"Winter"* Ascent - Yak Check

[wayne]

Suffering in the full conditions of the winter that wasnt, Yak peak allowed itself to be climbed by the Yak Check route. Bothered by only the occasional drip,verglass,and snow pile,Lane and I enjoyed just being in the sun and not being roasted by it.( Cant wait till this summer ,when we really will be scorched.) I am sure with a typical winter this route, with its friction and water cracks, would be almost impossible unless you were Polish. What I found to be the best part of this route was the variety of the directions we had to go. Route finding and the climb in general was never boring.This winter* ascent was not a statement of our winter climbing skills,more a statement to the burning of fossil fuels for the last century or so.

 

* post global-warming ascent, not an actual winter.

[Dru]

Some guys from UCC did make a full winter conditions ascent, I think of Yak Crack not Yak Check, drytooling, thin ice and crampons on rock/snow/verglas the whole way, a couple of years ago.

[wayne]

woah,ok, Polish or Canadian. I will bet there are ice streaks that form on the thing.

 

Dru, what the deal with the Flatirorn,north face ?

[Dru]

The north face of Flatiron is barely 2 pitches high when you finally get over there. I only went once and the snow was melting, water was running down in streaks and we didn't climb anything.

 

There is often a huge flow of thin ice that forms from the bowl between the subsummit Yak Check finishes on, and the main summit of Yak. But it gets so sun rotted that it is still unclimbed... I watched 100m of it fall off all at once in early Feb.