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Excellent to hear the White River is open!

Way to get after it and thanks for the entertaining thread.

Nice. You got any plans for this sunday. Weather may ease up around sat night early sunday.

Cool Ben, way to branch out this spring..

Too bad on the stuart trip. Looks like it was in good condition! I can't imagine going either direction on that roller coaster of a summer trail without skins.

Yeah, good times with the oven. Works better with dry wood.

last week scott emailed me, asking if i was interested in riding a line out by the columbia glacier. when i asked how early we ought to leave, i thought he was kidding when he said midnight. ale capone never jokes about departure times though.

courtesy of john scurlock, here is a photo of the line we were searching for.


a good tour starts with a good bbq, and i knew that to prepare for this mission, i better do some eating!


by 2am we had finished the whiskey and loaded our packs. time to hit the trail.


3:30am


4:20am, time for a break!


5:15am, a new record for earliest first turns of the day!


after a bit of traversing through a steep obstacle course of tree wells, we made it to blanca lake. bits and pieces of the surrounding peaks sporadically appeared through small windows in the clouds as we crossed the lake.


scott was having too much fun climbing to stop and put on crampons. someday i'll get my hard boots dialed in and maybe i can be a badass, too.


when the going got a little easier, i took a turn breaking trail.


a mere 8 hours after our departure, we dropped into our first line.


it was a bit foggy, but the snow was nicely edgable and though the deep runnels presented a bit of a hazard, they made for easy sluff management.




after a break on the pride glacier, we started climbing again, hoping to exit through the trail-less goblin valley to the south.


looking back at our line...


we climbed a little more to get some bonus turns in steeper snow, and after a winter of denial, scott finally admits to enjoying corn snow.




visibilty was variable


exiting the goblin couloir






the goblin creek exit started out deceptively easy. but we soon found ourselves traversing the sides of a steep chasm, kicking footsteps into wet ferns and clinging desperately to alder branches above cliffs that dropped into the raging water below. we would struggle and fight to advance a few feet, only to find our path blocked again and again by deep washed out gullys full of loose rocks. some we climbed around, struggling uphill on one side and carefully "belaying" ourselves down the other with branches. others we climbed down into and scrambled across, each step sending a torrent of loose rocks cascading into the water below. scott made steady progress while i spent a lot of time clinging desperately to my whippet buried in the soil and swearing.

the 2 miles of "hiking" took us 4 hours to complete, but they became a distant memory the moment my boots touched the gravel road. damn those beers tasted good!


on the way home, i celebrated my new freedom.... to buy whiskey at safeway!!!!!


thanks, scott, for the great tour idea (and photos!) and for putting up with my grumbling during the last hour. next time you tell me to stay on the right side of the river, i'm going to listen!

dont give up on the hard boots yet...it always hurts when you first stick it in...remember high school?

too bad there is that extra 27% tax on booze up there now though.

haha good metaphor. i'm not giving up; i just need to get out of work early one of these days and go see a bootfitter.

and though i enjoyed the novelty of buying my booze at the grocery store, i will stick to my original plan of stocking up every time i visit CA.

i don't believe in paying taxes when it can be avoided.

Good work Ben!!! Shasta over Fathers day weekend...Just sayin....

I'm blown away...that another state has taxes higher than CA! Riding looks sweet, too!

SOLID WORK

That line has made me drool for years.

Ales been KILLING it this year!

my friend ken invited me down to CA to try out his new Triad bindings and get some promotional footage on shasta. i hadn't seen him all winter, so i was happy to make the trip (plus i needed to restock on whiskey and i hate paying the WA liquor taxes).

first stop was the primus show in redmond... yep, it rocked. les has still got it!


loaded the family up to hit the road after the show and were climbing at broughton bluff by portland the next morning.


later that day we got our first look at the objective... even after seeing rainier on every clear day, shasta still looks big!


after not much sleep the night before, i crashed pretty early, before the film crew showed up. the alarm went off at 0230 and i got my first introduction.... damn, have you guys ever even seen a mountain before??


by daybreak, ken, justin, and i had left the los angeles menagerie behind, and i was wondering if we'd ever see them again.


justin was smart and hiked his custom split up the mountain while ken and i wasted time messing around with skins.


we stopped at helen lake and tried to raise the film crew on the radio. one had already dropped out. most of the rest were struggling. we continued on.


ken skins under our destination, the trinity chutes. so many lines!


ken climbs through the red bank cliffs. i'd never been on this side of shasta before and was surprised at how straightfoward the climb up avy gulch was.


with the film crew still hours behind and our line only a few hundred feet above us, we stopped for a rest near thumb rock.


damn those are some sexy bindings!


we looked around for a bit and then decided to finish our climb and go do the rest of our waiting at 13,300 feet.


time to pick out a line!


i voted for this one...


but we eventually agreed this one would make for better filming vantages.


at last, the crew started to arrive at the top of the chutes.


ken shares his vision for the shot.


but what's this... oh no! one of the hired film students refuses to ride into the chutes, stating them "too steep". somehow, downclimbing is determined as a "solution".


by the time the fiasco was over, hours had gone by and a cloud was covering the sun. so much for video. at least we still get to ride a cool line!!




and soon enough, we are back at camp, enjoying a beer and a sunset.


i never thought my board would look so cool with white bindings!


the next morning, we headed back north after a quick jump into siskiyou lake.


...and made it back up to oregon in time for a quick twilight climb.


on our final day of driving north, it was too rainy to climb...


so we did some hiking and still returned home tired.


it was a lot of driving for one day of riding, but completely worth it to do some exploring with good friends and family. and who wants to be in a video, anyway?!