nolanr

Climazalot, did you find any trace of a snow cave near the summit? Might have been a little bit of booty left in there.

My buddies were the party stuck on top and they did summit via N. Ridge. They drove w/in 2 or 3 miles of the TH I think. The snow was sloppy lower on the route, higher up it was wind blasted and solid. Based on their experience, definitely wait for good weather on this one.

Just my $.02 or so. Red Monk, granted some people are lulled into a false sense of security carrying cell phones or radios and might try routes beyond their capabilities. I think this is probably a minority of climbers. Regarding my friends on Baker, THEY DID NOT CALL IN A RESCUE. The rescue operation got underway without their knowledge after they had made radio contact. About half-a-dozen different SAR outfits showed up, they all wanted to be there and help in any way they could. My friends were not selfishly burdening society. In fact the rescuers were TOTALLY STOKED that this one was in fact a rescue, not a body recovery. They were taking pictures of my buddies and everything. Also, someone else has mentioned it, but totally competent, talented, and fit climbers can and do get into trouble. It may be momentary poor judgement, but sometimes it is due to situations totally beyond their control. Objective dangers exist and sometimes shit happens even when you are being totally cautious and aware of your surroundings. I ususally carry a cell phone w/ me, I have it turned off so people can't call me. It's there for my emergency use. I've never needed to use it. It doesn't in any way make me feel invincible or give me free license to take ridiculous chances. You're obviously entitled to your opinion and I'm even agreeing w/ it to a limited degree, but I think you're overstating the effect that modern communication devices have on the mentality of climbers. OK, that was probably more than $.02, but I'm done now.

Ditto on Milanos. And damn did they have some hotties working there on my last visit!

Thanks. I bailed on the trip, I'll save it for later. The snow is crap right now where I've been in the Cascades, I wouldn't expect it to be significantly better over there. No ski gear. I have snowshoes, but it's almost friggin' June already, those guys should be set aside until next winter.

I'm not even going to try to recap the whole story. Let me point out, although all of us already know this, that media reports sometimes contain glaring inaccuracies. The climbing community gets ahold of the media reports and the second guessing insues. The radios were those little talk-about thingies, Motorola 2 way radios or whatever. They're only supposed to have a range of about 2 miles but the ham radio operator picked them up approx. 60 miles away. Their primary reason for trying to make contact w/ the outside world was that one of the guys is married and he just wanted to get a message to his wife to let her know they were okay but were going to be stuck on the mountain overnight. It wasn't a case of "Mommy, come save us!" They didn't even know there was a SAR operation underway until Tues. morning. It turns out that was very fortunate, they were not in real good shape by then. They felt like they could have gotten all the way down on their own Monday if the weather conditions were better, but the night in the snow cave really took it out of them. They said all of the SAR guys were awesome. Here's to SAR. One of the guys WAS big into the Mark Twight fast and light principals. Not anymore. He's going to have a book burning festival, and Twight is going to be the featured author. That stuff just leaves a very slim margin for error, and when weather conditions get real bad it's pretty dicey. He's going to start taking bivi gear along on cragging trips now. Not really, but a few extra pounds of lightweight sleeping bags or bivi sacks would've been worth more than their weight in gold for the guys Mon. night. Anyway, I saw both of them on Wednesday, they're pretty worn out but recovering, humbled, doing some rethinking of the whole climbing thing, but I don't think either of them is going to totally quit doing it. Maybe no more 1 day pushes on volcanoes, at least. And I know all of you are sitting there thinking "That'll never happen to me, 'cause I'm smarter, or a better climber, or make better decisions, or whatever." That's exactly what they always thought until Monday. Just keep that in mind. It really can happen to anybody. I'm just so thankful it didn't turn out the way it did for the climbers on Rainier.

I'm a hick, and I actually got to build a little bit of fence like that while worker for some ranchers during summerbreaks in high school. Yee haw, little doggies.

Yeah, about that weather forecast. I canceled a weekend long backpacking trip 'cause I didn't wanna get rained on for 3 days. The one day I was in the mountains (Sat., Gothic Basin) rained a little and had fairly low cloud cover. Sun. and Mon. were pretty good until Monday night. My point was...I have no point. Seriously, the weather forecast didn't turn out to be very accurate and I don't think they were predicting Monday night to be anywhere near as stormy as it turned out. Next second-guesser, step right up.

Charlie, Sadly I did not get into the climbing thing until after college, so I have no knowledge of the sick phat boulder problem in the corner of the Tav. Is it like 5.12 when intoxicated, 5.2 when sober? Ah, Eburg, you gotta love it when the wind is just right and it wafts that wonderful aroma all over campus from surrounding dairies and/or slaughterhouses that just about knocks you flat on your ass!

I got your info, looks like the second guessing hasn't gotten too bad yet. Those are my buddies and climbing partners. They went up N. Ridge, traveling light and fast, planning to do car to car on Monday. No bivy gear to speak of. From what I understand, beyond a certain point on the N. Ridge backtracking isn't a very good option. Continuing to summit and descending Coleman-Deming route is standard. I haven't got to talk to them yet, haven't got the full story. It does seem like they were on the summit pretty late, but again if descending down the N. Ridge wasn't an option, continuing on might've been their only option. I believe they were just starting to descend when the weather got really ugly. They dug a snowcave and hunkered down for the night. Good to hear they're doing fine now and were chowing down at Taco Bell in B-ham as of about 30 minutes ago. Can't believe they had an epic without me. Again I don't know all the details, but I can tell you they're experienced climbers, they're not reckless, and they're not idiots. Anybody can find themselves in a bad situation. I'm just glad they're OK.

October can be good too. Ditto on Del Campo, several other good options in that vicinity off the Mt. Loop Highway. And I'm about to head down to the good 'ol Sierras for a week, I've had about enough clouds, rain, and crappy snow for the time being. We need a little emoticon thingy of a guy crying 'cause I realize I'm whining just a bit there.

Is an OR Sitka Sombrero okay? Charlie, what are you doing at the Tav? All the chicks are over at the Mint. I guess that's okay if you enjoy a sausage fest. At least that's the way it was when I was in E-burg.

We scared the shit out of one of our buddies one time, he was sleeping in his rig in the Longmire parking lot. We banged on the window and yelled "You can't park here!" He woke up thinking he was busted for sure.

Words can't even describe it. My buddy and I had the, uh, pleasure of stumbling upon the Seattle Mounties doing a scramble course up at Mt. Erie on Saturday. There must've been 50, 60, I don't know, a hundred of them swarming over every square inch of low angle rock. It was the most incredible conflageration I've ever witnessed. Now I tried to understand, some people don't have any experience w/ rock or w/ exposure or they have a low tolerance for risk or whatever. But I think all the stuff the instructors were instructing is pretty damn intuitive, I'm sure I was doing that when I was an 8 year old kid. Anyway, it gave us some good chuckles. You had to see it w/ your own eyes to believe it.

We intended to climb the Mole on Sunday, bailed on it part way up the approach due to wet rock w/ high probability of continued wet rock, making the slog up there not worth it. If you head up Hook Creek early enough in the spring can you kick steps in snow most of the way and avoid the nasty evil bushwacking?

You can see Gothic, too. Sounds like a good trip.

That's because the Mounties were having a scramble class at Mt. Erie on Saturday. Funniest damn thing I've ever seen. I couldn't help it, I started smirking and laughing out loud a couple times in the midst of them. After wandering around aimlessly for awhile we ended up climbing at Upper Wall, had it to ourselves, just had to watch out for falling climbing helmets from our Mountie friends above us.

I went to a slide show by Ed Viesturs a while ago, and I asked him if he thought things had changed any since '96. He said not really. 55 people on the summit in one day? What a frickin' zoo. If conditions had deteriorated rapidly, it would've been just like '96 all over again, too many people up there, bottle necks at certain parts of the routes, take too long to retreat off the mountain. When are they going to install a gondola to the top like those industrious Europeans have done in the Alps?

Anybody been around there lately? I'm thinking of heading up that way for Memorial Day weekend. Only I'm thinking of taking a slightly different approach so I don't have to mess w/ ONP permit crap.

Agreed, snowshoes weren't necessary. Daylward, was that you heading down the road on a mountain bike Sat. evening? If so, I passed you going uphill in the green Sub. wagon. Had an almost meeting w/ a fellow cc.comer. I saw several ladies hanging around the parking lot for quite a while 'til the bike guy came back w/ a car to pick them up. I left them alone, honest. I crashed at the TH that night. [ 05-16-2002, 06:22 PM: Message edited by: nolanr ]

About the lady paying the climber dude...performance artist maybe? Thought he was some poor starving to death college student? I dunno either.

SE Buttress of Cuthroat Peak is pretty cool, a lot less traffic than the other side of the Hwy (Lib. Bell/EW Spires). About 11 or so pitches, up to 5.8, some pitches are just picking your way up sandy ledges, some of the pitches are pretty sweet rock. If you leave gear at the saddle at the beginning of the rock climbing, get it up off of the ground. A bastard marmot ate the tops off of my boots and chewed up some of my packstraps.

Death to all snowmobilers.

Went up to Colchuck L. on Sunday. Snow was mixture of fairly firm and mushy. Worst part was picking my way thru the woods after the trail split and crossing Mountaineer Creek and getting up to the lake. Lots of punching thru, falling into moats around downed trees, muttering to myself, etc. After a little bit more of the same contouring around the lake, noticed tracks going across the lake, decided I might just try that. Poked at it w/ my trekking poles, kicked at it, weighted it, seemed fine, so I cruised around fairly close to shore. Frozen solid still. Some tracks went almost directly across the middle of the lake. Saw a bunch of people descending from Aasgard later, so it must go. I went up to Dragontail/Colchuck Col. Snow fairly mushy on top, more solid underneath, didn't see any significant slides while I was up there. Freakin' awesome 2000+' sit down glisade from the Col back to the lake, almost a straight shot, barely had to walk at all on the way down. After tagging Colchuck, walk up on snow at this point.

There's some more technical routes on Sperry, I've never done them, just a 3rd classy kind of brushy scramble up from the saddle between Vesper and Sperry. Makes for a nice day tagging both. Vesper gets way more traffic. I climbed Sperry in '96 and then again in '00 or so, and it was still the same summit register on top! That's a cool lake basin up there and nice slabs at the headwall of the basin.