Middle Palisade Conditions October 2013
Posted: Sun Oct 06, 2013 1:18 am
Holy glacier recession, batman. I guess I hadn't been up there since September 2011. Things have pulled back quite a bit. Sounds like others are finding the same, but dealing just fine. Maybe we missed the "easy" way, but we did some proper 5th class to go from "glacier" to "traverse" ledge. Used to be trivial. We did wander a bit back and forth, both up and down, just to see what would work and what wouldn't. I like to think we found the best way, but that could be incorrect.
This dark and poor pic was taken 10/4/2013 from just about 5 minutes down the dividing ridge/moraine/jumble. The blue line roughly marks what I remember to be the glacier surface. (I remember no appreciable change over a handful of trips 'tween '03 and '11, but sometime's I'm not that attentive to such details...). The orange is the "traverse ledge". Yellow is how we went up. About 20 feet of low-fifth. And red is where we rapped about 10m back down. Left a cord with metal on a bomber horn. No other slings in sight.
Further up, we found up to a foot of faceted and slippery snow in the gully. We could avoid it 75% of the time.
This dark and poor pic was taken 10/4/2013 from just about 5 minutes down the dividing ridge/moraine/jumble. The blue line roughly marks what I remember to be the glacier surface. (I remember no appreciable change over a handful of trips 'tween '03 and '11, but sometime's I'm not that attentive to such details...). The orange is the "traverse ledge". Yellow is how we went up. About 20 feet of low-fifth. And red is where we rapped about 10m back down. Left a cord with metal on a bomber horn. No other slings in sight.
Further up, we found up to a foot of faceted and slippery snow in the gully. We could avoid it 75% of the time.