North Twin Sister, West Ridge

[mattp]

On this hot summer weekend, I climbed North Twin with a bunch of sweaty old men. We opted to make a one-day trip into two so we could spend a night in the great outdoors, and this allowed for a relaxed pace. After a leisurely departure and a couple of stops on the road, we arrived at the gate on the Nooksack River at something like 2:00 p.m., and a guy in a work truck was perfectly pleasant about it as he passed through and re-locked the gate, but it was clear that he wasn't going to let us drive any further.

 

The legendary "labyrinth" of logging roads between the gate and the peak was not all that confusing. Simply hike up the main road 2.5 miles (a 2.5 mile marker about a hundred yards before the proper turn-off is a pretty obvious clue as to how far you've gone), and then take the side road up toward what is shown on the maps as "Daily Prairie." Follow this road, taking all choices that appear to be heading you slightly up-hill but not sharply uphill, until you get pretty much directly below the peak. The correct turn-off is presently marked with a cairn and somebody has recently done some brushing on the first couple hundred yards of this spur road. Follow it to the end, and a trail heads up through the top of the clearcut and onto the West Ridge.

 

I was surprised to find my friends resistant when I lead the way off the trail toward "Shangri La Meadows" at 4100 feet near the base of the climb. Apparently, these guys thought there was no reason to leave a perfectly good trail to crawl through the logging slash and camp at a meadow that was in reality a mosquito-infested swamp, but I regained at least some stature when I pulled three pounds of lamb out of my pack and we cooked a meal packed with iron to replace what was being donated to the local mosquito population.

 

The West Ridge proved to be everything we hoped it would be: an easy ridge scramble with just enough exposure to know we were on something, and the views were stunning. One member of our party who has never been rock-climbing requested a belay for a short 50 foot section near the top, and soon enough Team Sweaty made it to the summit. During the descent, we ran into a younger climber who informed us that we were idiots to be down-climbing the route, because it would be (he said) so much easier to "slide on your butt 2,000 feet" than to do all that down-climbing. I don't know where he was going to find his 2,000 foot snow slide, as I had checked out the north-side descent and much of it was melted out to scree, and I noticed that he had two tools on his pack, a 50 cm ice axe and 50 cm ice hammer, neither of which were the right tool for his butt slide (in my opinion, short tools are slightly dangerous for glissading because it is way too easy to stick yourself with the spike when using them for a self arrest). I was tempted to offer my own free advice, but bit my lip and continued down. As is always the case on non-technical terrain, we found that scrambling down the ridge was much easier than expected and even the short "hard" places were easier to descend than they had been to climb up, and team sweaty made it down off the mountain with ease.

 

[Quien_Sabe]

Nicely done Matt!

So how are your fingers after all that rough rock?

 

[plexus]

I've ripped out the ass on my shorts on the descent on that nice grippy rock.

 

A point to make about the North Side. If there isn't any snow, don't do it!!! It's loose as all hell and pretty crappy. My wife and I did it in August and we made the mistake of following some cairns away from the ridge. It has been the only time my wife has been scared climbing, because it was absolute shite and a pretty good drop-off at one section. After doing a 5.7 mantle up to the final shelf, I realized any more forward progress would create an avalanche of debris. So backtracked and got on the ridge.

 

I have descended the North Slope with snow in May and it is definitely worth it then, just not after July.

[scot'teryx]

my fingers felt like I went bouldering in bishop for 2 weeks straight after the ascent and descent of the n ridge

[raindog]

I'd recommend a pair of those cheap,close fitting,rubberized gardening gloves for this route/rock.Used a pair for this route a couple of years ago and felt like spiderman.

[iain]

well if we're going to revive old threads, I recommend a mountain bike for this one.

[scot'teryx]

I'd recommend a pair of those cheap,close fitting,rubberized gardening gloves for this route/rock.

 

Rubberized gardening gloves are AID

[Bill_Simpkins]

The first time I went up this my hands felt like hamburger.

I havn't had that problem the last few times. Just used my hands less.