[TR] Needle Peak- West Ridge 2/11/2005

[Dru]

Climb: Needle Peak-West Ridge

 

Date of Climb: 2/11/2005

 

Trip Report:

At around 11PM last night I made a spontaneous decision to bail from work today and go climbing instead.

 

By the time I woke up it was 10AM, so much for the plan to take a quick solo spin up the North Couloir on Slesse* I decided to head up to Coquihalla Pass. I had both skis and snowshoes and ice tools in the car because of 3 different destinations in mind.

 

By the time I got to the Needle pullout it was noon so I decided to just go for a snowshoe up Needle Peak. There is about 30cm of heavy freshiez well bonded on top of a super solid ice layer.

 

I wandered around trying not to destroy the skiers uptrack and checked out the ice formed up under the NF before heading up the west ridge. It was kind of icy and I started to wish I had crampons on for the summit pyramid but I managed to get through Ok by hopping from rock to rock, and scratching steps with my shovel handle

 

"Summit or die" - well I didn't die so I summitted. It was a really nice day bluebird sky and no one else on the mountain

 

On the way back down I practiced tele turns as my snowshoes slid out on the ice layer. I'm really glad I didnt ski this as I would be wrapped around a tree somewhere instead of home drinking beer

 

Got back to the car just at sunset in time to see a 100m long chunk of ice slide down the slabs on Yak Do not climb on Yak on sunny winter days!

 

 

Gear Notes:

Snowshoes

Aluminum crampons would have been nice

 

Approach Notes:

Highway 5 to pass

Snowshoe up West Ridge trail

Freshiez

 

 

*Please note sarcasm here

[Dru]

photo

[AlpineK]

nice photo.

 

No snow

[Dru]

There's never any snow on Yak....

Trust me, there's snow up there right now

30cms of freshiez with surface hoar in the valley bottom yesterday, and it snowed at the pass today too.

[Dru]

Here's another photo of the Ibex-steinbok group

[AlpineK]

Yeah 30 cm of snow...that's huge dude.

[Dru]

30 cm of fresh.

there was probably about 1m of base

[AlpineK]

The Lower Fraser had well below normal snowpacks as of February 1, with a Snow Water Index of only 40% of normal. This is a substantial reduction from the January 1 index value. The extremely low snowpack levels throughout the lower Fraser result, in part, from the significant melt and runoff experienced during mid-January, when an intense Pacific frontal system moved onto the south coast, producing high rainfall and elevated freezing levels.

 

Anyway I'm sure you're right Dru because you have the more energy to post.

[Ponzini]

Skied the eastern side of the bowl below the North Face several times on the weekend - steep solid snow and lots of it.

[Dru]

From down in the bottom of the bowl did you climb back up to the ridge to come out or just head down the creek to the highway?

[Ponzini]

We didn't ski right to the bottom, there's a cliff line that you run into about 600 feet down (so we came back up to the ridge). There's only two lines through the cliffs (that I've found) and they're both hard - each time I've skied them there's been mandatory air.

 

Currently, they are thin WI2!

[Dru]

Yeah or you can traverse way, way way north thru the trees and then drop down too I think.

[Ponzini]

Yeah, that'd probably work...

 

By the way, what's the peak to the left of the Ibex group with the big shady face? I've climbed Needle 11 times myself and haven't noticed it....something near Breckenridge? Or mabye the Scuzzy area?

[Dru]

yeah that's Scuzzy, it looks closer because of the camera zoom.

[jimmyleg66]

Hey Dru,

You don't just have to look out for those sunny days on Yak just in the Winter. Last June we were rappping off Yak-Check and just as I finished the second to last rappel, a Greyhound bus sized chunk of snow/ice at the base ripped out and slid down into the forrest. If we were five minutes faster, one of us would have gone for a ride. Saw the same thing on a smaller scale happen on Vicuna the year before.