24 October 2009 - Boise Gym Climbing

We made the trek over the hills and through the woods to Grandmother's house this weekend. (Visited both of them actually, that's some quality time on I-84).
While we were in town we took a new friend climbing...
Compare to this post. Coincidence?

There's a few more photos, mostly of interest to family and friends, here:Picasa Link It's not Smith Rock (where our climbing buddies went this weekend) but we had a good time and sleeping at Mom's house is a lot nicer than the climber's bivy at Smith

11 October 2009 - Lake Janus

Smith Brook road is one of Mike's favorites for snow shoeing and easy cross-country skiing, so I've been up and down the road quite a few times in the last few years with his group. We usually don't stray too far off into the field though and I've been thinking about doing a little more ambitious back-country trip here this winter. I thought I would take the opportunity this weekend to get reacquainted with territory past the end of the big switchback before it gets snowed in so Karen, Huck & I hiked the Union Gap trail up to the PCT and Lake Janus.

I've done this trip before from Smith Brook road but it was in 1974 and I wasn't thinking about snowshoes or skis at the time. Even before that, Doug's dad took us on a cross-country hike to Lichtenwasser Lake. That hike also started along this stretch of road and it was the first time I'd ever been hiking in this area. That was a looong time ago, but since it was only my second ever overnight hike, I remember the trip well - to get to our starting point we had to cross a bridge made of two huge logs over the creek, one of which was broken in half - Mr. Caley made us all get out of the station wagon and walk across before he drove, slowly, over. I also remember wearing our rain gear the whole weekend because the mosquitoes were so bad. The hike was short, but with no real trail it was an adventure for a bunch of Jr. High kids.

For this trip though, we decided to stick with the trails and follow the standard route up. I've heard of people skiing to Lake Janus and I wanted to have another look at it with that in mind. Most of the route looked like it would be pretty straightforward: climb up from the switchback, cut over to Union Gap and the PCT, and traverse with the PCT on the side of long ridge and then around the end of the ridge to the lake. Along the ridge though, we crossed a couple of slopes that looked like they were regularly cleaned by avalanches. I didn't see any good way to avoid these slopes so I'm not sure I would want to be back here anytime there was enough snow for good skiing. We probably should have gone the other way on the Crest Trail and checked out Lake Valhalla - I read somewhere that's a good winter trip and although you still have to traverse under a high ridge, on the map it doesn't look quite as steep as the hillside you have to cross to get to Janus. We'll just have to wait for some snow and check it out.

It was too early for snow this weekend, but it was plenty cold; there was lots of ice on the creek, frost in the meadows and icicles hanging down where the water was dripping out of the small springs in the hillside. The fall colors were slightly past their prime but it was still very colorful and pretty.

There's a few more photos on this Picasaweb album here.

9 October 2009 - Silver Peak

I had another vacation day to burn before the end of the year and I couldn't find anyone else with a day off during the week, so I took Friday off and hiked up Silver Peak. Octavian and I climbed this years ago about this time of year, but we got stuck in a white out. The wind and snow were forming icicles on our noses and it was downhill in all directions when we finally ran out of trail, so I'm pretty sure we made the summit but I had no idea what the view might look like. This time the visibility was a bit better, but I still didn't really get the grand views that other trip reports rave about; I didn't even catch a glimpse of Mt. Rainier. The views to the north and west were pretty dramatic though. It was particularly impressive looking across Interstate 90 to the peaks of the Alpine Lakes region.

I'm still not exactly sure of the route I took to the summit. The trees in Olallie Meadow have grown a lot in the last 10 years and I wasn't sure which trail head we went in last time so I just went to the farthest trail crossing I could drive to. There are a bunch of roads up here and they cross a lot of trails, so the whole picture is kind of confusing. On top of that, the proximity to so many jeep trails and snowmobile routes contributes to a lot of vandalism, so most of the trail signs are shot up or knocked down. I followed the trail for a quarter of an hour or so and then turned off in the general direction of the peak when it looked like the trail was heading too far east. I traveled on game trails and a few faint boot tracks, essentially following the easiest path just inside the timber on the east side of an old clear cut. Eventually I found a good track heading up the northwestern ridge of the peak and followed that until I lost it in the scree. I tried following the ridge itself, but got cliffed out so dropped down into the middle of the bowl and found another boot path heading toward the summit. The final approach crossed the ridge a few hundred feet below the summit and met up with the track coming up the west side from Annette lake. Neither the north or the west side looks like it gets much traffic and I didn't see another soul until I actually got on the summit and could see the main trail coming up the south ridge.

Coming down, I followed the main trail down the south ridge and then to the east until it hit the PCT. I took the PCT back to my car in Olallie Meadow.

I'm a few months late with this report and the details a bit hazy so the pictures over here in the Picasa album are probably a better guide than what I've written here.

4 October 2009 - Whidbey Island

The Seattle Times ran editorial in the newspaper about an interesting public/private conservation organization here in Washington. The Washington Wildlife and Recreation Coalition leverages government grants and private contributions to buy property and conservation easements and fund park and public lands improvements around the state.


Their website was soliciting photos for some of their projects, so I picked a worthy looking nearby project from their list, grabbed the camera and jumped on the ferry and spent a nice weekend morning enjoying the open countryside at Ebey's Landing. I'm sure they're nice folks at the WWRC, but they never returned my e-mail asking how I could help (probably because there was no check attached) but they did use
one of my photos on a project web-page.
I'm hoping to to visit a few more of the places they're trying to preserve, and maybe even post a few more pictures.

13 September 2009 - Grand Park Scouting Trip

In late April last year Octo & I tried to ski into Grand Park at Mt. Rainier. We only had a two-day weekend and we got hit with an unusual late spring snow storm that slowed us down a bit so we didn't make it all the way. Neither of us had ever been into Grand Park so we also wasted some of our precious weekend hours wandering around in the trees looking for the best route. Don't get me wrong, we had a great camping trip and got some fine forest and road skiing in, but we still want to make it into Grand Park in mid-winter someday. This weekend I hiked in on the trail to see what it looks like in summertime. Hopefully this will make it a little easier to find our way in the winter if we happen to get hit with another blizzard while we're there.

Here's a few comparison pictures. The trail in to Lake Eleanor, then and now:

Our forest camp (night & day/winter & summer):

Lake Eleanor:

Since I got to drive instead of ski the 8 1/2 miles in on Huckleberry Cr Road, the hike in only took a couple of hours. Still, I was a little surprised at how long the part from Lake Eleanor up to Grand Park took. On our original trip, I think we were within a few dozen yards of the first opening where you could see Rainier when we turned around. I saw a picture somewhere where they called this meadow “Grand Parklet.”

Since we still had to break camp and ski all the way out to the car, we quit pretty early that day, but I think even if we had not turned around when we did we wouldn’t have had time to make it all the way to the park. This time it was an hour hike (uphill) from the Parklet to Grand Park and the way we were skiing last year, stopping every few minutes looking for landmarks, it probably would have taken a couple of hours. Next time it should be a easier – We can follow a general compass bearing from the lake and then there is a little ridge crest we can try to stay on top of that should lead us right to the park.

The rest of the photos from Grand Park and Berkely Park are here: [on my Picasa page].

There's a bunch of shots showing a bit more of the landscape to remind us what we'll be looking for this winter as well as few frogs and marmots thrown in just for fun.

4 September 2009 - Vertical World

Took the new guy climbing...

I think he's going to be a natural, but I only had a cell phone to capture his first time on the wall. I've got to start carrying a real camera more often. The rest of the pictures, such as they are,
are here.

23 August 2009 - Spring Mt. Oregon

I've been missing Mom lately so K & I packed up the car and headed to eastern Oregon for a quick weekend visit. We had a really nice time with Mom, and for a bonus Joe came down from Boise for the day. But this blog is all about recreation, not family reunions, and La Grande is in the middle of a great outdoor recreation area. There’s lots of good places nearby and Mt. Emily is one of the best: when D was in school, a highlight of our summer vacation was taking our mountain bikes to La Grande and riding around on the summit roads and trails; in the spring, the wild flowers are awesome ; in the fall, Mom & Dad would go up there to pick huckleberries and later in the year my little brother would hunt bear (don't worry, he never killed any); and in winter I always try to arrange my visits to the folk's house to leave time for a side trip to the Meachum Divide cross country trails. (http://www.onc.org/bmnordic/).

I heard there was some rock climbing up there too, so this trip I decided to do a little scouting. Web research quickly pointed to Spring Mountain as the place to go so on the drive home we stopped to check it out. One of the developers has posted a nice list of the routes on his personal web page and the area is also covered in Rock Climbing Oregon. It's practically right on the way home, closer than Mt. Emily proper -- I don't know why I haven't done this before.

We didn't have time for a real climbing field trip, but we had to do at least a couple of routes while were there. The guidebook calls Hawaiian Slab "One of the best 5.5s in all of Oregon's backcountry" so of course we started there. I'm not exactly saying it was a sandbag rating, but it sure didn't feel 3 grades easier than Aloha Direct, the route right next to it and the only other one we had time to play on. But the rock was good and the routes were fun so I'm sure I'll be back later.



If you interested, there's a couple more pictures here: on this Picasa page

9-10 July 2009 - Mt. Baker

Octavian & I did the Easton Glacier. See the pictures at picasa

28 March 2009 - Skyline Lake & Ridge Snow Shoe

I don't remember now why we chose to do this -- I guess it was just time for another snow shoe outing instead of a ski trip, but a bunch of us headed up to Skyline Lake and the ridge above it. Oh yeah, I do remember - even though there was a ton of snow from earlier in the week, there was a nasty crust, at least below 5000', so walking seemed like the better bet. The forecast was for a decent morning with another system moving in after noon, so we picked something pretty easy and reasonably close to town and that's how we ended up here. The route up is straight north out of the Stevens pass overnight lot and the route back is down the fall line so it's pretty hard to get lost even if the weather turns bad. And if you stay in the trees or on the middle of the ridge you can avoid most of the avalanche terrain.

We hiked up past the lake and stopped for lunch just on the northwest side of the ridge. Mike and I tried for one of the minor summits (just west of the saddle above the lake) but right around 5000' the firm snow ended and the deep drifts began. We wallowed around for awhile but even with snow shoes it was challenging when the ridge got steep, and we pretty much had to stay on the steepest part of the ridge because we didn't want to get out on any of the exposed slopes, so we turned back without our summit pin.

The rest of the pictures are here on Picasaweb.

22 March 2009 - Sun Top

Octo and I have been thinking about a spring trip back to Lake Eleanor but the state park web page says that Sun Top snow park is closed by blow downs. That report has been up all winter though, and a lot of the lower elevation snow is clearing out, and I was wondering if the road might be open by now. So Huck and I decided to pop down there this weekend and find out.

It looks like we got there pretty soon after the clearing crew. The road was open to the sno-park, and plowed for several miles beyond that, although the gate was locked.

There's plenty of snow on the road passed the part they've plowed, but it was pretty soft and may not last much longer. It didn't look like anyone had been up the road very far in quite a while.

It was OK on skis, even though there were quite a few trees across the road. Pretty tough going for the dog though, and that was one tired puppy by the time we got back to the car.

16 March 2009 - Guitar Trip

Hey, that's my climbing buddies Mike & Dan checking out guitars at the music store.

And now they're talking seriously with my cross-country ski partner...

Uh-oh!

Hmm, I wonder where this is going?

7 March 2009 - Cabin Creek

Karen and I made a quick trip up to Cabin Creek...

28 February 2009 - Hog Loppet

I did the 30km Hog Loppet this year with a couple of the Caley boys, and three or four hundred other friends. Doug and Chuck are old hands at this, having done the tour many times before, but it was all new to me. To make it easier to catch the 6:30am bus up to Mission Ridge, we rode up in Chuck's van Friday night after work and spent the evening in Wenatchee. (We found out later all the wild ones stay in Leavenworth, but hey, we just came over for the skiing so Wenatchee was fine - really.)

We were a little worried about snow conditions, but a couple of small storms during the week brought in enough new snow to cover up all the rocks and we had fine conditions. A little cold and windy at the 6800' summit, so we were bundled up for the first downhill, but it didn't take long before we were working pretty hard and shedding the extra layers.

I'd heard the first part of the trip is difficult so I brought my heavier backcountry skis and plastic boots - that was great for the first 45 minutes of downhill (like the part in the picture) but most of the tour is on fairly easy logging roads so I was about the slowest skier out there. Pretty much everybody on touring or skate skis passed me before the day was over (even the ones I passed in the beginning when they were pasted into the hillside on their flimsy skis) but at least I got a good workout out of the deal. I even saw a few folks that had two pairs of skis - presumably backcountry skis for the off-trail part and touring or skates for the rest of it. I don't think that's the answer for me because I have enough trouble getting on the lift with a backpack and one pair of skis. If I do this again, I'll probably do it on touring skis instead. But still it was fun - good company, good snow and a lot of work. Check out the photo album here:
2009-Hog-Loppet

21 February 2009 - Amabilis Mt.

Not making a lot of progress on my quest to visit all the Sno-Parks this winter, but I've avoided exit 63 -- until now. Octavian didn't have a lot of time this Saturday so we opted for a very early jaunt up Amabilis. We were the first car in the parking lot and started out in the fog and wind, but broke out into a beautiful sunny day just below the summit. Snow conditions weren't too bad - the lower road was freshly groomed and there was a bit of fresh snow on the crust on the upper ungroomed part. The lower road was a bit icy, but the trip up didn't take too long and the trip down was as fast as I've ever done it; maybe as fast as I've ever skied on a road. Another trip that deserves a better write up and more pictures so I'll try to get back to it to finish up. (If my boss wouldn't keep interrupting me at work, I could keep up with this blog...)

15 February 2009 - Mt Tahoma Trails (North)

The plan was to check out the southern Washington Sno-Parks this weekend. I was all set to take my nephews Huey, Dewey & Louie to Oldman Pass for a little snow play and exploration when my brother told me Dewey broke his arm in a snowmobile accident. (As if I needed another reason to hate those machines besides the noise, waste and smoke they make. Now one of my favorite kids is laid up for a month with no recess!) I didn't want to drive all that far just by myself, but I wanted to visit a new park, so I went down to check out the Mt. Tahoma Trails.

The snow wasn't too bad, and even got a few flurries while I was out. That made the skiing OK, but the pictures aren't that great. If I get a few minutes later this week I'll try to see if any of them are worth posting.

7 February 2009 - Methow

The Trues and the Popas made the long car trip to Winthrop this weekend for a bit of cross country skiing and to get some nice eastern Washington sunshine. In fact, we all played hooky from work and school and made it a three day-er. The trip report is coming soon, in the meantime here's one quick snapshot...

1 February 2009 - Pipe Creek Sno-Park

I've always wanted to ski the Blewett Pass area. There's three Sno-Parks near the pass and lots of marked trails, but I've never managed a ski trip here. Since it's on the east side of the mountains, the weather is more likely to be good when the Snoqualmie corridor is stormy, but then I can't get to Blewett without a white-knuckle drive over I90, and when the weather on Snoqualmie pass is good, I usually just stop there and ski at Cabin Creek or head up Amabilis. We did drive over here last year near the end of the season and got out of the car at each of the Sno-Parks but never put on our skis -- there was so little snow, and what was left was so icy you would need crampons to walk up the logging roads.

There hasn't been much new snow the last week or so, and we knew we would be taking a chance on the conditions, but we decided to go for it and headed over on super bowl sunday. (This is traditionally the day for my first Mt. Si training hike of the year, but since I was up there once already this year, I didn't feel the need to go this weekend.)

We stopped at Swauk Campground and looked around a bit, but the conditions weren't very promising so we headed up the road to Pipe Creek. Pipe Creek is about 500' higher (3600') and with this poor snow cover we thought the extra elevation would help. The pass itself is even higher and has plenty of trails, but I hope to be in that area in a few weeks for the Hog Loppit, so we stayed down in the Pipe Creek area.

We chose the Diamond View Loop -- who could resist a trail with a name like that? Most of the trail follows a logging road, so you would think it would be pretty easy, but for some reason the sign does have that funny black-diamond shape.

The snow was deep enough on the trails, but the surface was so icy it was almost impossible to ski where there was any grade. You can see we had to side step up the steep sections, and there was even one point where we had to take the skis off and walk up on the edge of the road where there was a little dirt and pine needles for traction. This is where Karen told me she was putting skis up for sale on Craig's list as soon we got home.

After we gained the elevation to reach the actual loop, the snow was quite a bit better. From the east side of the loop, we had a nice view of Table Mt. You can just see the spot where a few years ago I accidentaly left the keys in the Jeep and Huck decided to take it for a spin.

There's another nice view off to the west on the other side of the loop.

After this we dropped back on to the icy logging road trail and slid back to the parking lot. We made it back without any broken bones and still had time for a nice dinner at the Sunset Cafe and we found some decent coffee at the new Swiftwater Espresso in Cle Elum. After we got home, K did list her skis, but she doesn't know I was the anonymous bidder and they're safely back in the Thule.

17 January 2008 - Yodelin Snowshoe Trip

There's plenty of snow in the mountains, but it rained and refroze over the last couple of days, so we decided snowshoes would work better than skis this weekend when a bunch of us went up to the old Yodelin ski area just east of Stevens Pass.

There was quite a temperature inversion on the west side of the mountains. It was below freezing when we met at the Woodinville Park & Ride, and getting colder as we headed up US 2 until we got to Gold Bar. From there, the temp jumped up 15 degrees before we got to Index. As we climbed up close to the pass it started cooling off again and as we crossed the summit it turned cold and was down to 20 degrees by the time we buckled on our shoes in the parking lot.

The cold made the snow CRUNCHY! Skiing wouldn't have been much fun, but it turned out to be great for the snowshoes and we made up to the ridge in record time. We crunched on over to the south side and warmed up in the sunshine while we ate our lunch. While we were sitting there I measured a snow depth of 230cm (7 1/2 ft) with my avalanche probe; there's a decent amount of snow this year, but so far it hasn't worked out all that well for skiing.

After lunch, Dan and I decided to run up to summit (yes there is a Yodelin Mountain) while the rest of the group headed down. We climbed up steeply through the killer trees (why killer trees? look at the photos) and then the ridge was pretty flat. We found a clearing with a bit a of view, called that the top and headed down.


On the way down we ran into my old climbing buddy Octavian. (You might remember him wielding a homicidal ice axe on this trip to Snowfield Peak)

Looks like he's got a new climbing partner now.


You can see the rest of my photos here on Picasaweb picasaweb.google.com/trueguides/YodelinSnowShoeTrip. Also I'll drop off a CD with Mike so he can add them to the group collection; bug him if you want to see the whole mess.

10 January 2009 - Mt. Teneriffe

The weather over the week hasn't been setting up a great base for skiing this weekend - we were looking at either slush or a frozen rain crust covered by a little unconsolidated snow at most of the sno-parks. We opted instead to break out the snowshoes, figuring those could handle whatever conditions we found. And what better trip for snowshoes than one that starts with "well, first you hike to the top of Mt. Si..."

The forcast was for a few showers and a snow level around 3000' on Saturday morning, so Octavian and I headed for Mt. Teneriffe. We went up the Mt. Si trail with the early birds, leaving the parking lot a bit after 8:00. We put on the yak-traks at about 2500' but the trail was actually in pretty good shape and it wouldn't have been too hard with just boots. It was dry and there was even a bit sun in a couple of spots.

There were quite a few folks on the Si trail and when we started out on the trail to Teneriffe we followed some snowshoe tracks for about 20 minutes before we came to where that party turned around. We ran into more tracks later when we hit the road/trail that goes directly up to Teneriffe from the Mt. Si road, but that party turned off (or missed the main route) and it looks like they just went up one of the minor summits on the ridge. We never saw either party, or anyone else for that matter, after we left Mt. Si.

The snow started to fall while we were on the road part of the trail, and was coming down pretty steadily by the time we left the main road for the climb over the false summit and along the ridge to the true summit. It was all pretty easy until we got to within 250' or so of the summit. It was pretty steep and there was 3 inches of loose powder on a very hard crust. It was a little dicey on snowshoes so we took them off, but the crust was so hard we couldn't kick steps, and the powder was so loose it wouldn't support our weight. So we put the shoes back on and kicked them in as hard as could to make the climb. (We both had MSR Lightning Ascents, and they would penetrate the powder and stick in the ice, but it was a lot of work.) When we topped out, it was snowing hard and the wind was blowing so hard it was actually a little scary to stand on the summit.

The tricky part then was to get back down that 250' without too much bodily damage. The slope wasn't exposed (lots of trees) but it was steep as hell and there was no footing available so we did the tarzan thing and just dropped from tree to tree.

It was a long day getting to here so we decided to just follow the road all the down instead of climbing back up to Mt. Si. The snow just kept getting heavier as we descended and then of course turned to rain by the time we were about half way down so we got thoroughly soaked. This is a 12 hour hike for us, and there's about 8 1/2 hours of daylight this time of year so the bottom half of the trail was all by headlamp.

I took a few snapshots of the trip, but I can't post them yet -- the camera blew out of my jacket and got packed full of snow while I was sliding on my face down the 20 feet from the summit to the first tree. It's drying out on the desk next to me right now so if it recovers or Octo sends me the shots he took, I'll post an update.

Update: Octavian sent some of his pictures and my camera finally dried out as well so I added a couple of photos above.
Here's were we went:

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