the summit pyramid. We unfortunately picked a path that stayed too high, it would probably have saved us at least half an hour and a lot of energy to have dropped down lower onto the Crystal Glacier to traverse around the E face. After motoring up the N Face as quickly as we could and doing this traverse, we were pretty tired and took a long-ish break at the top of the Sulphide Glacier before heading up to tag the summit. We briefly considered skipping it on account of how tired we were by this point, but neither of us had been to the summit before and it was a beautiful day and snow stability had been very encouraging thus far, so we went for it. Andrew near the summit: The main gully up to the summit was surprisingly steep, on par with the North Face, and probably the steepest climbing we did on the whole trip was the last 20 ft to the summit up a narrow ~60 degree gully, just above Andrew in the above photo. The summit was windy and cold so we spent no more time than was needed to take this horrible summit selfie: On account of the surprisingly steep last bit of gully and being fairly tired, we decided to rappel off the summit off a picket we placed. We thought we'd be giving up the picket, but a party that had just skied up the Sulphide came up to the summit and downclimbed it, bringing down our picket with them. Thanks guys! After descending the summit pyramid, we walked down the Sulphide to the col where Hell's Highway comes up to meet it: Descending Hell's Highway onto the Upper Curtis Glacier, the snow conditions quickly changed from stable and confidence inspiring to a bit worrying. I started a small slab avalanche (~3 inch crown). Here's Andrew coming down after me and you can see the crown above him: We spotted several interesting iceflows above the Upper Curtis Glacier: Looks like that would be a fun climb (has it been climbed?) except for the giant scary cornice hanging above it. Also a crazy free-hanging ice dagger off to the right. After traversing the Upper Curtis Glacier, we were at the top of the White Salmon Glacier. Here, the snow conditions were even more worrying, with me sending down boulder sized pinwheels with every step. We down-climbed and ran down this slope as fast as possible to minimize our exposure time, at last returning to where we had stashed our snowshoes at the bottom on the approach. Overall, a very fun day and definitely one of my biggest 1-day pushes in the mountains so far. 8000 ft of elevation gain (and loss), of which probably half was with 2 ice tools in hand. Gear Notes: We brought 3 pickets and 2 ice screws. Used 1 picket to rappel off the summit but that's it. 2 tools are a must. Approach Notes: Going high as shown in our GPS track really makes the most sense even though you really don't want to gain/drop that extra elevation. The valley below is overgrown and the snow-slopes broken up by tree holes and glide avalanches. Staying at the elevation shown you mostly just traverse a nice uniform snow slope. We used snowshoes. Skis would have worked just as well. One of the two is definitely useful for the approach, the snow is soft and it would be a lot of postholing without.

Trip: Dragontail Peak - Gerber-Sink Date: 4/10/2016 Trip Report: Jeff, Priti, and I climbed the Gerber-Sink route on Dragontail Sunday. Saturday was a leisurely approach day and we got up at 4:30am Sunday for the climb. We got moving up the route a bit later than we wanted because one of our party members had an ankle injury and we ended up climbing as a group of 3 instead of 2 teams of 2. I was initially worried about what this would mean for our speed and time up the route but turns out I had no need to worry. The route was in super fat condition, snow and ice all the way. We didn't touch any rock at all, no 5.7, no mixed, nothing. Even the exit pitch into the 3rd couloir was all snow and ice. With conditions this easy, it only took 6 hours to hit the summit. The lake was still frozen enough to walk across despite the hot afternoon temperatures up there: Looking up at Dragontail's north face: Here's the overlay of the route we took (we pretty much picked the easiest bits of snow/ice as we went, one could definitely pick harder variations if one wanted to): And a zoomed in version: Climbing near the bottom of the route: Looking back down: A little higher up the route: Simuling ice chimneys towards the snow bowl at the top: A bit of beta for exiting the bowl at the top, as I saw different trip reports talking about different things. Here's how the bowl looks like when you are at the bottom of it looking up towards the fin: After following the easy exit gully, we were in the third couloir and unroped to walk up to the summit: Descent took less than an hour back to camp from the summit, you can glissade large chunks of the way from the summit to the col and down Asgard. Overall, super fun outing and a great start to alpine climbing season! The route felt much easier than I expected given the grade it's given on Mountain Project (5.7/WI3+/M4) but I think that was due to the conditions which made it so there was no rock at all. All the snow and ice routes on Colchuck and Dragontail looked to be in really good shape. There were a lot of kicked steps all over all the routes, surprised there haven't been more reports on CC yet from this area this year. Gear Notes: We brought: 2 pickets - used all the time 8 ice screws - way too many, 4-5 would have been plenty Cam sizes 0.3 through 2 - used a bit 3 pitons - never used Set of nuts - never used Approach Notes: Road is still closed. Snow coverage starts about half way up the road. We brought approach shoes to walk the dry part of the road and stashed them near the Lake Caroline trailhead. The trail is all snowcovered and the snow is firm, uneven, and covered in sap, moss, branches, etc. Definitely would not recommend skis for the approach (unless you're going up specifically to ski). No crampons or microspikes or anything needed for the approach. The lake is still frozen and can be crossed, but don't know for how much longer. Jeff's foot plunged through into the water at one point, near the shore where the ice is thinnest.

Nice work! Looks awesome. Been wanting to get on that...

That's awesome! Thanks! I'll email you.

Nice work! Glad your climb went smoother than ours

Nice work! Looks awesome!

Trip: Snoqualmie Mountain - New York Gully Date: 1/9/2016 Trip Report: On Saturday, 4 of us headed out to try New York Gully. For me, it was really my first attempt at an alpine route that involved a combination of ice, mixed, and potentially aid climbing. Some of our group was slightly more experienced with mixed alpine but it was fairly new for all of us. We didn't get a great sense of conditions in advance as there were no recent reports. On the approach, we did find tracks in the snow that stopped and turned around from right around when you could get a view of the route, so at least one party probably looked at the conditions and thought better of it. But with relatively little experience in judging mixed conditions by sight from the base of the route, we decided to give it a go. The views from the approach were beautiful: Snow going up the couloir towards the route was fairly deep but felt stable: I'll give a brief pitch by pitch even though there is beta already out there. Pitch 1 (50-60m, Snow): As you ascend the big snowy couloir, the route is on the wall to your left. It starts where there is an obvious break in the rocks with a lower angle ramp traversing up and left up the face. This pitch was in snow covered condition, it was very easy going getting deep steps in the snow that felt very secure. We placed one picket for pro along the pitch. At the end of P1, you come to an oven sized rock sticking out of the snow where there is a very tempting easy looking ramp heading to the right, and slightly steeper terrain heading left. The rock takes a 0.75 and a #1 cam, and other gear to build a nice anchor to belay your follower up P1. We had to wipe a lot of snow off the rock to find these placements. Pitch 2 (50-60m, M3?): From the rock, don't be drawn up the easy ramp to the right. You have to keep traversing up and left (this took us a few minutes to figure out). This pitch was more difficult than the first but still pretty fun and easy. The snow coverage was thin in places with rock underneath. I placed 5 pieces of pro along this pitch: 2 pitons and 3 cams. The pitch ends at a large tree anchor with red slings around it. It had a few short mixed slots that you had to climb up such as this one right at the end. Pitch 3 (60m, M4): The "Box Gully": This pitch was in what I thought was fairly bad condition, though I'm no expert. There wasn't much ice... I don't think ice was deeper than 1-2 inches anywhere. A lot of shallow snow over rock. You could get tool sticks in frozen moss/dirt here and there. It's fairly low angle overall but had a couple vertical/bulgy steps that were made difficult by snow that kept blowing out if you tried to stand on it. Much of the climbing involved drytool placements with your tools. It did seem to have plenty of places for rock pro, though. I followed this pitch and felt a bit sketched out by the weird drytool-type climbing with feet that kept blowing out. We built a gear anchor after about 60m of climbing up the box gully. Looking back down the pitch: Pitch 4 (30m? M4): The rest of the box gully. This section was generally easier than P3 with just one step that I found quite difficult which involved surmounting a bulge where I couldn't get any feet by doing a pullup on drytool placements. More of the same conditions as P3, only a thin veneer of ice, rock features obscured by snow, but not enough snow to be able to stand on it where you really needed to. The pitch ends at a large snowy ledge with a big boulder, below the obvious 5.8 crack that's in all the beta out there. Photo of our belay at the top of P3 showing the start of P4 above: Pitch 5: The 5.8/Aid Pitch Due to us being newer to this style of climbing and what we found to be challenging conditions making us go quite slowly, we came to the base of this pitch as it was getting dark. We started to try to lead it, but with it getting dark and us having found the last two pitches quite difficult and this one looking even more intimidating, we made the call that it would be a better decision to retreat back down the route rather than trying to push the crux in the dark. Bailing: We bailed down the route in 4 double rope rappels. The first two rappels (down the box gully) were quite straightforward. We did leave one cam in the middle of the box gully, a #1. From the tree at the top of P2, we decided to rappel back down the traversing pitch rather than head straight down into the unknown. Traversing that far on rappel was a bit awkward. We built another rap anchor at the rock on the top of P1 (a 0.75 cam and a nut) and did another traversing rappel back down to the base. It was probably around 9:00pm or so at this point. Overall we stayed safe and had a fun day and a great learning experience, though there were definitely some things we could have done better: - start earlier to give ourselves more time - keep a better track of the timeline and evaluate whether it's reasonable to continue onward or not before it actually gets dark, taking into account the difficulty of the remaining climbing - learn to better evaluate the conditions of a mixed route visually before starting up it Gear Notes: Each climbing pair had roughly: - 0.3-#3 BD cams: Used these a lot - A set of nuts: Used these a bit - 1-2 pickets: Useful - 5 pitons (knifeblades): Useful, probably could have gotten away with 3 - 4-5 ice screws: Never used, tried to place a stubby once but it only went in half way before bottoming out We left behind some gear to bail (0.75 and #1 Camalot C4s, 2 nuts, some slings, and some biners). If someone climbs the route and feels like returning any of the gear that would be awesome, please contact me here. Or if you feel like bootying it that's fine too, a bit of a prize for climbing a serious alpine route like this Approach Notes: Lots of deep snow on the way up to the saddle. Some kind of flotation is useful.

I was there Dec 24-Dec 31. It has been generally cold (-20C / -5F) and everything we tried to get on was in. I didn't hear of any climbs being out. Ones I can specifically confirm are in, either because I climbed them or saw friend's photos of climbing them: - Grotto Falls - The Professor Falls - Cascade Waterfall - Haffner Creek area - Junkyard area - Guinness Gully - Louise Falls (last pitch is not great) - Spray River (Selenium) Falls - Superbok

Nice report Jaime. Should add that we did the South Buttress of Cutthroat the next day too! Regarding the NW corner... if I was to do it again, I'd definitely consider bringing a #6 for the Zigzag flakes pitch. While many leaders might be comfortable running that section out a bit til you can place a #5, if 5.9 is at your limit, I feel like the #6 would be very reassuring. As for the corner pitch itself, I found it very strange. When you look at it, it looks like it should be easy. It's fairly far off vertical and it looks you should be able to almost just walk up it with your feet on the face and one hand on the crack for counter-force. The issue is the rock is super slick (very unusually slick for WA pass) and you just can't get any purchase with your feet on the face most of the time and you have to struggle up it as if it was a totally vertical offwidth.

Water seems to be getting pretty low all over the cascades. Don't expect any running water from the time you leave Ingalls Lake until you summit and then descend back down to Ingalls Creek. The small snowfield by the false summit at the top of the Cascadian should still be there. When we were there on Aug 2, there was a tiny trickle of water flowing from this snowfield that you could get at without melting snow, but that probably depends a lot on temperature and time of day.

Thanks! And thanks for the link Val, yep, we looked through all the reports on here for everything in the area. Olyclimber, yep, it was actually pretty fun despite the fact that we did an absurd amount of approaching for very little climbing. It was just cool to be out in an area which sees so few visitors. There were certainly a lot of burnt trees and my hands and clothes were covered in ash after ascending crystal creek basin. That area is so dry and underbrush is everywhere... a single lightning strike could burn that whole area down easily. We did run across a couple cairns, as well as a fairly modern metal water bottle in the middle of the bush whack on the way down.

I'm thinking of hitting up Crystal Lake Tower later this year. Let us know how it goes!

Trip: Nightmare Needles - Fire Spire Date: 8/9/2015 Trip Report: Summary: 26 Miles of hiking for 26 feet of hand crack As part of the Boealps ICC class, Ryan, Melissa, Chris and I were assigned to do some adventure climbing on the East Ridge of Dorado Needle. With the weather looking bad up in the North Cascades, we decided to instead explore the Nightmare Needles area. Our plan was to hike in from the Ingalls Creek side, head up Crystal Creek, and tag either the Flagpole or the South Face of Little Annapurna on Saturday, and then do a climb or two in the Nightmare Needles on Sunday. On the way up, we chose some sub-optimal schwacking near crystal creek, I'd say it goes around BW2: The terrain opened up around 5500 ft and turned much more pleasant, reminiscent of the nearby enchantments basin, minus the crowds: Our plan was to camp around the flat area by "Dry Tarn", where we expected to find water, if not from the lake than from Crystal Creek. As it turned out, the lake was completely dry: I'm not sure if the lake completely dries out usually, or if it is a result of this year's record low snow level. Anyway, the creekbed was completely dry up there too, no sign of it at all. We had to descend back down along the creekbed to 5700', where the creek bubbles out from under ground for a short stretch before disappearing deep below rocks again. There is currently absolutely no accessible water anywhere above this 5700' location anywhere in the Crystal Creek basin (we explored thoroughly). It's actually kind of interesting, I think the water flows completely underground all the way down from Crystal Lake. While up at dry tarn, we took a look at the couloir heading up to access the S Face of Little A: It looked pretty terrible, I'd much rather ascend that thing when there's snow. Not having brought enough water capacity to refill low and go back up and bivy, we decided to bivy where the stream pops out at 5700'. Ryan was stoked to get some climbing in, so we went to the nearby wall west of Crystal Creek, found a likely looking crack, and climbed it. First ascent everyone, one pitch of 5.5 with a V0 boulder finish with only 13 miles of approach! We called the route Ryan's Roof: After developing this sure-to-be-classic new route, we returned to camp and bivied for the night. From the top of Ryan's Roof, we got a good look at the ridgeline of the Nightmare Needles group. I've tried to identify the summits/towers as best I can based on the illustration in the Beckey Guide. If anyone knows this area better and and notices any errors, please let me know (note, the easiest way to approach most of these pinnacles is from the other (east) side of the ridge, not up the face in this photo): Sunday morning, we decided to go climb Fire Spire. After contemplating heading directly up towards it on the west face, we decided that the little beta we had described approaching it only from the east, and we chose to do that. So we contoured over around the bottom of the Nightmare Needles ridge to reach the gullies on the east side. There were a few sections of loose/annoying terrain, but most of the traverse over was quite pleasant: From the east side, we could see this view of the ridgeline, with Little Snowpatch featuring prominently on the right, it looks like it's a pinnacle worth climbing: We headed up the gully towards the notch north of Fire Spire, which included a lot of pleasant 4th class scrambling on solid rock: As you approach the notch, the Ostrich Head becomes very obvious: However, to reach the route for the West Face of Fire Spire, you head for the higher notch just left of Ostrich Head. I reached the notch first and decided that I didn't want to go any further without getting on my harness and roping up. Doing it right at the notch was super awkward, and I yelled down to the rest of the group to harness up lower down. I built myself a one cam anchor (our #6, which we had brought in case we did Flagpole) and clipped into it while getting out the rope and getting ready. From here, you traverse out across the west face of Fire Spire along ledges with airy steps between them for ~30 ft, until you arrive at the base of a lichen-covered 5.6 hand crack that goes up vertically for 20-30 ft. There's a 2nd corner crack just left of the hand crack, which you could use to stem against or bear hug the two cracks if you want. But for me just going all in on the hand crack worked best. The first few hand jams came right out with the lichen, but after that it was totally solid, with bomber perfect little curves in the crack to get the most secure foot jams ever. Ryan followed me up, then Melissa led the crack as well. We climbed everything with our packs on since we wanted to keep our descent direction options open. Here's Melissa coming up the crack, she chose to layback it, it looked quite strenuous to do it that way! Melissa topping out: You can see the crack gets wide at the top (that's our #6 in there... I was determined to get some good use out of it since we lugged it for 26 miles round trip!), but by then you get jugs everywhere to grab onto. Next, Chris came up: That one pitch is the whole climb to get to the top of Fire Spire, from which you can see another spire (Wildfire?): Looking across at the ridge above Little Snowpatch. These might be the lizards? Fire Spire showed no sign of ever having been climbed (though I know there was an FA mentioned in Beckey's book and then a later party that traversed over it in 1980). It would have been possible to downclimb it, but we decided to descend the West side back to Crystal Creek and do some adventure rappelling. We ended up doing 3 single rope rappels and 2 double rope rappels down the west face, with some scrambling in between the rap stations. We'd brought extra tat to leave for the rappels. After getting off steep terrain, we decided to try scrambling down the creekbed of the small creek just east of Crystal Creek. This turned out to be much better than the bushwhacking we did on the way up. We were able to follow rocks strewn into the creekbed almost all the way down, schwacking for only the last few hundred feet down to the Ingalls Creek Trail: Here's our approximate paths we took, drew these over on hillmap: Approach Notes: No water (or snow) above 5700' in Crystal Creek basin. The permanent snowfield on the map does not exist. Plan accordingly.

Nice work!

Great, have fun! Let us know how it goes