Category: Blog


  • Ice, Avalanches, and Failed Desert Towers

    After getting showered with powder snow for the tenth time, I look up to see Marcus peering down at me. “Uh, I’m not sure what I should do. My feet are numb.” We are on Otto’s Route, a moderate trad climb that follows the historic first ascensionist’s line up drilled pipe-holes and cut steps on the Independence Monument, a desert tower in the Colorado National Monument.

    Colorado National Monument
    Independence Monument

    The snow on the ground was mostly melted. The snow in the cracks and slabs on the route we were climbing was not. We found this out the hard way. This is our rest day activity, and we treated it with the seriousness one would expect of a rest day. We slept in and stuffed a large pizza in our packs, driving late and lazily towards what we expected to be an easy romp up an aesthetic desert tower.

    It’s February. For the last two weeks we’ve been racking up pitches in the Ouray ice park. Climb ten to fifteen pitches of ice a day for four or five days, take a rest day to recover. It is Marcus’ idea to climb Otto’s Route on our rest day. I readily agreed. Now I’m yelling up at him: “Screw it dude, just get a piece in to lower off of. This sucks, let’s bail.”

    Two pitches in and our rest day romp turns into a gear-leaving bail epic. After excavating cold powder snow out of a vertical handcrack for 60 feet, Marcus’ attempt to reach the first fixed anchors on the route is foiled by an ice covered friction slab. It turns out bare hands and tight climbing shoes are suboptimal snow travel equipment.

    After lowering Marcus on a micro nut, we convene on a snow-covered ledge to eat our large pizza, laugh, and make a rappel anchor on a chockstone wedged into the wide crack in front of the belay. We flee, feeling a bit guilty about leaving a nut and some tat on the route but happy to have warm feet and hands. This is the first time in the sandstone desert environment for both of us, and I’m starting to see the Edward Abbey magic.

    We got what we came here for — mileage. No where else in the world has the accessibility and sheer number of ice climbs than Ouray, and it has lived up to its reputation as an ideal training ground. The weather has been unseasonably warm the entire time we’ve been here too, taking all the usual cold and misery out of the experience. In terms of goals, both Marcus and I are on track with what we said we wanted out of this month. Check out my trip report for Colorado Ice.

    Riley leading pitch one of Stairway to Heaven
    Riley leading pitch one of Stairway to Heaven

    Climbing in Colorado is a much different experience than climbing in the Cascades. On the few climbs I did in Washington, the route descriptions were vague, the approaches long and difficult, the weather shitty. On the backcountry ice climbs we’ve done in Colorado, complicated-sounding approaches were wicked easy, the weather has always been mild, and the climbs have been straight forward. Working with a super small sample size here, but I’m starting to see why people say that success in the Cascades often predicts success in the greater ranges. The difficulties of the Cascades only increase the allure for me, but there’s no better place than where we are now to get strong fast.

    One Colorado thing we’re not so stoked about, though, is avalanches. One day after cruising a route in Eureka a few hours faster than we expected we rounded a bend heading back to Ouray to see a massive wet slide had ripped at the top of a drainage and had taken out highway 550 — our only way back home. Driving up to it we realized it was the biggest slide either of us had ever seen. Later classified as R3/D3, the skiier-triggered slide had run for almost 2000 feet, depositing debris fifteen feet deep on a 350 section of road.

    Debris
    Debris

    Happy with our climb that morning and not particularly bothered by the day of waiting ahead of us, we cut some snow ledges, pulled out the sleeping pads, and slept for a few hours. We woke to a huge line of people sitting in cars — the front-end loader that had been clearing the road had bailed back to Silverton to get a better snow-clearing tool, and the tension in the car line was rising.

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    With our camp stoves, hot food, sleeping bags, and satisfaction of a day’s work already done we were the envy of the car line. We picked a safe path and hiked to the top of the ridge to get a better look at things and to kill a couple of the seven hours we ended up waiting for the road to be cleared. The wind-loaded gully had ripped all the way to the ground, leaving a muddy and raw wound all the way from the top of the ridge to the bottom. Somehow the skiers that triggered the slide were not buried and sustained no injuries. The avalanche forecast for that day was Moderate above treeline, too. Yikes.

    The last few days here we spent at Escalante Canyon, a well kept secret of incredible desert sandstone. We got spanked on splitter cracks and our asses kicked on off-widths. Fun for all — can’t wait to go to Indian Creek.

    Sunlight gazing down into the chimney on Interiors
    Sunlight gazing down into the chimney on Interiors

    Next up for me is a NOLS rock climbing seminar in Arizona, where I’ll part ways with Marcus for a few weeks. After that we’ll be spending some quality time with long trad routes at Red Rocks, Nevada — where we’ll meet up with a crew from the Yale Climbing Team on spring break. The ice has been nice, but we’re both itching to get on some desert rock. See ya around!


  • False starts, alpine flops, and winter cragging

    January was a time for some good lessons winter climbing in the Cascades.

    The biggest was, don’t try to plan a short trip in the Cascades. Guidebooks and websites stress this: weather windows are hard to predict, so buy your flights with caution. I even planned for this, asking to take longer weekends at work during the month rather than a solid chunk in the middle. We had plans to get two-person rope team skills dialed in for glacier travel but never made it onto a glacier — the constant deluge of wet snow kept the avalanche danger consistently high  the entire month. The time we did make an attempt on a bigger objective we ended up skiing seven miles on Cascade River road just to start the approach to the climb. After a miserable wallow through deep, unconsolidated snow that night we bivvyed well below our planned elevation. The next morning we woke up to new snow, realized there was no way were would make the return date on our backcountry permit, and went back to sleep until noon. The Alpine Flop was born.

    But it wasn’t all gloom and doom — the stoke stayed alive, and we spent my days off backcountry skiing and cragging in the snow at Tieton and Smith Rock.

    We started up Pinnacle Peak:

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    With Avy conditions lower on the East side of the Cascades, we made a couple of trips out to Tieton. Our multipitch aspirations on Goose Egg rock were foiled by gushing water on the face:

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    Ride the (wet) Lightning

     

    But we made the best of it and ticked some classic basalt cracks in the snow, like Inca Roads and Jam Exam:

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    Inca Roads
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    Sunshine and snow and handjams

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    We caught a couple of spectacular days at Smith and continued the Alpine Flop tradition, getting stormed out the last day of each trip.

    We knocked out some classic trad moderates like Moonshine Dihedral and Karate Crack and finally made the crawl into the Monkey’s Mouth on West Face Variation Direct:

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    West Face Variation Direct — Monkey’s Mouth in the center slot!

     

    A solid start to a long trip.  Next up is a short stop at the house in Myrtle Creek and then we’ll be off to Ouray, CO to get strong on waterfall ice for the next month. See ya around!

     


  • A Place for Records

    This is a place for records. It’s a habit I’m trying to start, so we’ll see what happens. I’m writing here to appease my compulsion to record everything, and because I feel I owe it to friends and family to keep people updated on the lifestyle I’ve chosen. Which in a way I’ve realized is pretty selfish.

    And so it begins. After skipping my college graduation in May to suffer in the snow in the Wind River Range for a NOLS instructor course, I worked field courses and climbed in Washington most of the summer. For four or so weeks in August and September I went on a trip to Japan, climbing and hiking in the Japanese Alps and drinking on trains in Tokyo. At the end of September I headed to Ashford, WA to hunker down for a few months in the winter with a job at Whittaker Mountaineering, a climbing shop at the base of Mt. Rainier. Curious about the lifestyles of professional guides and Outdoor Industry people, I happily took a job in Retail and Rentals with the promise I would leave in January to embark on a vaguely planned climbing road trip.

    My time here has been good — restorative in many ways. I’m only just beginning to grow bored of the low-stress 9-5 life, a welcome change of pace from the planned-every-hour schedule of college. Time to write, I told myself (something I didn’t do) and time to train (Something I did do). I built a motorcycle, I pieced together some last bits of gear, I took an AIARE course, and I got a splitboard setup dialed for climbing approaches.

    Time to leave.

    A few months ago, my friend Marcus made plans to come visit and climb in the Cascades for a few weeks over his winter break. Our text conversation went something like this:

    “I have a home base in WA. Wanna come climb in the Cascades on your winter break? Think I’m gonna quit in Jan and climb the next four months after that. ”

    “I’ll buy plane tickets. And pitons. People still use those in the Cascades, right?”

    A few days later he told me he went ahead and took the rest of the semester off. I didn’t believe him until he told me he had already found someone to replace him in his house. Marcus, a friend from the rock climbing team, is the only person I met at school with any serious interest in Alpine climbing. We have similar goals. The current plan is to spend the rest of January here in Ashford, spend a month in Ouray, CO getting strong on waterfall ice, a month working on crack climbing technique in the Southwest, and another month alpine climbing in the Cascades once the snowpack settles in this season.

    And there it is, all the pieces. Free time, transportation, a rope, rack, reliable partner, and the stoke to get things done.

    See you in the records!