philfort

Local stokage! (stokage only guaranteed valid at 11am October 24)

Maybe this...

lazy snowboarders!!! My khyber isn't so good on firm snow, but maybe it's just that I suck.

Go to a library and photocopy them! Cheap if B&W is ok... I spent a lot of time in the geography library in college, expanding my map collection thusly...

Jens's aura is strong...

Around Ingalls on Saturday, about 5 inches on rocks at 7200ft. (8-10 inches on permanent snow patches).

I thought the NW Forest Pass requirement had already been removed at undeveloped trailheads around here... isn't this old news? I know you don't require them on Cascade River road anymore, nor at the end of the Middle Fk Snoqualmie road.

A few weeks ago I had a view of the western lobe of the Lynch glacier, or what's left of it. It's pretty much completely gone compared to what is shown on the topo map. There was one thick piece of snow left, that looked like it would slide off soon, but 90% was just rock slab. btw, you might want to run a spell/grammar check on your report.

Kind of hard to gauge this one, since it is mostly covered by the enormous 98-99 snowpack: August 21 1999:

Is that what you call that thing sticking out of the top of your tent?

I guess this is kind of late info, but it was fine last weekend. No moat issues. I thought the gully was pretty nice as approach gullies go. Some loose crap (don't bring a big party), but not dangerous - much of it is nice fun blocky 3rd class. Downclimbing it was fine.

Someone's in good shape!

Cannonhole near Spark Plug Mtn:

They've always had tripple on the 545 since I started riding last year. To handle all the bike traffic now, they'd need probably 6 spots per bus.

Plenty of folks climbing it today, didn't look like there were any crevasse issues. You can just make out the boot path heading to the right of the bergshrund: I guess being able to see makes all the difference.

Sure, the glacier's almost gone - but it's so much sunnier now than it was back then!

That .gif is nearly 3 megabytes! I guess that's what you get for high quality uncompressed footage. Screw wmv, mov or mpeg... .gif is clearly the future of high quality internet video.

George W. Bush stole them

The winter wasn't really that "big"... I think snowpack was just around average by the time spring rolled around. It just seemed big because there weren't any pineapple expresses from Christmas on, and we built snow pack earlier rather than later... Buckner's gone, Spider's gone...

The pics in this thread make it look like it's mostly ice (not snow) right now.

That looks sweet This: looks way gnarlier than this: Is that the same ridgeline though? (just looking from opposite directions). How long did it take to traverse to the main peak from the west peak? And where was that west peak summit register, we didn't see it up there last year

That's by far the most bare I've ever seen Spider look, any time of year. This year perhaps marks the loss of permanent ice on that face? From Lowell's webpage, a picture from September 2003: http://www.alpenglow.org/climbing/ptarmigan-1953/spider-mtn-1953-2003.html "The snow gullies of the north face, first climbed in the 1970s, were also in poor condition." Looked a lot better "way back in 2003" than it does now. Here's what it looked like August 18 2002:

Definite increase in riders on the 545 since last summer. There are so many now, that the bike racks are always full, and you have wait for the next (or the next next) bus. It got so annoying I started driving again. What they need is an hourly bike-only bus. Or else figure out a way to get more than 3 bikes on the outside of the bus.

Sounds like a great climb! Very cool the "I'll come from the west, you'll come from the east, see you at the base of the ridge".