Tinniswood - E Glacier
Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2012 3:35 am
I had a craving for BS, so I conned Maddy into "an adventure" over the Easter weekend. I was battling a cold that seemed to get worse the day before leaving, so we slept in on Friday and didn't leave the city till 10am. The couple hours of extra sleep helped soothe my throat a bit, which was a short lived bonus. We ended up getting really lost on the excessively long logging road approach and we got to Outrigger creek as the sun was setting. We set up camp near a bear cave and cooked really close to our tent for added fun. I think we were downwind or something because we didn't have any visitors.
That night I dreamt of Tinniswood after we got a tease at sunset.
I got stoked on this mountain when I saw a picture from the air. I stole this off of bivouac.com from Scott Pick, shhhh. He says it's the nicest side of Tinniswood, but the N face looks fun too.
We had a lazy day on Saturday in anticipation of an epicly long day on Sunday. Sims creek is a pretty cool canyon, it's cut through solid rock and flows through smooth granite walls.
We skinned as far as we could on the logging roads where a steep ridge cuts down the valley. I can only assume that it cliffs out at the river, so we decided to take the high road. We found a steep creek gully and skinned up it till we found somewhere to do some sketchy traverse out of it on isothermal snow. I can't wait to come back the same way...
We did a descending traverse and got to where I had planned to cross the creek. My plan was derived from checking out google maps satellite images. All the pictures were from summer and one of them had a patch of snow right beside the creek underneath a large avalanche path, so I figured that there might be a bridge created by an avalanche over the creek. The debris was impressive
We had a bit of a slog and got lost in the maze of braided creeks in the valley that were not bridged as well, while gauking at the impressive granite walls in this valley.
but we finally made it to camp 6 hours later. We fuelled up and went to bed early for an alpine start. We were still at 600m and the summit is just over 2600m. I anticipated a bit of BS in the initial creek gully too, which we had a bit of in the wee hours of the morning. A bit of beta, don't come out of the forest below 875m, it will suck.
Maddy at sunrise on the lower section of the glacier
Alpenglow... and wait a second. How do we get onto the glacier? I didn't think it'd be that exposed to icefall.
As we got closer we found a nice little snow feature between a ridge and the glacier. There was only a short section of blue ice to climb and strip of snow that might prove ski-able later. It got hot pretty quickly in there though.
As it got colder up high my cold started to kick in and it made me feel terrible again, so I forced Maddy to break trail up the final summit slopes
A short boot pack up some wind slab on top of 3 feet of facets made for some fun flailing. Maddy topping out, with the valley 2000m below.
Pow off the summit
Some Seracs
it softened up
Then we had another 1000m of some glacier cruising, isothermal muck, avi crud scrambling, & even some corn.
When we got back to the tent, we ate lunch and listened to frequent avalanches sweeping down the valley. We decided it might be safer waiting for stuff to cool down, even though it meant I may miss some work. We passed out early in the afternoon and ended up waking up at 4am for the ski out. It was pretty quiet, so I justified staying the extra night. Nobody seemed too mad at work either, which was a bonus. Fun trip! But I don't intend to slog that long again anytime soon. That valley deserves some more attention though; it's purdy.
That night I dreamt of Tinniswood after we got a tease at sunset.
I got stoked on this mountain when I saw a picture from the air. I stole this off of bivouac.com from Scott Pick, shhhh. He says it's the nicest side of Tinniswood, but the N face looks fun too.
We had a lazy day on Saturday in anticipation of an epicly long day on Sunday. Sims creek is a pretty cool canyon, it's cut through solid rock and flows through smooth granite walls.
We skinned as far as we could on the logging roads where a steep ridge cuts down the valley. I can only assume that it cliffs out at the river, so we decided to take the high road. We found a steep creek gully and skinned up it till we found somewhere to do some sketchy traverse out of it on isothermal snow. I can't wait to come back the same way...
We did a descending traverse and got to where I had planned to cross the creek. My plan was derived from checking out google maps satellite images. All the pictures were from summer and one of them had a patch of snow right beside the creek underneath a large avalanche path, so I figured that there might be a bridge created by an avalanche over the creek. The debris was impressive
We had a bit of a slog and got lost in the maze of braided creeks in the valley that were not bridged as well, while gauking at the impressive granite walls in this valley.
but we finally made it to camp 6 hours later. We fuelled up and went to bed early for an alpine start. We were still at 600m and the summit is just over 2600m. I anticipated a bit of BS in the initial creek gully too, which we had a bit of in the wee hours of the morning. A bit of beta, don't come out of the forest below 875m, it will suck.
Maddy at sunrise on the lower section of the glacier
Alpenglow... and wait a second. How do we get onto the glacier? I didn't think it'd be that exposed to icefall.
As we got closer we found a nice little snow feature between a ridge and the glacier. There was only a short section of blue ice to climb and strip of snow that might prove ski-able later. It got hot pretty quickly in there though.
As it got colder up high my cold started to kick in and it made me feel terrible again, so I forced Maddy to break trail up the final summit slopes
A short boot pack up some wind slab on top of 3 feet of facets made for some fun flailing. Maddy topping out, with the valley 2000m below.
Pow off the summit
Some Seracs
it softened up
Then we had another 1000m of some glacier cruising, isothermal muck, avi crud scrambling, & even some corn.
When we got back to the tent, we ate lunch and listened to frequent avalanches sweeping down the valley. We decided it might be safer waiting for stuff to cool down, even though it meant I may miss some work. We passed out early in the afternoon and ended up waking up at 4am for the ski out. It was pretty quiet, so I justified staying the extra night. Nobody seemed too mad at work either, which was a bonus. Fun trip! But I don't intend to slog that long again anytime soon. That valley deserves some more attention though; it's purdy.