[TR] Ruth - 11/21/2004

[AJScott]

Climb: Ruth -

 

Date of Climb: 11/21/2004

 

Trip Report:

Tried to ski Ruth mountain on sunday, but the weather did not hold. I wanted to post to let people know that there is some carnage on the hannegan pass road, and to share some photos. We left saturday morning from Glacier, and were dropped off at 9 here:

 

 

Here was some SERIOUS tree carnage like I have never seen. It looks like it was caused by a huge gust of wind shooting straight down into the forest. It wasnt like one big tree falling over, and pushing several trees over, this was just a massive circle of trees that had been blown over in different directions. It was really odd, and worth driving up to check out if you live close by. I wish I had taken more photos. Anyways, it added an extra 1.5 miles for us to the trail head, we were able to put on our skis and skin for about half of the distance. Then we made it to the trail head and were excited to finally get going.

 

 

We had plans to sleep somewhere up high to get some good views, but we werent planning on the road being out, so it took a lot of work to get up to the saddle on Ruth, up from Hannegan Pass. Clouds started rolling in and it looked pretty bleak. We had just enough light to set up the tent and get situated. During the night the clouds cleared, and we looked like we had a good shot for the next day. We woke to clear skies, but there was some gnarly weather ah' brewin' to the west and it was headed our way. We got going as fast as we could, heading up the ridge that leads to the large schrunds near the top.

 

 

The winds really started to pick up, and the visibilty starting going down. We had a dog with us, and no ropes...so we decided to play it safe, with a full on white out slowly dropping on us. We tried to ski back to camp, which was entertaining, as the three of us are snowboarders, Jake on a split board, that was too frozen to get back in to board mode. Adam on three pin straight ski's. And me on my new AT setup (now an ex-snowboarder.) We broke down camp and found out how fun it is to try and ski with big packs on, during a brief section of 45 degree slope we managed to break jakes binding on his split board. And Adam broke his ski right behind his heel, as well as shattering both of his ski poles into 7 pieces. We were able to rig up Jakes board, and get outta there, the white out continued to chase us down hill, and the weather got really warm out, causing a few concerns for avy's, but we made it out o.k.

 

[thelawgoddess]

sounds like it was a little rough on the gear, but at leat y'all are alright! yum ... snow ... yum.