jon

Tactical facemasks are the new windshirts! Nice work, Baller!

I was down in Hood River kiting this weekend, but went on a quick snowshoe up to Cold Springs on Saturday because there wasn't supposed to be any wind and wanted to check out the conditions. The road is melted out above Morrison creek for maybe a half mile, then pretty patchy the for the next couple miles. I've never done it but it might be easier to find a more direct route up that avoids the more southern melted out aspects from Morrison Creek. Someone put some really nice turns on the SW chutes while we were hiking up. Talked to a couple skiers on their way down and they said it was pretty good, so now is the time unless you love skiing suncups.

Fun fact, my first trip to Sahale is where we actually conceived the idea for this site. Also first time and only time I've been buzzed by a Prowler from Widbey, as well as seeing the Northern Lights at full blast.

Hi @Bill Nelson we'll look into it to see if there are any issues. It's possible nobody is looking to exchange permits. Due to the population growth in Washington and Oregon it's becoming increasingly harder to obtain permits for all areas.

I've got a support message into the forum software company about why these images are not showing correctly. Here they are..... https://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/509/945Morning_Star_to_Big_Kid_anno.jpg https://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/509/945Ditney_to_4240_anno.jpg https://www.cascadeclimbers.com/plab/data/509/945Frozen_to_Bandera_anno.jpg

Yes, we need to get those articles updated.

Badass!

@Chris Hopkins I'll be fairly blunt while you are welcome to post conditions here this continued vendetta you have with NWAC and TAY is not. The thing with TAY is between you and them. It doesn't serve any purpose here, it's mostly conjecture. If you feel this information is important for others to read you can go start a blog on Blogspot or WordPress.com.

It has to start somewhere? Here? I wonder how much the revenues have risen for the Northwest Forest Pass the last 5 years? Pretty good article about it here: http://www.oregonlive.com/travel/index.ssf/2016/11/where_does_your_northwest_fore.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/interior-secretary-ryan-zinke-throws-support-behind-grizzly-bear-recovery-in-north-cascades/ Thoughts?

@cgolden123 I understand the issue now that link is actually the RSS feed itself and not a link to latest trip reports. We will fix that. If you want the latest TRs they are sorted chronologically here http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/tripreport

The photos were hotlinked from FB and they don't appear valid anymore

@Joe_Poulton I don't think anyone is judging Marc here, it's just a conversation about life and risk. Thanks for posting the tribute to him.

Good read here: https://gripped.com/news/canadian-marc-andre-leclerc-has-passed-away-in-alaska/ I drove through Squamish today on my way up to Whistler and staring at the rainy Chief he was definitely on my mind. I read the news from his dad while taking a break in the lodge and had to put my helmet and goggles on so people didn't see me crying. I'm not surprised this happened, just very sad for his family, friends, and Brette. Not everyone can be an amazing climber, and not everyone can be a great human being. He was both. Rest easy, Marc. Also thinking of Ryan's little boy. Heartbreaking.

In an ideal world this would have been posted on the sites anniversary, Oct. 2, which would have been 17 years in existence. Also ideally this would have been posted three plus years prior when I first started working on the migration. We actually started talking about it much further back. Something I’ve learned is things don’t always work out like you planned, you just have to keep moving forward and learn from you past mistakes. I’d like to thank those who are still around, some of you who have been here from the beginning. I’m sorry to those of you who have given so much to this site in the form of great discussion and trip reports, to the moderators that dealt with so much of the not so great moments, and that I let you down in not keeping this place working better and in a more modern state. We'll make it up to you. Porter, thanks for helping keeping the stoke alive with me and being such an amazing friend. Trip Report Tool v1 I’ve got the new trip report search working. In some ways is a few steps back from the old search in that you can’t facet by month or forum. It’s a step forward in that it works and works well on mobile. http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/tripreport This only works if you are logged in at the moment. This wasn’t by design just what happened as I added this on the work of the developer I hired who did the TR submission work. We’ll get that sorted out. What we have on deck will be polishing up some of the trip reports and probably adding better geographical data for being able to search trips on a map. We certainly view trip reports on this site as our crown jewel, we are just shy of 9000, and we’d like to make sure they are easy to find and easy to add. I think we’ve nailed the later with the forum upgrade and I’m confident we can come up with better search. The Future Like I said we have now been in existence for 17 years. Not many things on the internet can claim that. But the upgrade of the forum and the work we are doing now is the beginning and not the end. I was 24 when I started this site and really didn’t know a whole lot. I was trained as a biologist and had no experience or really knowledge of web communities. My (still) good friend Timmy and I just decided to create something. I’ll never forget an email I sent to a pretty notable local climber when we first started. I actually don’t remember what I asked him, but I remember his response “Good luck getting traffic, that will be hard”. He seemed pretty pessimistic, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Getting the traffic ended up being easy, managing it was the hard part. There were certainly some real wild west early days with cc.com and it was difficult to know how to handle them, especially our spare time for what was a hobby. We’ve made mistakes. We can acknowledge that. And we have learned from them. There are people and behaviors that will no longer be welcome here. What is sad is many of those people just took their dump and left. I realize we have a bad rep with many people and that’s unfortunate. I also think it is what you make it, and maybe it’s time to give it second chance and be part of the solution. We’ve solicited a lot of feedback, we’ve read feedback posted on Facebook. We’ve taken a lot of it to heart. I understand Facebook is easier to use, they are a multi-billion dollar company with scientists who’s sole purpose is to get you hooked. I get that Mountain Project is a nice tool, I have nothing negative to say about them, but again they are owned by REI now and have huge coffers of money. It was also incredible to read how people met their climbing partners here, or even their partners in life. Yes there has been some bullshit, but there has also been a lot of good. Cascadeclimbers is a unique and local product: an opportunity to interact online as a community rather than as the product. We are not here harvesting you and your information. This is still a hobby for us. We turn down offers every year to sell this site as we know it’s not in it’s best interest, we know what will happen if a corporation take it over. We have turned down advertisers because we have stayed true to our commitment to supporting retailers. We run the site, we own the site, but the content belongs to the community. We will be better stewards of this place and we hope people will give it a second chance. To those sitting on the sidelines, sometimes reading, but not participating. I get that you don’t want deal with the spray, and I assure you things will be different forward. But I also challenge you because the only way to make something better is to make those positive contributions. If everyone just steps away because they don’t like certain things then all you are left with is what people don’t like. This is a community driven site and only works with contributions from the community. We will be better listeners and stewards; please be better contributors. Why we allow anonymity. This is actually pretty simple; we have no way to prove someone’s identity. Facebook doesn’t either. We also made this decision pretty early on because we felt this would make it a safer place for women to contribute, without a bunch of guys stalking them. Again keep in mind these decisions were made 17 years ago, but I still think it’s a valid point. We recently added JasonG to the moderator staff. You probably already know Jason from his Trip Reports and amazing photography. We are always on the lookout for trusted and committed people to help the site grow, so let us know if you are interested. We may have more roles in the future that need filling. And of course a huge thanks to all the existing moderators that have stuck with us through thick and thin. Our current path forward is pretty simple: We expect people to leave things better than you found it. If you can do that simple things you can be a part of this. If you can’t you will not be welcome here. We want the site to grow, in people, in posts, in trip reports, and new personal connections. Thanks for reading. Onward.

There is a campaign to raise money for the SAR operation https://www.gofundme.com/592fn8w

Marc has really been on my mind the last two days. Thursday night I was thinking about reaching out to him about doing more writing for us. Really hope they are dug in and just waiting out the weather.

So instead of seeing all the replies to a topic you only see the latest post for each topic, maybe with the number of unread replies. I'm not sure if we can do that but we'll look into it, I think that is a good view if we are going to include spray in All Activity.

Yeah this place has great beer and food! I've skied Adams a few times and the problem I've encountered is that the road isn't clear enough to make it to the trailhead while the snow is still good. It's a lot of work for terrible turns. I personally don't think it's worth it unless you have a sled to get in earlier in the season. To answer your question yeah it really is a dumb idea if you have no experience for a number of reasons. I'm not sure where there TR is on here, but some guy got lost from his group in a whiteout on the summit, went down the SW Chute by mistake, fell and ended up breaking both his legs, and had to drag himself out on the PCT. South Spur is an "easy" route technically, I've literally seen someone in Tevas going up. But it's still a big mountain and people do get hurt and lost. You are much better off starting off with a smaller objective, heading up St. Helens or to Muir, and doing so in the spring when the snow is actually good. That said I know that area hasn't gotten a ton of snow this year, so the road could potentially be open to the TH much earlier then normal.

I'm not sure I understand the logic of not bringing a filter. I have an MSR Hyperflow and it's 200g and can fill a 1L Nalgene in about 30 seconds. I think some of the best advice I've seen from someone here about traveling light if you have known water sources is to make sure you are really well hydrated before you leave the car and travel with very little water, there is no need to have a full 3L in an bladder (which would be 6.6 pounds). A 1 L Nalgene is 2.2 pounds of water or 1000 grams. So that filter only weights 1/5 the weight of the water of 1 Nalgene. I also have 3 petri dishes running around my house trying to get me sick I don't need to risk having disaster pants when I actually get out.

@Z-Man the photos themselves are still on the server, but we had to abandon the gallery. The old gallery software was no longer being updated and they stopped selling it, and had become a security risk for our server. I tried importing the gallery into the gallery app our current software provider makes, but it was becoming highly problematic and too big of a blocker to convert the forum, so we decided to move forward without it. I will try to import the gallery at a later date, but I'm placing a big priority on getting the Trip Report search back up.

Remember me? I'll post something in the next few days about where we've been and where we are going with things. Just really stoked that we were able to finally able to deliver a better experience to everyone after years of false starts on this. Everyone who has contributed a TR or meaningful content deserved better. Thanks for hanging in there with us.

I encourage everyone to read this, Marc-Andre Leclerq's first TR on here: http://cascadeclimbers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/800493/2 Then go to about minute 50 of this podcast where Alex Honnold and Jimmy Chin start talking about how badass he is: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2016/05/17/alex-honnold/

It seems to be if a post is too long it does not post correctly. We haven't changed anything in our code, but the servers were updated by our host that likely is causing the problem. I'm hoping to have time tonight to track down the issue.

The gun ads are due to a few reasons, some have which have been pointed out. If there is posts about guns Google will target ads to us about that. We also get ads from an outoor ad marketplace, and I use "Outdoor" in the broadest sense, that unsurprisingly does get a lot of money from the gun industry. If this bothers people that much I'm more then happy to put a request to no longer display those ads on our, meaning yours and my, site. That said, asking us first about this would have been the proactive first step in addressing this, instead of making assumption. I don't own a gun nor have fired a gun in 25 years since being in Boy Scouts, but I did like a post on IG yesterday for the SEAL that was awarded the Medal of Honor.