Category Archives: .Areas

Triple Couloirs on Dragontail Peak

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Sometimes climbing a peak is just meant to be. This week, it seemed that every time I got close to climbing the Triple Couloirs on Dragontail Peak something would derail my plans, and yet it all worked out in the end. Funny how that happens sometimes.

I’ll spare you the happenstance that led up to the climb but the night before while I was talking it over with the two partners I came with, I decided that I was going to climb Colchuck Peak instead of the Triple Couloirs on Dragontail with them. The three of us had been bouncing around the state all week trying to get some climbing in and we had been thwarted everywhere we went.

I won’t speak for Charlotte and David but I was kind of bummed that we hadn’t summited anything and I figured that with a committing climb like the Triple Couloirs it made the most sense to have a faster two person team instead of three. I needed a win, they needed a win and while I was bummed about giving up Dragontail, at least I would summit something.

They next morning I brewed some water and prepped to climb Colchuck Peak. I had watched David and Charlotte leave about an hour earlier for their far more committing climb and now they were just dots at the base of the first couloir. As I sorted out the little gear I would need, a fellow who would soon be my climbing partner wandered over. I had briefly talked to Aaron on the hike in to Colchuck Lake and he knew of my plans to head up the Triple Couloirs. After explaining about his partner’s footwear malfunction he asked if I wanted to rope up for a go at Dragontail. It was a no thought needed decision and an hour later we were at the base of the first couloir.

Now for the actual trip report. The snow on Dragontail was purported to be phenomenal. I can attest that on March 27th it was just about as perfect as perfect comes. Unfortunately we weren’t the only people that knew about the amazing conditions and the route was overrun by four parties and a soloist.

The first couloir was a conga line with everyone following the kicked steps of the leader. The snow was sinker and it was like climbing a ladder all the way to the runnels.

The runnels were dry but Charlotte and David wanted to take a looksey just in case there was some fun dry tooling to be had. The rest of the train continued up to the “5.8 variation” with a short rappel into the second couloir. I put quotes on “5.8 variation” because it was covered in the same amazing snow that the first couloir was and was no more difficult.

The hardest part of the variation was not that the anchor was creaky or that the tat had seen better days but rather the fact that the rappel was a bottleneck and all forward progress halted. I was the last in line and by the time I got down the short rappel my toes were half frozen, though my hands were toasty warm in my new BD Guides that I got a wicked awesome deal on.

After the rappel there was a short ice step that was pretty beaten up from the thwunks of countless tools. There wasn’t much rock pro to be had and the ice was on the thin side but Aaron found a bomber #1 camalot. He easily dispatched the ice step and we began swinging leads up the second couloir, though I should say swinging leads is kind of misleading because we weren’t placing pro and were following amazing kicked steps.

As we reached the top of the second couloir Aaron moved out of sight and slowed down. He had been cruising up the kicked steps so I really didn’t think much of it. When I rounded the corner on the second couloir I saw that he had built an anchor and I was being belayed properly.

The reason he built the belay was because between us was a tricky traverse which called for a bit of dry tooling and ginger steps in the snow. It wasn’t hard but it wasn’t easy either. When I got to the belay he told me to continue on. Since I had almost no pro on my harness I asked what I was going to need for the second crux at the top of the second couloir. He laughed and told me that that attention grabbing part was the second crux.

We unroped for the third couloir and even though I felt a little exposed the snow was in such great shape that I think it would have been more dangerous to be roped up and moving slower.

There is not much more to tell about the route. I feel a little cheated in how simply it went. There was nothing epic about it because the conditions were perfect. Don’t take the Triple Couloirs lightly but if it is in good shape it is a great climb.

Round trip from Colchuck Lake it took about 7 hours. Aaron brought a light rack which was a set of camalots, a set of nuts, a few blades and two pickets. David brought a brand new ice piton which is now fixed somewhere in the second couloir. Those ice pitons are scary looking but apparently they work really well.

 

Mt Shuksan – Fisher Chimneys

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Mt. Shuksan is one of the most beautiful mountains I have ever laid eyes on.  Like most mountains, Shuksan has an easy way up and a myriad of less easy ways up.  The Sulphide Glacier is the standard route of the mountain.  I cannot attest to the quality of that slog but I imagine it can’t be that bad.  Years ago I would have gone up the Sulphide Glacier no questions asked.  Back then the summit was more important than the quality of the climb.  I wanted a tick next to Shuksan and the easiest way to do that was up the simplest route.  But as I have grown as a climber I have found that experiencing the character of a mountain is more important than summiting her.

I have had my eye on the Fisher Chimneys for a while now.  In 2008 I was shut down by slopping snow conditions.  Things were in that in between state of not being melted out or covered in snow.  It was the right decision to back off but it stung because I had flown out from North Carolina to climb and damn it, I wanted to climb.

Now that I have moved to Seattle the North Cascades are actually accessible.  The problem was that I had nobody to climb with.  It took a while but I eventually met Charlotte on Rainier who graciously took me under her wing.  We are both in grad school and have extremely busy schedules so when we found a day that we could escape to the North Cascades it wasn’t a question of do you want to but rather what shall we climb.

The Fisher Chimneys are not typically thought of as a round trip car to car day trip.  Since that is all the time we had we were going to make it into one.  We figured that this late in the season, October, the approach and Chimneys would be melted out and we could move pretty quickly by following the well trodden climbers trail.

The day before we were scheduled to leave a co-worker of Charlotte’s asked to come along.  Wes is an ultramarthoner, a rock climber and from his few modest comments a pretty good ice climber.  Almost needless to say he was invited along.

We left the car at 3:30AM.  We wanted to get to Lake Anne by 5:30 and start heading up the Fisher Chimneys around first light.  Even with the gate closed, which added maybe ¾ of a mile of street hiking, we made it to Lake Ann in two hours.  From Lake Ann we followed some cairns and a climbers trail up to a talus field.  I’ll skip ahead and tell you that we did what so many parties do and we accidentally dropped on to the Lower Curtis Glacier.  This is exactly what you don’t want to do.  Towards the end of this TR there are tons of pictures of the correct way to go but pretty much the entrance to the Fisher Chimneys is a lot higher and a lot further left than you think.

We dropped on to the Lower Curtis but didn’t really think much of it at the time.  Fred Becky’s drawing didn’t look like anything we were seeing but there were plenty of third class chimneys to climb so we headed up one that we thought would be tame.  I’d call this a mistake in retrospect but at the time it was really the only thing we could do.

Well, third class slowly turned into fourth class and then fourth class turned into short sections of low fifth class.  The problem was that it was not hard enough to rope up but not easy enough to effortlessly scramble.  Of the three of us Wes was the strongest rock climber.  He led the way with route finding.  Charlotte’s experience with rock climbing was rather limited and required a bit of coaching.  That said, she kicked ass, especially considering this was exposed, high consequence climbing in boots.  (BTW, I was wearing Trango Alps and they kicked ass)

As we made our way up the chimney it became pretty apparent that we were not on summit pace.  I’ll admit that this sucked a bit but it was also a bit of a relief.  We could now relax, enjoy our climb and not have to worry about climbing at a breakneck pace.  After a few hours of scrambling (yes I said hours) we made it to the top of the Fisher Chimneys.

At the top Wes and I decided to go take a quick peek at Winnie’s Slide while Charlotte stayed behind and enjoyed the Sun and the view from the top of the Chimneys.  After a brief snow hike, Wes and I got a good look at Winnies Slide.  Since it was October things had melted out pretty intensely.  I wish I would have taken pictures but alas I did not.  Winnies Slide had melted out to a thin layer of crunchy sugar covering beautiful alpine ice.  It was probably 45 degree ice and would have been front points the entire way up.  After a few minutes of admiring Shuksan we rejoined Charlotte and headed down.

Getting down wasn’t technically difficult but it was slow.  It was a lot of face in down climbing that was pretty exposed.  It was slow but the plus side is I got to take quite a few pictures.

I’ll end this trip report with a series of pictures on how to get to the Fisher Chimneys entrance.  The pictures were taken on my way out so they are correct.  Note:  The pictures are the last 10 pictures and conveniently labeled 1-10.

Another Go at the Disappointment Cleaver on Rainier

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I had every intention of climbing Mt Rainier this Labor Day weekend but absolutely no expectation to summit.  I say this because NOAA issued a winter storm morning that called for 1-2 feet of snow to be dumped above 7,000′ and high winds.

With a forecast like that why would I even want to climb Rainier?  The simple reason was a friend, Grant, was coming up from Vegas and had been training for months.  Now that I am a local I can opt to pass on attempting a climb but when you buy a $300 plane ticket you and train for months you need to at least give it a try.

Knowing the nasty forecast I was justifiably nervous.  I pulled out my Sub-Zero puffy, my winter gloves and my incredibly versatile Turtle Fur.  I expected white out conditions on the “summit day” so I ran to Home Depot and picked up some bamboo and red duct tape to make a boat load of wands.  And preparing for a worst case scenario of hanging out in a tent for a few days I picked up some extra fuel at REI.  With my winter gear packed and Grant’s GPS I knew we could get up and down safely no matter the conditions.

On Saturday we hiked to Camp Muir in what started out as rain at Paradise, then turned to fog around Moon Rocks and then finally sleet on the upper snowfield.  Visibility was relatively good and navigating the crevasse field on the upper snowfield was easy.  IMG had wanded a route through the field but their wands were few and far between.  I also saw a guided group wanding another route but they seemed a little lost and I wasn’t filled with confidence by their route finding.

Since I expected a foot or two of the fresh powdery stuff to be hiding the small crevasses on the Muir snowfield I supplemented IMG’s wanding with my own and Grant made sure to set waypoints every 15 minutes or so.

The week prior Camp Muir had been bustling.  The weather was gorgeous and it seemed everybody and their brother was up there.  This week, in the nasty weather, there was three other independent climbers in the hut.  I say independent because IMG decided that they were not going to camp out at Ingraham Flats but were going to shack up at Camp Muir.

I have no problem with people being guided up a mountain.  If that is what you want to do, who am I to judge?  What I do have a problem with is some of the shenanigans that clients pull due to their inexperience.  I think that one of the first things guides teach their clients is headlamp etiquette.  If there are nine other headlamps turned on you probably don’t need yours to tie your boots.  Or another perpetually funny thing that clients do is to put on their crampons while still inside the hut and then walk around for 20 minutes waking everyone up with their crunching.

On what was supposed to be summit day the IMG guide woke up his clients with a mighty yell at 12:30 for a 2 AM departure.  They all huddled around the big thermos of hot water and took ages getting dressed and asking questions like “should I wear my liner gloves?”  And of course there were a dozen high-beamed headlamps going the entire time.

At 1:30 AM I took a quick look outside and was surprised to see that I could actually see.  I thought for a moment that we just might be able to climb.  Grant and I were going to tuck in behind one of the guided parties to take advantage of their boot path and decided we were not going to leave ’til about 3 AM.  By the time 3 AM rolled around the weather had blown in and it was pretty clear that we were not going anywhere.

If you’ve never been to Camp Muir you should know that it is on a ridge.  As a result when it is windy on Rainier it is really windy at Camp Muir and with wind comes spindrift.  Owing to the layout of the camp the spindrift piles up pretty quickly in front of the outhouses which creates the very un-fun task of digging out the toilet.  Since it was pretty windy at Camp Muir and spindrift was piling up quickly there was a real possibility of getting stuck in the outhouse.  Maybe this is too much info but after only a minute or two inside I had to give the door my best linebacker shoulder plow to be able to squeeze out.

Getting down from Muir promised to be fun because by mid-morning a foot of snow had covered the snowfield and had hidden the crevasses.  This was in addition to it being semi-whiteout.  I could have said it was epic or gnarly but in actuality it was quite boring.  With adequate wanding, regular GPS waypoints and a little common sense it went without a hitch.

Nasty weather is not something I take lightly especially on a big mountain like Rainier.  I refuse to become a statistic in Accidents in NA Mountaineering especially by getting killed due to something stupid like hypothermia.  With a little forethought and a bit of common sense this little adventure was just a little adventure and not a full on epic.

Previous Trip Reports (Successful Trip) (Botched Trip) (Rainier Gear List – for the successful trip)