Todd Anderson

The smoke did not take long to move back into the Enchantments after the rain cleared it out on Saturday

Gear notes: helmets, riot shields, Glad you guys are okay!

Definitely leave the skis at home. When we did it S-N we skied: 1. Spire Point to just below White Rock Lakes (aka the Dana Glacier), 2. a quick traverse of the South Cascade Glacier, 3. the Le Conte Glacier, 4. Le Conte ridge down to Yang Yang Lakes, 5. the Middle Cascade Glacier, and 6. Cache Col to Cascade Pass (almost) If we were going N-S, we could have skied: 1. Spider-Formidable Col to Yang Yang Lakes, 2. Le Conte ridge to bottom of Le Conte glacier, 3. Le Conte-Sentinel Col to South Cascade glacier, 4. South Cascade Glacier to White Rock Lakes, 5. Spire Point to Cub Lake I suspect all these runs will involve at least one carry now. The problem with the N-S runs is that most of them are not fall-line; you're just trying to maintain elevation as long as possible. This will be much more difficult as the snow starts to melt out, mostly because moats you have to traverse under will be bigger and further downhill. What would have been the best N-S run, Spire Point to Cub Lake, is south-facing and could be melted out by now. We skinned from Cub Lake to Spire Point, but otherwise either booted or skied the rest. The frequent transitions and steep traversing made booting faster.

I went S-N on July 1-2, taking the Downey Creek trail to Bachelor Creek, to Cub Lake, to the Spire Point col. There has been some work done on the upper Bachelor Creek "trail", as evidenced by orange flagging, and generally speaking the trail is pretty well beaten-in. If you miss the flagging, the easiest way down would be through the pine forest on the descender's right side of the valley. Unless you have skis, you shouldn't have much trouble even if you end up tunneling through alder for a bit. Going uphill through alder with skis was fun.

Anyone been on this route recently?

Turns out I have more time off than anticipated and flights are cheap Thanksgiving day, so I'm headed to the desert to climb splitters with everyone from CO. There may be a Seattle-area group headed to Hyalite, though; I will certainly be there for the ice fest. I am assuming that if ice starts coming in in the Lillooet area we'd hear about it on the West Coast Ice facebook page, but maybe not. In any case, it looks like highs in the 40s for the forseeable future up there.

The late great Andreas Fransson skiing the Col de L'Aiguille Verte (line #1 on the topo): Route detail on the Couloir Couturier (line #4) including some ski beta and history: http://www.camptocamp.org/routes/54983/fr/aiguille-verte-couloir-couturier

DPS and Dre, emailed you guys. Anyone else: andersontodds at gmail

Yeah drying gear sounds like an issue. Unfortunately my ice partner list is not deep; one of the attractions of Lillooet is the density of TR-solo-able ice. If I can round up three more I guess a motel room would be affordable.

I have a few 4-day weekends coming up in the later part of this year, and if Lillooet ice is in good shape I think I'll head up (from Seattle). Can anyone recommend somewhere to camp for cheap up there? My station wagon is set up to sleep in, so really all I need is a parking space where I won't be harassed. Would also consider hostels, but Google isn't turning up anything cheaper than $50/night. I'm not very familiar with western BC north of Whistler, so any help would be appreciated.

Hey Davey, hope you guys had a good trip! Also thanks (to one of your group, anyway) for the rappel beta; we probably would have figured it out, but I think you saved us a lot of time Sunday morning.

Trip: Goode Mountain - NE Buttress Date: 8/12/2016 Trip Report: David officially became a PhD candidate on Thursday, so we went out to the Knarr Bar to get smashed and play shuffleboard. Then on Friday morning we left to go climb Goode Mountain. We had both read a lot of TRs of Goode over the last month or so, but we forgot to print anything out and didn't bring a map, so navigation was based on foggy hangover memory. Somehow we totally nailed the approach to bivy at 5400'-ish; we definitely found the "magical alder tunnels" that Ilia S. refers to in his TR. It was sunset when we found a good bivy site, which was not large enough for the Firstlight. The Firstlight did make a good pillow, though. We slept in on Day 2 and awakened when a party of 4 tromped past us on their way up. Shit, they're going to take the summit bivy! They got a solid hour head start on us, but we eventually made it up the rest of the slabs and onto the glacier. The cracks are pretty big, but we found a way that started a ways east on the glacier that didn't involve any ice climbing or crack-jumping. The moat was deep near the toe of the buttress, but maybe only 5 feet deep and easy to downclimb where we got on rock, i.e. slightly uphill and east (climber's left) of the buttress toe. The glacier was definitely making worrying noises, and the north face was dropping bombs pretty frequently later in the day, so an earlier start probably would have been a good idea. I don't think we made it onto the rock until almost 10 AM because of our late start. Getting onto the ridge crest was kind of dicey, since the rock was extremely loose. We belayed two short pitches until we gained the crest, then simuled probably 500m in roughly 100m pitches. We pitched out the harder section about 3/4s of the way up, and since we were using a doubled twin we could only do 30-35m pitches. This was quite slow; we had been steadily gaining on the party of four ahead of us until we started pitching things out. At some point things got easier, and we did two more long-ish simul pitches to a ledge just below a bivy ledge near the summit. I saw two of the party of four on that ledge, so I was worried that the other two may have continued to the summit and we would have to share the bivy with them. Fortunately the entire party of four turned out to be on this lower ledge, so we did one simul pitch to just below the summit, and one 15-meter pitch to the summit. We didn't pitch the Firstlight because the weather and position were so awesome, so I ended up carrying a 3-pound pillow. I also carried summit kippers, but didn't have the appetite to eat them in the morning. On Sunday morning we discovered that Rudy the Rat had nibbled on my partner's climbing shoes, and also taken my socks. I was trying to figure out if I had enough moleskin to construct something to hike out with when my partner produced a spare pair of socks. Awesome. We rapped past/through the party of four, who were just starting their summit bid, and made it to the SW couloir and down those rappels pretty easily. We weren't really sure how to get down to the Park Creek trail, though, so we ended up going skier's left into a large open bowl that turned into a steep-sided canyon/drainage, and following the skier's right side of the drainage to the flood washout/burned forest. I thought I remembered a photo of people descending the left side of the washout (i.e. not actually in the washout), but David was leading the way here and he said a line straight down the middle of the flood washout would go. It was burnt alder hell at the bottom and we each took a few big scree falls, but we eventually made it to the Park Creek trail at 1:30 pm. We thought it would be 19 miles out from there, but a sign when we rejoined the PCT suggested it would actually be 21. In any case, we did it in 7 hours, and got to the car at sunset. Fortunately we made it to the nearest open gas station in Marblemount for sugar/salt/caffeine. Gear Notes: 1x nuts, 1x cams .3-2, a bunch of slings 65-70m twin rope, i.e. only one (a longer lead rope would have been very useful for bigger pitches but the light weight of the twin rope was nice) Climbing shoes, tent unused/unnecessary; kippers unused but necessary Put your socks in the steel mesh bag with your food Approach Notes: Long walk on the PCT, leave North Fork trail and cross North Fork at cairns, then choose your own adventure

When you use the MSR Cam Rings, do you have a single cord strand fixed to the tent tie-out, then the adjustable loop at the stake end? Or a fixed stake loop and the adjustable loop at the tent end? I have Cam Rings on my flat tarp (in the former configuration), and I find the tension extremely difficult to adjust, since there is so much friction between the adjustable loop and the stake.

Awesome photo, thanks. I had heard a friend of a friend did Slesse last weekend (solo?) and had a "super chill" glacier crossing, but I wasn't sure if he crossed the pocket glacier or the other one.

Any update on the pocket glacier? Low temps have been well above freezing for a while now....