mwcjak Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 (edited) Trip: McClellan Butte - North Gully. Date: 1/19/2011 Trip Report: With a bluebird day, unprecedentedly low avalanche danger and brutal ski conditions, Jonah and I decided to climb the N Gully of McClellan Butte and found phenomenal snow conditions. Our boots sunk in a bit in the lower section but a few hundred feet up avalanches had swept off everything soft leaving hard snow that only our points penetrated. We climbed most of the way up unroped but did a running belay on the last few hundred feet to work out the kinks in our system before getting onto the summit scramble. From our final tree belay about 50' below the summit we decided to turn back because the last bit looked more intimidating than we had hoped. With just a few stoppers and pickets we were afraid of reaching an impasse and then having no protection opportunities. We pulled out or second rope, did six or so rappels, then downclimbed the trees on climbers left of the gully back to the trail, rapping once more on the way. A few things I learned: Do more French steps and less front pointing, don't hit yourself in the knee with your ice pick while chopping a stance so you can take a picture and eat/drink a little more during the ascent. All and all a terrific day! At some point with, softer snow, I would like to put on my man pants an return to the gully with skis. Gear Notes: Axe, 2 30m ropes (longer ropes would have been nice on the descent),pickets, trees, and crampons. I tested the conventional wisdom that vertical front points perform poorly in snow by wearing mono-point G-14s. I'd need to reclimb it in similar snow conditions with horizontal front points to be sure, but preliminary results suggest that indeed the wisdom holds true. Approach Notes: Snowshoes, and choosing where to leave the trail (~3,500 ft) would have been difficult without an altimeter. Edited January 20, 2011 by mwcjak Quote
chubler Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 Did you take any photos of the top pitch? How did it look - ice/snow/mixed?? Thanks. Quote
mwcjak Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 I tried to upload photos from my computer earlier but that didn't work, lets see if I can upload them from Picasa... It looked like rock plastered with shallow, hard snow. I'm sure there are tons of people out there who would go for it without batting an eyelash, but I'm not one of them yet. Jonah about halfway up the gully. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689652965476434[/img] The summit block. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689664620811874[/img] The final section that we didn't do. [img:left]http://picasaweb.google.com/mattwcallahan/McClellanButte#5564689673402709458[/img] Quote
mwcjak Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 Shoot, I'm having trouble getting the images to show, at least if anyone's really interested they can copy and past the url to the photos in picasa. Quote
genepires Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 nice looking snow conditions. thanks for the TR. there must be an easy way to post the pictures from another website like you tried. Prolly just a couple of commands needed. I usually download to the photo library. Quote
genepires Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 I know somewhere on this site shows how to post photos. Maybe the newbie section? Quote
mwcjak Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 (edited) Thanks for the tip Genepires! Ok now that I got them uploaded they're still irritatingly tiny. Edited January 21, 2011 by mwcjak Quote
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