July 26, 2006
Ingalls Peak
Esther, Matt, Kate, Dan and I went up to Washington to climb Ingalls Peak over the weekend. We were going to do Mt. Stuart but changed our minds after we heard that it'd be over 16 hours. We figured we should try something smaller first. So our friend Bob told us to do Ingalls Peak right next door.
On Saturday we did the easier (5.4-5.6) South Ridge route. It was super fun and easy. Great views from the top of Rainier and the Cascades and of course Stuart off to the East. We got attacked by swarms of biting flies and mosquitos and had an early night. I tried out my new bivy sack, which worked great except for the exposure to the bugs. Bastards.
On Sunday we rose to a nice sunrise over Mt. Stuart. We huffed it over to the East Ridge after a quick breakfast. I lugged up over 11 liters of water to the base, thinking we'd need it all. It was way to heavy and after drinking our fill I dumped close to 6 liters of water. Matt joked that we'd regret it later, luckily we didn't.
The East route was a bit harder than the South but was more exciting with great exposure and great climbing. I learned a cheap lesson to always wear your helmet. While Matt was climbing I took my helmet off for a second and got hit with a fist sized rock in my back, luckily missing my naked head.
The route was super fun, good protection when needed and a few really fun hand traverses with cool exposure. We all enjoyed our first real alpine climbing experience and hope to get in a few more this season. We ended up getting down kindof late and returned to the cars around 10pm and back to Portland at 3am.
July 15, 2006
Beach
Over the weekend I went down to the beach with Sheri to take some photos. Although we didn't have the light we wanted we took quite a few pictures and got comfortable taking shots. After Sheri left to go surfing my friend Jill came down and with her came the sun. We spent our time looking at Jill's recent travel pictures and eating Spanish tortilla. I took entirely too many pictures of Jill's sandals at the beach on Saturday night.
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Beach walk
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July 9, 2006
Beacon Rock
Over the weekend we (Jami, Matt, Keevin and I) climbed Beacon Rock. Here are our pictures.
July 2, 2006
Middle Sister
Over the 4th of July weekend we (Esther, Keevin, Matt and I) went over to Eastern Oregon to tackle the Middle Sister. We had plans to do the "East Arete" as it looked like a super cool line with some easy rock climbing inbetween technical snow climbing.
On Saturday we climbed at Smith to get warmed up and practice our trad placement. I started talking to an older guy next to us about the East Arete on Middle Sister. He told us outright that it was shitty rock and unprotectable. So there went that.
So we switched up to doing the North-East ridge instead. We went through Sisters after finishing climbing and got some awesome pizza at Martoleous? before heading up to camp. We got up and left camp at 4am and were on the summit around noon. There wasn' tanything really technical and we definetly had more gear than necessary with pickets, rope, crampons, axes and tools. But better to have than not.
