Saturday morning we woke up to a bunch of new snow. Not a good sign because the route would be buried. But we had bacon:

These ice tools are good for something

After a leisurely breakfast we hiked up to Hubba Hubba and found it doing this:

We took our packs off and waited in a debris-free area and watched more snow come down. After an hour of dawdling it looked like the sloughs were slowing down and getting smaller, so Sketchy decided to go for it and started up Hubba Hubba Center (the line with the pretty icicle curtain). It worked out fine — the only showers he took were after flipping off the route while tying in and after he had set the anchor and was belaying me up.

After we finished the first pitch there was more snow coming down around us, so we decided to bail to a tree anchor a short traverse to the left. I managed to place one screw in decent ice and sling the ropes over a horn to protect my traverse, but the after that was a slab covered with a thin sheet of ice. Oops. Nothing to do except scrape across it to the tree. When Sketchy got to that part he was a little nonplussed, especially since I had scraped some of the ice off, but he found some mossy crack to wedge his pick in so he was fine.

Ice climbing is surprisingly time consuming (especially when we have to wait for a night’s snowfall to clear off the route), so when we got down it was already time to head down. We hung out with a friendly husky mix named Solstice who was loitering around our campsite and then went to the Munchen Haus in town (they have heaters in the winter). When we got back to camp we had a surprise.

Bacon Thief

Someone stole all our bacon and eggs! And then walked on the picnic table, leaving his big paw prints so we knew exactly who it was! At least he left us some coffee and a jar of salsa.

When we woke up the next morning we had high hopes for another day of ice climbing, but we had another surprise. Rain! Ice climbing under snowballs is bad enough but ice climbing in rain is a bit much. So we had our breakfast of coffee and salsa and left. At least the rain meant that we wouldn’t have any trouble driving on the unplowed road…

Seattlites

There were 8 of us and 3-ish lines so things got split up pretty reasonably. Sketchy and I got an anoymous line between HH Left and HH Center. Unfortunately Sketchy broke a crampon about 3/4 of the way up the first pitch, had to downclimb to his last screw, and then lower down so I could give him my left crampon. Trying to do the higher pitches with 2 people and 1.5 sets of crampons didn’t seem like a great idea, so after I followed the route we rapped down. Everyone else was still finishing their routes and descending, so I did get to lead about half of the pitch to a tree, my first lead on ice (though it probably shouldn’t count, since I spent half the time digging out the tree so I could get to the trunk and set an anchor).

Hubba Hubba Left/Center