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Ptarmigan Traverse in 2 days?


Alex

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It takes almost half the day just to do the car shuttle. I'd much rather bivy on the route than in the parking lot just for the privilege of being able to do it in two days. But if you don't care whether you see much of it while you travel in the dark, why bivy at all?

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Last week some friends and I did the Ptarmigan Traverse in 6 days. We smoked a buch of pot, drank a bunch of booze, and I remember some mushrooms too. we climbed a few peaks too.

 

Scot'corplogo would have flipped right the fuck out, but we had a great time.

 

6 days is way more fun than 2 sucker. [Wink]

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Hey, nobody said 2 days was cooler than 6. No reason to go all hostile. I set out to do it in 5 days but we got stormed on the second day and bailed back out the same way. I'd like to try it in 2 days. It would be way fun - it's just seriously cool to cover so much ground, plus it's nice to find out whether you can actually pull it off... After all, the weekend warrior only gets so many chances for 5-6 day trips in the season, but 2 day trips can be pulled off more easily [Wink]

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  • 4 months later...

What you would see in two days..your feet, the crevasses on the upper Cascade glacier, where the hell the red ledge is.... confused.gif

 

I'm researching on doing the traverse with a few friends this summer, including one that did it this past summer. True the crux of the whole trip is getting five (hell even three) days of no rain, but just don't understand why anybody would want to blaze through that area...it truly is a once-in-a-lifetime trip if you do it right.

 

What I'm looking forward to is getting Mixup again and Dome and Sentinal... bigdrink.gif

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Last summer Joe S. and Andrew W. were able to complete the entire traverse on foot in fifteen hours. They wore approach shoes and each carried a single ski pole with a whippet on it. They did it in mid-August so there was no snow on any of the trail portions.

 

They certainly were interested in doing it fast, but that was only part of it. Their work schedules simply didn't permit them to take multiple days to do it.

 

Joe guided the traverse a couple weeks before the two of them decided to do it fast. Previous knowledge of the area certainly helped with their speedy traverse.

 

Jason

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Dumpster Diver,

 

The Ptarmigan Traverse is mostly glacier walking and high trails. This is not spray. The traverse has been done several times in a day by several parties.

 

The standard traverse goes below and between most of the major peaks and doesn't go over them. As a result, doing it in a day generally doesn't entail any peak bagging.

 

Jason

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jason,

 

i thought the original traverse(aka the traverse) ascend some of the peaks that it crosses paths with. so not climbing the peaks is not actually doing THE ptarmigan traverse. just hiking it is more like hiking up the back side of half dome. so they did a nice long traversing hike and not a nice long travering climb.

 

either way, am sure everyone had fun.

 

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That doesn't really sound like the entire traverse to me.

 

I'm not discrediting anyone and their accomplishments except when they might claim to do something they did not. Maybe what you really meant to say is something like "my friends completed a variation or version of the Ptarmigan Traverse in 2 days. This was completed from a to b with this many summits." ??

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....but just don't understand why anybody would want to blaze through that area...

 

I can certainly understand why people might want to take a long time to do a traverse like this, but going fast has other advantages, even beyond merely not having time in your life schedule to do a more-than-two-day trip. For example, the feeling of covering a lot of ground quickly, not being burdened by heavy gear, even the fact that you're taking a bigger risk by being out there without backup or equipment to stay a long time to ride out a storm or whatever.

 

I don't buy the idea that when you move fast you don't see anything. In a landscape that big, even if you're at a dead sprint the views don't move by so quickly that you can't see them. Sure, there are a few things you miss, but there are more things you miss by walking instead of crawling & examining everything with a microscope. And in many cases, if you move quickly you can actually see more, because it can allow you to go places you wouldn't have time to go if you were moving slowly.

 

There is as much virtue in speed as there is in any other approach; its just a matter of what's important to you.

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