forrest_m

click me heaven's gate thread from last year

coming off the s. butt. of tiedemann, we rapped off an 12" x 6" x 3" rock we found lying in the snow, buried as a deadman. i've done a lot of raps while trying to navigate complex icefalls by just slinging the rope around ice horns/blocks/etc, good for those "nuisance rappels" because you don't have to screw around with slings, etc. Many times in these places, there are big old blocks or towers that have collapsed and then partly merged with the surrounding ice. You can often wrap the rope all the way over/around these features, and these can often be made REALLY secure just by improving the lip a tiny bit with an ice axe to create a slot for the rope. Pulling the rope isn't ususally a problem if it's ice, even if the rope is wrapped back and forth around something because ice is, uh, slippery.

I don't know why, but from Winchester, Larabee looks like it's really big and really far away - the first time I went up there, I thought for a second that I was looking at Mt. Baker, which was plenty disorienting! But it's not as far as it looks - we were able to ski down into the drainage and then skin up Larabee (not to the top, but as far as you could easily skin) by mid-morning.

josh - cool trip! i love it when you get to just spend a few days exploring new terrain. a couple of years a go, three of us spent the thanksgiving long weekend in the hut on top of winchester peak, there's a ton of great ski terrain in there, the s. flanks of larabee especially. In early season, we were able to drive most of the flat road and the accommodations were great. At that time (don't know if this is still true) one of the b-ham hiking clubs maintained a coleman stove & propane tank up there, so we didn't have to carry tent, stove or pots. (there was an envelope to leave donations, which we did.). No wood stove, though. am i reading correct that you were solo?

my personal experience (2 pairs) and everything i have heard argue for getting one SHELL size smaller - this may be 2 SHOE sizes smaller, depending on the brand, because many plastic boots (scarpa, for example) only make the shells on the whole sizes and take up the half size with different sized liners. anywho, i think the smaller shell size is essential to keep the intuition liners from swimming around. further, the snugger, less sloppy fit is in my mind one of the key reasons to get intuitions in the first place.

be aware that sunny knob and combatant col are not really accessible to one another. i mean, i'm sure it's possible, but not at all easy. if you want to climb on tiedemann or asperity, you will want to be at sunny knob, but most of the newer routes on combatant are accessed from combatant col. we did the s. butt. integrale on tiedemann, so if you want specific beta, shoot me a pm. it's the best alpine rock route i've ever done.

bp - what kind of routes are you interested in focusing on - snow/ice or rock, grade IV, V or VI? more or less explored areas (i.e. better info vs. more first ascent potential)? a little more info would help with making recommendations, the coast range is a big place. a group of 8 of us of mixed ability levels/suffering thresholds flew into the plummer hut (below claw peak near mt. waddington) a few summers back and were all able to find things to amuse ourselves for three weeks without any trouble, so that's one option.

Climb: Cashmere Mt.-South Side Date of Climb: 3/14/2004 Trip Report: Spring always seems to appear suddenly, though if you were paying attention, you would’ve seen the signs earlier. One day, all the trees are in bloom, it’s still light out when you get home from work and the focus of ski trips changes from slopes to summits. Winter is all about searching out the powder shots or yo-yos on the best aspect. But with longer days comes the desire to only pull your skins off once, even if it means skiing through zones of poor snow in the course of a top-to-bottom run. That was the story Sunday. We left the car at Bridge Creek Campground (1,880’) and were able to ski continuously up the road to the Eightmile Creek Campground. From there, we followed the gated road that cuts off to the right up past one switchback and then up steeper slopes towards a gap that gave access to a second, parallel valley below Cashmere Mountain. This steep slope, which was covered with only a few feet of snow, was in perfect shape for turns… at 9:30 in the morning. The slope kicked back as we skinned into the narrow valley above, traversing the steep sides of a stream gully until we could cross to the south side of the drainage and work our way up a scenic rib that climbed up to timberline through an old burn. The silver trunks hummed in the gusty wind, but it was warm in the sunshine. It got downright hot as we climbed through a series of open bowls, working our way west across several small ridges. The wind became stronger as we entered the steep slopes of the couloir leading to the ridgeline below the summit. We put skis on our packs and let the gusts push us up the icy avalanche debris, past a free-hanging frozen waterfall, to the col. The terrain on the far side leading in to the Doctor Creek valley looked amazing. We tagged the summit (8,504’) at around 1:30, assuming it counted if you merely touched the summit with your extended ski pole. It was downright cold and fairly exposed, so we didn’t dally. The descent involved the good, the bad and the ugly. As usual, the most difficult, highest-stakes turns were the first ones of the day, and took place on the worst snow. Andreas started on an icy shoulder about 50 feet below the top; I shot pictures as he skied the exposed 45 degree slope. The Stuart Range loomed snowy and stormy looking in the background. Chatter, chatter, edge, jump. Definitely scrappy, even for Andreas on AT gear, and I was glad I’d left my tele boards a bit lower. The couloir below the col was equally icy and only a little lower angle, but had a much more palatable runout. Around 7,800 feet, we exited the bottom of the couloir and relaxed into 2,500 feet of effortless corn. Creamy hero snow encouraged us to treat the bowl like a terrain park, hopping and banking off snow-covered boulders. Lower still, we surfed through sloppy snow in the open trees where snow snakes lurked, hunting for a telemarker’s unweighted back foot to grab on to. By the time we reached the lowest slopes, we were skiing in bottomless isothermal glop that let you sink down all the way to dirt, but we managed to make it to the road without major base damage. Another half hour of shussing saw us back at the truck, though in places the road had less than an inch of coverage left. As we changed clothes in the afternoon sunshine, I thought to myself, “Yup, spring is definitely in the air.” Approach Notes: all in all, a good alternative to the mostly north & east facing runs in this area (i.e. colchuck glacier, n. side cannon, etc.)

i sprained my ankle bad in 2001 about a month before going to patagonia, i went to the pt and was religious about doing the exercises. i went on my trip and had no problems carrying large packs over talus fields in the rain. mostly, they had me use a piece of surgical tubing tied off to a solid object to push and pull against, forward, back and sideways, the idea being to strengthen the muscles around the ankle (since you can't do much for the ligament in the short term). the other good exercise was to balance on the foot for up to 60 seconds. when this gets easy, close your eyes. finally, start turning your head from side to side, this removes all balance cues and really works out your ankle muscles.

wait, so snugtop is a real person?

bob, i'm not sure i'm following you here. you say that upgrading the ratings at index (which we all agree are somewhat stiffer than the national average) would be bad because it would make everything the same and decrease personal responsibility. yet your whole premise in your original post is that we should downgrade at lillooet because it isn't consistent with the rockies. are you saying it's OK to sandbag but not OK to inflate? all in all, i prefer the regional differences, makes life more interesting.

hmmm, burnt trees, sulphur, toxic waste and tailings. are you sure you were in idaho and not, say HELL?

So I’ve gotten a bunch of emails & PMs since #6 came out, and everyone thinks Mark’s photo on the cover is awesome but they have questions: “why are you belaying from on top of that huge cornice?” When I got to where Mark took the photo and could look back and see how overhung it was, I asked myself the same question. Beyond the edge there was an almost-vertical wall of snow and it was the first “reasonable” place and I was out of rope. I knew it was a cornice so I did jump up and down a bunch to test it. “why are you facing backwards?” (Most popular question) Of course there were no anchors whatsoever (I’d used both pickets on the pitch), so I made a big stance facing down towards Mark to belay him up. Also, his pitch started by traversing down around an intermediate pinnacle. That stance is actually facing the direction of pull for most of the pitch, and I couldn’t really change in the middle. “what’s going on with the ropes?” After Mark traversed down, he had to make some sketchy moves but still hadn't been able to place any pro, so he flipped one of the ropes over the other side of the cornice to protect the move. (smart!) Later, I had to untie from one of the ropes because it had dug into the underside of the cornice and I couldn’t flip it back. For a more subjective view, I’ve pasted in something I wrote about it shortly after getting home. People who don't like wordy TRs should probably stop here. ________________________________ I’ve read about people who were so scared that their “bowels turned to water,” but this is the first time I’ve experienced the sensation firsthand. Whether due to a diet of Clif Bars and Ramen, the altitude, or simple fear, I’m immobilized, all my being focused on keeping my sphincter tight. I know beyond any reasonable doubt that a release of pressure is going to result in me shitting my pants. I thought that hard core alpinism meant clenching your teeth, but I’m learning that it sometimes means clenching your cheeks as well. Above me, the cornice we’ve been traversing rears back into a narrow fin, one foot wide and dead vertical for 30 feet. At the top is a bizarre mushroom formation, like a half-inflated surgical glove whose fingers have sagged until they are resting on the palm. To reach the fin, I’m forced to edge well beyond the cornice fracture line and I half expect to drop through Hermann Buhl-style or collapse the entire thing with every step. After a minute of deep breathing, I’m able to continue, but now I’ve added soiling my only set of clothing to my list of worries. When I finally get to the fin, only some aspects of the situation improve. I’m no longer treading on an overhang, but the exposure increases as well. I start flailing around in the deep, loose snow. There is a core of more or less solid material in there; a picket driven into ice, even aerated coca-cola ice, inspires some confidence. Upward progress is measured in cubic feet of material excavated as I whack away at the slushy snow that bars my way. With one foot flat on the arête, the other frontpointing out right, and my hammer shaft jammed horizontally into the outside face, I send tons of material down to the glacier 6,000 feet below. By the time I reach the top of the pinnacle, I’ve reduced the angle by 20 degrees and carved a body-sized trench through the mushroom at the top. Cavalierly, I slice its remaining connection from below and shrug it over my shoulder like a running back slipping a tackle. It falls free for two hundred feet before impacting the slope and sliding away out of sight. Finally, I can throw my leg over the top to straddle this toothy blob of snow like a horse. My stomach is wracked by another series of spasms – it feels like my entire intestine is trying to wriggle out my ass. I’m not even half way through the first pitch of the Happy Cowboys, and already I’m very unhappy. When I finally manage to get my shit together – it’s my day for learning the literal meaning of phrases – I finish the pitch and bring Mark up to my belay. It’s a cupola on top of an ice cream cone, beautiful and comfortable but without even a suggestion of an anchor besides the hole I stomp out. We can see another vertical stretch ahead, but the terrain in between is hidden behind the walls of my hollow. Driven by wishful thinking, I say the magic words: “That wall looks like it’ll be kind of hard, but I think it’ll be easy getting over there…” Mark looks at me sadly. I should know better by now. Underneath all the snow, the Happy Cowboys are a series of rock pinnacles, and the gap between the one we are on and the next is essentially a crevasse delicately plastered over with a narrow rib. With no protection available, Mark flips one rope onto each side of the cornice that separates us and eases forward. The snowbridge dissolves like a cigarette left to burn in the ashtray. Mark can barely stem across the remaining gap, traversing another fifteen feet before he can diddle in some decent pro into the only exposed rock we encounter all day. I begin to simulclimb behind Mark as he disappears down the back side of the pinnacle. Beyond the vertical wall is a section of downclimbing followed by a tenuous traverse along a leftward-arcing knife edge that eventually cuts back right around a small rib. I’m feeling out the move past the crest when the rope begins to pull me hard. “Don’t pull!” I yell, but the rope is straightening out from a parabola to a chord as Mark heads down a short slope out of earshot. I’m close to panic again, between my harness and the corner a hundred feet away, the rope is no longer touching the slope, and its pulling me towards the void with the eagerness of a kid in the candy aisle at the supermarket. I’d love to run forward, but the next twenty feet is going to be extremely delicate. Another tug almost rips me out of my steps. At the top of my lungs: “Aaaargh…. STOP!!!” A long pause. The pressure on my waist eases slightly. I breathe easier when I get past the next bump. Mark, though unable to understand anything I was yelling, guessed my predicament. I untie from the second rope and attach all the gear I’d cleaned so that Mark could pull it up to him. Neither of us is willing to be at a single location again. We’ve both seen the size of the overhangs that we are forced to traverse, and we know that only possible safety is in being at opposite ends of the rope. “If one of us goes over, the other has to be ready to jump off the other side,” Mark had told me at the start of the ridge “Really. I’m not joking.” And so it went for several more hours. It never gets as hard as the pinnacle pitches again, but it is continuously “interesting.” Every downclimb features a crevasse at the bottom, a fact which I prove by falling into each in turn. Finally we jump the last slot and plow through deep snow to a small flat spot at the base of the Changabang arête. We had only been climbing for eight hours, and had planned to brew up and continue, but now we begin setting up the tent. There’s no discussion necessary. Our fried brains are completely synchronized, demanding relief from the tension. I drop my pack, look back the way we’ve come, and with what I hope sounds like sang froid, declare “I don’t want to do anything like that ever again.”

dru wrote: too bad one of the coolest ones recently had the sinkhole entrance "accidentally" filled in with debris by a logging company road building crew. like we have so many caves around here that we can afford to lose any...

i don't doubt that his list of accomplishments is impressive, i'm just confused as to how something can be too long to summarize... isn't that what a summary is, a way of hitting the highlights?

from the producer's bio:

On mt. hunter last year, my partner and I both used schoeller pants as our only outerwear on the legs (me the cheap MEC pants; him those Patagonia guide pants). It worked great, with either light long underwear or light fleece underwear underneath. However, we had a several conversations about how on denali, where high winds are such a concern, we probably would want real windproof shells. Also worth noting that on the legs, between the bottom of your shell jacket and the top of your supergaitors, there’s not actually that much exposure – your upper body is a different story – regardless of the windproofness, I have yet to see a soft shell jacket with a real hood I could imagine doing the job with a helmet and goggles in full-on conditions.

man, you guys rule! ross, you look really old skool skiing with the climbing helmet.

Actually, wouldn't the worst technical gaffe be the fact that he's shown leading with a top rope in that scene? I love that movie, full of priceless stuff for anyone who's an afficionado of 70's kitsch. I can put up with a lot in a movie that actually stuck hollywood actors up onto the north face of the eiger - there's a great shot where clint is struggling on some rock moves and the camera just pulls back and back with no cuts until you see the whole huge friggin' face. (Maybe not so impressive in these CGI days, but pretty cool when you know it's a real shot.)

try this thread

jedi - i've had great luck with provia 400 in my yashica t4, see here for some photos from a shady n. face mt. winstone photos everything's still on the blue side - can't be helped, i don't think, but much better than the provia 100 and kodachrome 64 my two partners shot on the same climb.

i had a "great to be a guy" moment yesterday, turns out both i and my female co-worker were getting our hair cut right after lunch. her total RT time: 2.5 hours. amount of time she scheduled her appointment ahead of time: 3 weeks. she only trusts one specific person to cut her hair. my total RT time: 20 minutes, including the 5 minute walk each direction. amount of time I scheduled my appointment ahead of time: 0 minutes. with my #2 clipper cut, i'd trust an ex-con with astigmatism, even after a few beers...

sobo wrote my experience was that, economically, married vs. single-but-cohabitating was about the same... until we bought a house. our mortgage is more than double what we paid in rent before, therefore much less cash floating around. of course, now that it is so common (and easy) for two non-married employed people to purchase a house together, this issue will likely spread to the non-married. one thing that neither article mentioned was the international marriage phenomenon. the thing that finally tipped the balance for us to tie the knot wasn't economic, or moral, or family/societal approval, but simply that it radically simplified obtaining my wife's green card. we'd already been living together for several year at that point, so it wasn't really a traumatic decision. as our society becomes much more mobile, this has become more common - I personally know seven couples who have gotten married primarily to simplify the immigration process. i'm not speaking here about fraudulent marriages, rather about committed couples in legitimate relationships who would not otherwise have felt compelled to get hitched if it weren't for hassles with the INS.

Jason Martin wrote: FWIW, the movie shows him rummaging for the knife with both hands… anyway, I’d bet dollars to donuts that after holding body weight for an over an hour with an icy 9 mm rope (with mittens), the knot was hard up against his belay device. Slow slippage until the knot jams seems almost inevitable in that situation. The typical systems I know to pass a knot all require that you have enough slack in the system to “lower” onto the passing system and thus unweight your primary belay device. Can you describe how you unjam the knot without an anchor? If you have a solid anchor, you can move yourself downhill to transfer tension to the friction knot, but Simon WAS the anchor, so I don’t think that would work. Could you do a mini-Z to untension the rope, using yourself as the anchor? Even if it's physically possible, that would be pretty complicated given the other circumstances. That’s why both my scenarios include cutting something with the knife, it’s the Universal Tension Release Tool. ;-) Cutting the rope has the virtue of simplicity. Seriously, it’s always worth remembering that if you screw up your self-rescue system and forget to leave a tension release system in place, you can always cut something to effect the transfer – just be careful with sharp blades and tensioned ropes!