[TR] Darrington - Dreamer 5/29/2005

[cman]

Climb: Darrington -Dreamer

 

Date of Climb: 5/29/2005

 

Trip Report:

KJ and i did dreamer on sunday. after doing some 4 wheelin', or as much as i have done with the subaru, we got to that base of the climb right as the sun start to come out of the cloud. a party was already on the route so thanks to them and matt's free topo routefinding was not a problem.

sun started baking us, i have the sunburn to prove it, and the slabs felt greasy.

the undercling pitches were great, and i was thankful we brought a full rack. it was a great day, except my wife was a little pissed when i got home at 11pm, screwed up our diner plans.

 

Gear Notes:

full rack was nice

 

Approach Notes:

dry

[catbirdseat]

I've climbed it on a hot day and I have climbed it in the rain. In the rain it get's really slick but you don't get as thirsty as when it is hot and sunburn isn't as much of a problem.

[mattp]

Saturday was way too hot up there. Sunday was much better and yesterday even better. You guys did well to stick with it -- most partiest roast off the thing on a day like Saturday.

[cman]

luckily for us it cooled off in the afternoon, right when i finished all my water, i had to put my jacket on for the last couple pitches. it actually started to mist a little just when we started to hike out, perfect timing.

[kenp]

nice job and perfect timing! I've been cooked to the bone twice up there. Were you able to drive to the TH?

[Dustin_B]

Saturday was way too hot up there. Sunday was much better and yesterday even better. You guys did well to stick with it -- most partiest roast off the thing on a day like Saturday.

 

Hmmm. yep, I'll have to remember that for next time... We were on Blueberry route on Saturday. It was hot but there was an occasional cool breeze. I ran out of water on about pitch 3-4. yada, yada, yada. When I stood up and shouldered my pack to begin the hike down the granite sidewalk I was stumbling and almost puking and slurring words. On the bright side we had the route to ourselves..... (we stopped at Blueberry Terrace as we didn't have the time/energy/water to make it to the top). good times, sort of.

 

Mattp - you had a sweet little campsite there!

[mattp]

I might have run into you if I'd taken my eight year old nephew up the Granite Sidewalk as I had planned. I had thought he might enjoy a scramble up to that "frog pond" 3/4 the way up. Instead, we went over to 3:00 rock and he did a couple of 5.5 pitches right off the ground.

[thelawgoddess]

i still gotta get up there and try that route some day!

[cman]

i have an subaru outback and we were able to drive to about 7 1/4 miles, where it says the road gets rough, right before a huge puddle. we only had to walk about 5 minutes to the end of the road.

[Dirtyleaf]

What size's of gear did you use? Any pieces you wish you would've brought?

[mattp]

Much of the climb is bolt-protected, but you should bring one piece of every size up to 4", and on the first of the two 5.9 overlap pitches you should hoard you bigger pieces like the #1 - 4 camelots for the "blue crack" (a gold flake). If not, you'll likely use the #1 and #2 lower on that pitch, but you can just as easily use smaller gear if you know to do so.

 

I'd carry five or six stoppers to 3/4" and cams from tiny TCU or Aliens to Camelot #4, but no doubles. Bring at least a couple long runners, and favor trippled up shoulder-lengths over quick-draws. If you plan to rappel the route (most people do), you'll definitely need two ropes.

[chucK]

Where do you use a #4? I think a #3 Camalot was the largest I've placed on Dreamer.

 

Double ropes are useful cause there's some crazy traversing and retraversing on a pitch or two.

[mattp]

I use that #4 in the "blue crack," and if my memory is correct, you'll still have to "run it out" slightly by modern standards even with the #4(it is maybe 10-15 feet from the highest #4 place to the anchor but it is only 5.5). I tink the #3 will fit maybe 6-8 feet below that.

 

The rope drag problems on those pitches can easily be solved by breaking them up. I once suggested moving the belays because they are in poor locations from a rope-management standpoint, but if you are careful you can get by how it is, or you can simply break up the pitches. If you stop and belay at the bottom of the Blue Crack, and then pass by the next hanging belay but stop and belay after the next undercling, you'll eliminate most of the potential problem.

[cman]

i placed a #3.5 in the blue crack, but it mostly took #2 & #3. i got pretty bad rope drag on both the undercling pitches. we were using double ropes but i was clipping them together. guess i will be smarter the next time.

how do you prevent your rope from getting stuck on the second undercling? i placed gear sparingly and used long runners but still the rope got wedged and i had to lower off the bolts and pull it out. on the plus side i got to climb most of that cool pitch twice.

[mattp]

An easy way to prevent that problem on the second pitch is to stop and belay right there. This is rarely done but, when you get yourself in trouble by not doing so you would probably have saved time if you'd just stopped there in the first place.

 

If you and your partner are very careful, you can avoid placing pro after that downward flake on less than a very long runner and then flick the rope above the thing when you start climbing more upward again, but then your partner really has to watch to give you enought slack so you can move but not so much that it falls back into the jaws.

[Toast]

Is this the one you're talking about?

[slothrop]

Cool photo! Matt, are you saying you'd belay right where the climber is?

[mattp]

Slop -

If you are worried about the flakes, the offenders are the one he's trying to clear in the photo, one slightly less prominent about 5 feet above, and the one visible directly above him. If you know about it, you can keep your rope out of them but it is tricky and it requires using very long slings or skippin pro altogether in the area where he is now, avoiding pro where he starts up again until you can place a very long runner up high, and keeping the belay rope tight after he gets onto the face above. I have't actually tried this, but I bet it would be most efficient just to stop and belay at the base of the blue crack, and then to bypass the hanging station above and set a second belay near where the climber is shown in this photo.

[chucK]

One time when we did it, the leader took a roll of tape out of his pocket and jammed it in there. Kept the rope out, and I cleaned the tape on second!

 

I wonder what kind of uproar it would cause if someone took a couple of wooden doorstops up there and pounded 'em in the rope eaters?

[catbirdseat]

No comment, but amusing premise.

[Dru]

looks like a #1 bigbro would work as well.

[Buckaroo]

Me and Ed H. did this on June 9th. It was sort of wet, the wettest spot being the crux undercling pitch above the blue crack. This climb is underated, it comes pretty close to Outer Space and it's longer.

 

Noticed a newer variation of the 8th pitch, says runnout in Nelson's, there's a bolt line on the left of the dihedral through some knobs.

 

The blue crack pitch goes with a number 3 because it gets easy above it, and there's so many easy runnouts on this climb you get used to it. This is a good pitch to practice your gear skills to avoid rope drag. Rapping down this pitch this time was a trip, the rope end went in a hole at the bottom of the blue crack and came out at the undercling below, holding the breath pulling it out, luckily it didn't get stuck.

 

On the rap down look out for the rope eater cracks/flakes on the 4th pitch, I believe they are part of Giants Tears. The first time I did it the rope got caught and when looking down the crack there was 5 cut off rope ends inside. Fiddled with the rope for several minutes and before cutting it off, yarded as hard as possible, it popped out. It was a good day.

 

The Nelson topo is inaccurate at the start, it shows a right facing dihedral. There are no right facing dihedrals anywhere on this part of the face, but there are several left facing ones. Don't miss the rock approach gully, it's fully canopied by brush at the bottom, any other way is total bushwhack.

 

The road is getting quite overgrown, don't take a nice car, or one with too low ground clearance, the Civic made it but had to go slow.

[mattp]

Sorry about the outdated information in Nelson's book. I should have helped him update it for the new edition.

 

Meanwhile, here's a topo for Dreamer:

 

Darrington web page at www.seanet.com/~mattp/Darr

[Buckaroo]

""Sorry about the outdated information in Nelson's book. I should have helped him update it for the new edition.""

 

No worries mate, I think Nelson does that sometimes just to weed out the gumbies. If you can't find the route with betamin maybe you shouldn't be on it.

 

Nice topo, I always wondered why that fourth pitch was so sandbagged. Dohhh, we were doing a variation!!

[mattp]

I have known very few parties to do the original 5th pitch in years (I assume you are talking about the pitch before the "Blue Crack" pitch); the original is much easier but runout, and thus modern climbers uniformly opt for the crack leading upward whereas, in the early days of the climb, I think most climbers instincitively followed the lower angled and heavily featured original line.