[TR] North Cascades - Vesper and the bachelor 9/1/2007

[AlpineK]

Trip: North Cascades - Vesper and the bachelor

 

Date: 9/1/2007

 

Trip Report:

A good friend of mine is going to get married in a couple weeks, and he wanted to do a couple day backpack trip into a nice area where folks could drink beer ( and other stuff ) and some of the group could go climbing. There was a total of between 20 and 30 people on this trip and about 4 poodles. Keep in mind this was mostly a party, but we did make an attempt to do a climb while we were there. Of the large group there were 4 real climbers and a number of folks doing some scrambling in the area.

 

1 mailman and 2 tree guys one of whom is the bachelor

 

Dave the dogs and the bbq

 

 

The scramble to the north side went pretty smoothly and we got some nice views.

 

The north side of Vesper

 

Since after my mishap last year I've been trying to take it easy, and so I went up there figuring I'd be following and not leading. 2 of our group had been here before, so I left the route finding to them. As it turns out we got on the face a little too early and what was suppose to be a 5.5 turned rapidly into a 5.5d

 

A little higher on the route our only way up got significantly harder than 5.5d and we decided that we were up there to party and not do a rad FA. To add to that we found a number of rap anchors where others had bailed off that route.

 

We rapped back to the glacier and hiked back to the notch and then down to the party.

 

A small sample of the fun.

 

Don't get to worked up about the mess. We packed out everything we packed in. Under normal conditions I wouldn't recommend using these tactics to climb, but given that our friend is soon to be married it seemed just fine to me and a much better way to celebrate than going to the strip club.

 

Gear Notes:

Standard rock gear. Crampons are nice too.

 

Approach Notes:

The trail in is an above average hike. The glacier on the north side is pretty broken up and there is a difficult moat to cross.

[G-spotter]

 

Did u ever think that with all the arborists in the party maybe u should traverse off the clean slabs onto a nearby bush line?

[AlpineK]

We could have easily sent the scramble up route on the ridge, but we were looking for the technical route. There weren't any vertical tree lines on the North side.

[carolyn]

Poodles and a blow-up doll! Wonder what kind of route finding they could have done.

 

Glad to see you are getting out when you can and enjoying yourself. keep it up!

[AlpineK]

The blow up doll didn't come out till after we got back from our failed climb. I'd post her picture, but that didn't seem appropriate on a web site. It is a good picture though.

 

All in all it was a fun trip despite our failure at climbing.