[TR] Goode Mountain - NE Buttress 8/12/2016

[Todd Anderson]

Trip: Goode Mountain - NE Buttress

 

Date: 8/12/2016

 

Trip Report:

David officially became a PhD candidate on Thursday, so we went out to the Knarr Bar to get smashed and play shuffleboard. Then on Friday morning we left to go climb Goode Mountain.

 

We had both read a lot of TRs of Goode over the last month or so, but we forgot to print anything out and didn't bring a map, so navigation was based on foggy hangover memory. Somehow we totally nailed the approach to bivy at 5400'-ish; we definitely found the "magical alder tunnels" that Ilia S. refers to in his TR. It was sunset when we found a good bivy site, which was not large enough for the Firstlight. The Firstlight did make a good pillow, though.

 

We slept in on Day 2 and awakened when a party of 4 tromped past us on their way up. Shit, they're going to take the summit bivy! They got a solid hour head start on us, but we eventually made it up the rest of the slabs and onto the glacier. The cracks are pretty big, but we found a way that started a ways east on the glacier that didn't involve any ice climbing or crack-jumping.

 

 

 

The moat was deep near the toe of the buttress, but maybe only 5 feet deep and easy to downclimb where we got on rock, i.e. slightly uphill and east (climber's left) of the buttress toe.

 

 

The glacier was definitely making worrying noises, and the north face was dropping bombs pretty frequently later in the day, so an earlier start probably would have been a good idea. I don't think we made it onto the rock until almost 10 AM because of our late start.

 

Getting onto the ridge crest was kind of dicey, since the rock was extremely loose. We belayed two short pitches until we gained the crest, then simuled probably 500m in roughly 100m pitches. We pitched out the harder section about 3/4s of the way up, and since we were using a doubled twin we could only do 30-35m pitches. This was quite slow; we had been steadily gaining on the party of four ahead of us until we started pitching things out.

 

At some point things got easier, and we did two more long-ish simul pitches to a ledge just below a bivy ledge near the summit. I saw two of the party of four on that ledge, so I was worried that the other two may have continued to the summit and we would have to share the bivy with them. Fortunately the entire party of four turned out to be on this lower ledge, so we did one simul pitch to just below the summit, and one 15-meter pitch to the summit. We didn't pitch the Firstlight because the weather and position were so awesome, so I ended up carrying a 3-pound pillow. I also carried summit kippers, but didn't have the appetite to eat them in the morning.

 

 

 

On Sunday morning we discovered that Rudy the Rat had nibbled on my partner's climbing shoes, and also taken my socks. I was trying to figure out if I had enough moleskin to construct something to hike out with when my partner produced a spare pair of socks. Awesome.

 

We rapped past/through the party of four, who were just starting their summit bid, and made it to the SW couloir and down those rappels pretty easily. We weren't really sure how to get down to the Park Creek trail, though, so we ended up going skier's left into a large open bowl that turned into a steep-sided canyon/drainage, and following the skier's right side of the drainage to the flood washout/burned forest.

 

 

 

I thought I remembered a photo of people descending the left side of the washout (i.e. not actually in the washout), but David was leading the way here and he said a line straight down the middle of the flood washout would go.

 

 

 

 

It was burnt alder hell at the bottom and we each took a few big scree falls, but we eventually made it to the Park Creek trail at 1:30 pm. We thought it would be 19 miles out from there, but a sign when we rejoined the PCT suggested it would actually be 21. In any case, we did it in 7 hours, and got to the car at sunset. Fortunately we made it to the nearest open gas station in Marblemount for sugar/salt/caffeine.

 

 

 

Gear Notes:

1x nuts, 1x cams .3-2, a bunch of slings

65-70m twin rope, i.e. only one (a longer lead rope would have been very useful for bigger pitches but the light weight of the twin rope was nice)

Climbing shoes, tent unused/unnecessary; kippers unused but necessary

Put your socks in the steel mesh bag with your food

 

Approach Notes:

Long walk on the PCT, leave North Fork trail and cross North Fork at cairns, then choose your own adventure

Edited August 18, 2016 by Todd Anderson

[ilias]

Nice work! Goode is a full value trip, that's for sure. I think the better descent to Park Creek is on the ridge to the right of the drainage, that's what we took anyway and it was pretty mellow and had traces of having been previously traveled.

[JasonG]

Yep, that's where the climber's path was pre-fire.

[davey b]

Hey Todd- sorry about the socks and the shoes! Snafflehounds are the worst- they kept us up all night! I was in the party of 4 that you passed at the 8800 foot bivy. Glad you guys got to the summit bivy- there was no way we were going to continue.

[Todd Anderson]

Hey Davey, hope you guys had a good trip! Also thanks (to one of your group, anyway) for the rappel beta; we probably would have figured it out, but I think you saved us a lot of time Sunday morning.