Michael Telstad

Trip: Prusik Peak - Stanley-Burgner + Solid gold Trip Date: 05/29/2019 Trip Report: AKA the "It could be worse" road trip When weather in The Valley, Red Rock, Moab, Tahoe, City of Rocks ect. looks heinous for the week you have off, what do you do? You stay close to home and go for some earlyish season ascents of some of the cascades best alpine rock routes! The original plan: Spend a few days in Trout creek waiting for weather to improve. Get a permit for the core, plan for 2 days up there climbing Solid gold and Stanley-Burgner one day, Valkyrie and Acid Baby the other. People said we need snow shoes, but we'll probably be fine. What we actually did: Hike up to Colchuck, hang out under your fly waiting for the thunder storm to pass. Talk to some guys who tried Valkyrie, turns out the route is wet. Rad. one route off the list. Post hole the shit out of Aasgard pass and keep post holing your way through the core in some of the worst spring snow conditions I have personally experienced. Wake up late the next morning to find splitter weather and already slushy snow. Post hole your way over to Prusik. Start up the first pitch of Solid Gold only to find the crux soaking wet, and water dripping down onto the belay. Lower off the spooky chock stone and move over to Stanley-Burgner. Post hole your way up to the base of the route in rock shoes. It seems like some fluffy clouds are starting to form. What did I read yesterday about the warning signs of t-storms? P1/2: Mostly dry except for the crux. Awesome. P3: Mostly dry except for the crux. Cool. P4: Mostly wet except when I try to climb around the wetness and get off route. The added lubricant probably made the squeeze a little easier. P5: Mostly dry except for a few wet jams. At the crux. P6: Pretty damn wet and now there is a full fledged thunder storm baring down on us. Layback around some sketchy new looking loose blocks as it starts to rain. Good thing the route is already wet. Pull up onto the normally awesome summit block only to have my ice axe and entire rack start to buzz. Flip my shit and throw my pack across the summit. Hop over the other side of the summit and start belaying my partner up in a full on vertical sprint and the longest six minutes of my life. There is now a BD .4 on that pitch if someone wants some easy booty. Get the hell off of the summit. Get our rope stuck. Clean it and continue to rap. Post hole our way through very wet waist deep slush over to the base of the west ridge. Run down to lower ground and laugh about how its already sunny again. Try to dry out our gear in camp and decide that this weather cycle is not worth climbing tomorrow. Hike out and get a burrito at South. Drive home and start repacking for WA-Pass. I still have three days off of work. Now for the photo dump. No more pictures till we were back to the base and the storm had passed. Gear Notes: Double rack .2-2 single 3 and 4. Hand full of nuts Approach Notes: Post hole your way up Aasgard pass and down through the upper core. Snow shoes probably aren't worth it.

The real plum is an E face route on each formation in 24 hours. If it has ever been done I'd love to hear about the strategy.

Shit! Climbed the main flow on Thursday and everything seemed solid but HOT! Nothing falling off and the snow seemed very consolidated. I guess pushing my partner to bring avy gear was the right move. If not to just find our bodies. The Funnel lives up to it's name!

Use the anchor for Tommy's Sandbox. Be very careful not to knock anything off the top, it'll land right at the base of godzilla. Also if you choose to do it on a weekend, which I don't recommend, be quick and don't take over such a popular route. I personally try and only TR solo more obscure routes as not to get in the way, the exception being empty days in the winter or iffy weather days when no one else is around.

Trip: Juno Tower - Clean Break Trip Date: 07/30/2018 Trip Report: It seems like Gabe and I have had a track record this season of finding the most marginal weather in the state, then choosing to go for it anyways. From plenty of wet and cold days in vantage last winter to an early season one day climb of prusik in a Blizzard, and a very cold and rainy day in the liberty bell group. This climb was no exception. On Sunday we drove over from Seattle and after cragging a little in the shady icebox canyon we stashed a bike and some Gatorade just off the road at the wine spires pullout. On our drive down to Winthrop for dinner we stopped by the Cutthroat lake rd to chat with the ranger who was stationed there. He informed us that the fire was under control and that it likely wouldn't impact our climb the next day. The next morning we woke up at 3am and left the car at 3:30 in an attempt to get to the base at first light. With a weather forecast of 90 on the summit of Silverstar we knew it was going to be a hot one. It was. Gabe trying to get us un-lost on the approach. The route basking in some nice alpenglow as we cross some slabs below the base. The first pitch is the stellar tight hands splitter on the right side of the blank wall. We got up to the base by scrambling up the chossy gulley to the left of the snow. There was an exciting 5th class mantle at the top that some might want to rope up for. No need for snow gear! I quickly learned on the first pitch that 1.)over 3 liters of water is heavy. 2.)warming up on 10c with a heavy pack is hard. And 3.) it's already damn hot and i'm sweating a lot. Somehow I managed to pull off the OS and was glad to have triples in .5 & .75. The rest of the route went pretty smoothly despite feeling like shit while baking in the sun. Luckily our packs were getting lighter really fast! Gabe styling the 10a roofy slabs. Gabe fighting with a tree on the 5.6/5.8 traverse pitch Pretending to be having fun while trying not to vomit from heat exhaustion. Moments before Gabe threw a hissy fit because our friend Jeff told us we didn't need a 4 for this pitch. The perfect rack would be one 3 and one 3.5. We had 2 3's and the crack gets wider than a 3 at the lip. Gabe didn't like that. Some of the first shade encountered on route. Trying to use the cold rock to cool down. More shade on the big ledge before the simul block to the summit. This was a real life saver though a big time suck. You're apparently supposed to stay right of the ridge crest here for more enjoyable climbing. I think we passed the only spot to get over so were forced to climb the lame sandy gullies to the left. Can't say I recommend them, but they get you to the summit. Summit stoke! We topped out at 1pm for a time of 9:30 C2S. Not too bad for how crappy we were feeling. Looking up Vasiliki ridge. One hell of a traverse! The descent follows the "obvious gully" then traverses left and down A LOT back to bench camp. There is plenty of kitty litter on slab skiing along the way to keep it exciting. Overall Clean Break is a stellar route with high quality rock and not a whole lot of routefinding issues to be had. This makes for a relatively fast 15 pitch 5.10 in a rad location. We really learned our lesson not to climb big routes on such hot weekends, and to bring a filter, not iodine if we end up doing it anyways. Half an hour is far too long to wait when you are that thirsty. Gear Notes: Rack: Doubles .2-3, Triple .5 & .75, A few nuts, 2 microtraxions. Either replace the second 3 with a 3.5, or just bring a 4. We brought 4 liters of water each. We should have brought a filter, chugged water at the base, filled up 3L, then refilled at bench camp. 2 UL poles, no axe Approach Notes: Silverstar creek trail is not super straight forward to follow in the dark so I definitely recommend having a GPS track on your phone to follow, it helps speed things along a bit. Same goes for the descent.

@eberman Right on, i'll keep an eye out for your FA trip report!

Climbed Clean Break yesterday as a carry over from Silverstar creek. We didn't encounter any snow at all and except for some nasty off route bushwacking on the descent it was pretty mellow. I'd highly recommend this over approaching from burgundy which I've heard is just as much effort as approaching from silverstar. Regarding the fire, it looked almost completely out and very under control. They threw a lot of resources at that thing and it looked like it worked. It's a stellar route and you should definitely get on it!

Trip: Nesakwatch Spires - SW ridge North spire Trip Date: 05/27/2018 Trip Report: Thanks to G-Spotter's Slesse Conditions report from two weeks ago, Tess and I were inspired to skip the Squamish crowds and go check out the Nesakwatch spires over the long (for us Americans) weekend. On Saturday morning we made the surprisingly easy drive in to the valley after nearly being sent to secondary for trying to take an apple over the border. Thanks to my mediocre off roading skills we almost got stuck twice in the first washout we hit along the road, but Zoe the 2011 forester pulled through. Not wanting to get stuck in the next real washout we opted for the road walk instead. The washout in question. From there the road is pretty manageable all the way to the actual bad washout. Which lasts for about a quarter mile and would need a pretty serious rig to navigate. There were fresh tire tracks so clearly it is not impossible. This new signage is pretty sweet, though i'm not sure it's totally necessary. After the road walking the trail pretty much just goes straight up. The trail was pretty much snow free up to the base of the rock wall at 5100ft. Tennies were really nice up to that point. Two guys were working on a new line on the rock wall below the spires. If anyone knows them I'm curious to hear how the route turned out. The snow made for very easy travel through the boulder fields. And it also made camping much much easier. The Bivy boulder is almost completely snow free but we didn't find it until we had already set up camp. So we used this boulder instead. The clouds gave quite the show on Saturday night, nothing beats this view. We woke up to grey skies and a cold wind so decided to wait a bit in hopes that things would warm up a bit And warm up it did. The splitter headwall cracks. Felt like easy 5.8 to me. Wish they had been longer. Summit! There was quite a bit of snow sticking around on the NE faces and some decided to rip loose from the ridge in the left of this picture. In order to avoid steep rotten snow on the standard descent we found a rap route down the S face. This particular station was a little cramped. There is still a lot of snow up there but that shouldn't discourage anyone from making the trek. Most of the easy routes appear to be holding a lot of snow but the steeper stuff like Dairyland looked to be in great shape. Go out and get it folks! Gear Notes: 2x .4-2 1x 3,4 nuts Boots & axe may be nice but no need for crampons Approach Notes: Tennies up to the rock wall (5100ft) Boots the rest of the way. Washouts at 2.3mi and 3.3mi depending on your vehicle.

Does anyone know if Ride of the Valkyries has seen any action in a while? Seeing that its a Hugh Herr FA has me wondering if it's a major sandbag. Or if the beta is to wear stilts with camhooks on the end and helium balloons tied around your ankles.

Have you found out if your friend is OK? I climbed glacier the week after you posted this and found an abandoned tent on the approach. It was there on our way in, and on our way down, just sitting on the side of the trail in a dried up stream bed.

I think I accidentally climbed this last weekend in an attempt to climb Winter solstice. I awkwardly traversed in left from the ledge on winter solstice proper, and climbed the first crack I got to. It had good (dirty) finger locks down low, then opened up to hands, then back down to rattly fingers. If this is your route it was fun, and with a little more traffic it would be a good 5.9ish alternative to both winter solstice and Midway.

I'm hoping to give it a go over memorial day weekend, based on the Approach/descent conditions you had while you were up there, is it worth bringing crampon compatible tennies and a light tool?

After reading the long winded comments about the approach to Dreamer on Mountain Project Tess and I decided to spend a misty northwest day scouting out the road and approach to the climb. As expected the mile or so beyond the 8 mile trailhead had some blow downs (Note that 8 mile trailhead is actually at the 6 mile point on the FS road). I brought a hand saw, axe and some loppers and made pretty quick work of these. That said the road is still pretty rough in a few spots on the way in so make sure you've got a car that can handle going through a streambed or two. We were in a Subaru Forester and questioned whether we would be able to get through a few of the rough patches. IMG_0367 by michael t, on Flickr[/img] [img:left]IMG_0370 by michael t, on Flickr[/img] 
 
 We cleared the road of blowdowns to mile 7 where the road widens slightly before a small creek comes in and is eroding the road pretty quickly. You could go a bit further but there is a deep sandy mud puddle 5 minute walk in that I wouldn't want to get stuck in and you lose the ability to turn your car around. The logging road quickly turns into more of a streambed (particularly at this time of year) but if you follow your nose you'll find yourself on a beautiful little climbers trail through the forest. Neat to see some old mining hardware in place way up here. IMG_0374 by michael t, on Flickr IMG_0375 by michael t, on Flickr There is a rope handline set up to help facilitate the copper creek crossing but honestly a set of poles is probably more useful but we appreciated the handline to let us know we were in the right spot. A trail/path of least resistance is slightly downstream of where we crossed the creek. Follow a couple cairns through the boulders towards a beautiful waterfall. There are a ton of wild roses in this section right around the base of the waterfall which was pretty prickly, so we lopped a rough path from the boulders to the falls to spare the poor soul who decides to wear shorts on this approach. 004 by michael t, on Flickr (The rope across the stream) 008 by michael t, on Flickr (Clearing a path through the pricklies) DSC_0383 by michael t, on Flickr (The buttress in sight!) 005 by michael t, on Flickr (Red webbing and a cairn marks the alder tunnel. We also replaced some of the faded pink tape with new orange tape.) To the right of the base of the waterfall someone has some red tubular webbing which is still there marking the base of the tunnel through the slide alder. There is also a bit of flagging marking the way. I imagine people have a harder time finding this later in the season when there is vegetation growing every which way. We found it pretty straightforward because everything was still budding/snow had just melted off maybe last week. Slide alder tunnel is pretty much a highway as long as you are prepared to just climb through on your hands and knees. We did run into one spot that was impossible to get through with backpacks on so brought the saw out for a quick trip (but don't worry plenty of adventure schwack still there). 003 by michael t, on Flickr (Tess doing work on the slide alder) IMG_0406 by michael t, on Flickr (Some pink tape marking the tunnel) After the tunnel we hit snow. We went up to the top of the snow but this section starts to get pretty steep muddy and wet and we didn't feel super comfortable going much further through the steep brush and snow without an an ice axe or at least a sturdier set of poles (those Ultra light BD Carbon Z poles don't really cut it on snow). From our turnaround point we had a fantastic view of the route. Once the snow is gone and the slabs dry, you can most likely just scramble straight from here to the base of the climb. 006 by michael t, on Flickr (Tess making her way up the snow) IMG_0411 by michael t, on Flickr (Me trying not to punch through the thin hollow snow over slab) IMG_0926 copy by michael t, on Flickr (Rough route overlay from our turnaround point) Would love to get confirmation that the the normal approach route just continues straight from this point through the avy chute. Is there actually a little trail that would normally appear to get to the base of the rock if there wasn't snow or is it just some stiff veggie belaying up and down from the area above this snow. Hope this helps anyone trying to get out there soon!