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AquaFresh

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Everything posted by AquaFresh

  1. Anyone have knowledge of ice conditions around Strobach Mtn?
  2. My recollection is somewhat fuzzy (we were smoked), but yes about that many. To clarify, probably only five or six of the raps used up all of the ropes. We frequently found ourselves stopping short because we couldn't see if we would have enough to get to another viable rap station. I also recall that we had to continue our rappels a bit lower than Kurt's descent because of waterfalls and treacherous slippery conditions.
  3. Hi folks, Climbed this route about a month ago, and it turned into an epic. Rad is right-- this is a serious (but fun) climb not reflected by the moderate grade. Our climb took about two hours longer than expected, but it's the descent that was really hairy, and took us an extra ten (yes, ten!) hours because of the number of rappels and difficulty retrieving our ropes. It's easy to descend the wrong way, and end up with a nightmare series of potentially dangerous rappels in a very wet gully (what we ended up doing). We topped out in darkness, and started rapelling down a brushy SE-facing gully what we thought was the gully described in Kurt's guidebook. In retrospect, I think we didn't go south far enough. It also looked like a number of other folks had made the same mistake, as we saw a number of left over rap anchors on everything from rocks to large downed logs across the gully. Our descent route required about 22 rappels, many of them double length. The rope drag was heinous because of the brush and, and even required us to ascend some of our rappels to retrieve the rope. The gully we went down also turns into a series of waterfalls near the bottom. If you're going to climb this, make sure you study the route, especially the retreat beforehand (sorry if this is obvious...). We left the parking lot at 8:00 AM, and got back at around 2:00PM the next day. Not ideal. Picture below is my partner ascending the stuck rope on our second to last rap. This was after nearly 11 hours of descent. Notice it's light out (again) in the picture. Edit: Just saw @Lowell_Skoog's post. I think we rapped the same gulley he did. BTW, we also left a fair bit of gear during this descent, including a #3 or 4 cam.
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