Sawtooth Mountain

Continuing my trend of ass-whoopin' this summer, my brother and I hiked over 20 miles and 5,000 vertical feet only to get thwarted a couple hundred feet shy of the summit of Sawtooth Mountain in the Trinity Alps wilderness. The summit pyramid was a maze of castellated granite spires and we were out of time (turn-around time was 4:00pm and it was 3:52 I believe). We also had a good 10 miles back to the truck, so it was a wise decision to bail. I found out later you don't need gear to summit, but weaving your way to the top must take some pretty clever route finding.

The trip of course was not a total wash. Far from it in fact. The clean, white granite of the Canyon Creek watershed is absolutely stunning. I've said it before and I will say it again, the Trinity Alps are one of the greatest mountain ranges that almost nobody has heard of.

Beautiful Upper Canyon Creek Lake

Right at our turn-around point at about 8,500 feet

Upper Canyon Creek falls behind me flowing over stellar granite slickrock

Another reason the trip was not a wash is it gave the chance to scope out some of the obscure climbing in the Trinity Alps. If roads got anywhere near the high country here I suspect this would be a pretty decent climbing area. Information on the area is very hard to come by but you can bet I'll be doing some more research. Here are a few pictures of the so-called Stonehouse Pinnacle. My old Tim Toula's "Rock and Road: a Climbing Guide to North America" describes the formation as 1,000 feet tall with granite that is "almost as good as Yosemite." (citation needed). It didn't look quite that big, but it looked quality from where I was standing.

That chimney looks like a man-eater

Look at those cracks!

This is another formation across the canyon that I dubbed "the Great white face." Guess I'm going to have to head back with some gear sometime in the future. Anybody keen?

North Sister 2

So after climbing at smith one weekend, my brother and I decided to see how high up on south sister we could get. He had climbed middle sister the week before and was keen to get on top of another one. Both of us damn well knew that N. Sister is called "the black beast of the Cascades" for a reason (or even Ugly Sister), but we figured we would turn around if the going got sketchy. The standard route is normally done in the winter or spring when the rubble is well frozen over. One ascends the southeast ridge, weaving your way around gendarmes to the so called "terrible traverse." Then you gingerly scoot your way up a groove called the bowling alley (man it seems there's one on every high cascade peak) and up onto the mass of Prouty peak, the summit pinnacle. It turns out we wouldn't have to worry about all the technical stuff, as we turned around at around 8,000 feet when the wind cranked up to gusts of 60 mph +. The blasts nearly knocked you off your feet and we got mighty cold in our thin shells. Being on a ridge, you could never predict which way the next blast of cold air would come. The rain coming in sideways didn't help either. I'd rather have below freezing and snow than just above freezing and cold, cold rain like we did. So before we bailed we made a couple of videos and a few phone calls to confuse people. Anyways, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Even a quick defeat still makes for an excellent day.

Before the steep parts with a shrouded North Sister in the background

A completely unnecessary move on crumbly rock

Right before the real action began above the first gendarme

The wind was so strong it ripped off my wilderness permit!

We. Were. Freezing. It took us a couple of hours to warm back up again on the way down. Here I am starting to dry out once we got back down from the ridge.

North Sister is #1 in my book

A few videos of Tim and I on Mars... I mean North Sister, accompanied with horrible sound due to high winds. We're a peppy group I'll give us that.

McKenzie River Trail

About 7 of us and a couple of energetic dogs rode the McKenzie river trail in its entirety this past Sunday. Along its length, one will see some of the bluest water you've seen, several incredible waterfalls and more log bridges than you can shake a stick at. A single speeder has to spin at about 250 rpm during the last half, and that takes it out of you after 30 or so miles. It's normally 27 miles but none of us had been on the trail recently and we took a few wrong turns. On top of that we got rained on, almost lost a dog and got scraped up in the lava rock section as well. Yep, pretty much a great day on a bike.

Greg leading the pack after the first few miles

You just have to stop at the Blue Pool. The entire river comes up from underground and heads downstream.