Klickitat - North Face of the Northwest Ridge

Whew, what a mouthful of a ski descent.

Only in the Cascades can you have the best day of the ski season on June 22. The NFNWR is a classic line first skied by the legendary Glen Plake, and is perhaps ‘the line’ on the young volcano known as Klickitat or Pahto or Mt. Adams.

I drove to the trailhead from the north, from Index, with plans on meeting a friend who came from the south. The trailhead is on a remote side of the mountain, accessed via 35+ miles of dirt road. My friend, Erik, had smooth sailing on his journey, arriving right at the time we planned to meet.

While he was setting up camp, relaxing with an early dinner, and enjoying the sunset on the mountain, and perhaps vaguely wondering where I might be, I was frantically trying to shovel my high-centered car out from a slurry of mud and snow, still five miles away from the trailhead. I multitasked by swatting mosquitos with a great enough density to kill 6 per slap, truly the icing on a pretty f'ed up cake.

Eventually, I realized I wasn’t going to get my little AWD hatchback un-stuck, so I laced up the running shoes and used the best mode of transportation I had available to go find Erik. Our simple exchange upon me jogging (not driving) up to the trailhead conveyed a bigger story than was spoken - “hey! …oh, shit?” “yeah, shit” “oh, shit!!”

One quick recovery mission, a rushed dinner, and 3 hours of sleep later, our skis were on our packs, headlamps were on, and we were motoring up the trail. I’ll let the photos take it from here.

Morning light on Tahoma, the Mother of Waters.

On the approach. Just up and left of Erik is our descent, the NFNWR. We climbed the north ridge, the rocky line on the left.

Two climbers visible on the Adams Glacier (center-right).

Photo by Erik of me beginning the climb of the north ridge. I was surprised to discover later that most seem to find this route tedious. I thought it aesthetic, efficient, and atypical for a volcano climb. Perhaps the choss of the San Juan Mountains has given me a new perspective.

Erik cresting the summit plateau. I think this was the smelliest (sulfur) volcanic summit I’ve been on.

Erik dropping in on the NFNWR. The first few hundred feet off the summit were a perfect low angle warmup.

Check out Erik’s GoPro video of the descent here.

Erik exiting the face. We wove through the cliff bands in the upper right.

Lenticulars above the Adams icefall. The mountain was enveloped by clouds around 5 minutes later.

Thank you, Klickitat.

I camped again that night and made it back to my parent’s home in Wenatchee the next day. That night while digging through boxes in my childhood bedroom, I found an old journal. In it, 13-year-old me had written his goals down for 2010. Climb Dragontail, climb a v2, do a 360 on skis, among many other things that I’ve long since achieved. The last goal on the list, never crossed off, was to climb Mt. Adams. It took me 14 years, but I was finally able to check that one off the list. 13 year old me was proud.

Love and Grief in the Cascades

A formative photojournalism assignment in my sophomore year of college brought me to the Seattle home of renowned fine art photographer Chris Jordan. One of Jordan’s most well-known works, ‘Midway’, depicts the decaying carcasses of albatross fledglings on Midway Atoll in the central Pacific. The flesh returns to the earth, and what remains are bones and a colorful pile of plastic. Lighters, bottle caps, whatever else. An inedible last meal (or more likely, long series of meals) and a haunting portrait of the anthropocene. A tragedy. During an interview that day, we talked about grief and sadness and mourning, and Jordan said something about grief that has stuck with since - something like:

'Grief is the realization of love for something that is no longer with us.’

I know I butchered that quote (sorry Chris, if you read this), but understanding that love and grief are two sides of the same coin has influenced my emotional development since.

Since 2019, I hadn’t spent much time in my home state of Washington that was uninhibited, minimally scheduled, and on my own terms. A good friend’s wedding brought me back to the state this June, and I set aside the rest of the month for reconnecting with the place that shaped me.

I’m not sure yet where the needle will fall on this blog’s spectrum between personal and professional. In the interest of skewing it towards the latter, I’m keeping a lot of things private, but this might be a bit more personal than some other posts. Sometimes you gotta think out loud.

We go about our days, indulging in our little habits and keeping up with our little tasks. Days go by in the monotony of adulthood and nothing seems to change, until we return to somewhere in our past and the paradigm shift slaps us across the face.

That’s what returning to Index felt like. I walked through the cedars along the north fork of the powerful Skykomish and turned around, expecting to see friends who simply aren’t there anymore. I bathed in the river and felt like I was 20, felt like it was time to drive back to Bellingham when I came back up for air, felt the weight of a past life no longer there, and the friends and family members that are no longer here either.

It was grounding and healing to revisit those lives and mourn them. I am who I am because of the Cascades, and I was reminded that I can always return and reconnect with that younger self. Though the stereotype of a young person finding themselves and going soul searching tends to happen as a teenager, or turning 18, or graduating college, I feel I’m going through it now more than ever, at 27. A quarter life crisis perhaps, or simply a Saturn return. A bit too much time in isolation at my home in Dolores, CO (a fantastic place to live, but occasionally a bit too quiet even for an introvert like myself) maybe, a yearning for an unknown something, a trait that a former therapist had often pointed out I carry.

After a few years in Colorado I saw the fairy gardens and micro ecosystems of a Cascadian rainforest with a whole new set of eyes. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so giddy to find a slug. So much water, so much life, so much granite. I cried more than once.

A few low-res cell phone snaps of what joy looks like.

I was excited to spend time in the alpine of the North Cascades while I was home, as those mountains, since being carried on my parents back through them as a baby, are a deeper home still, but I found most of what I needed on this journey in the lowlands. The sense of community that the Index climbing scene provides is, to me, incomparable.

What is the lesson in this stream of consciousness? Why did I post this? I’m not really sure, because when I started typing, I intended this to be a trip report for a ski descent that happened a couple days later, after leaving Index. I guess a few things just needed to be said first.

As they do say: Index provides.

A Week in the Elk Mountains

Since I moved to SW Colorado four years ago, the entirety of my skiing has been in the San Juans. On this so-gloriously-perfect third week of April, I ventured out with some friends to ski a handful of classic lines in Elk Mountains, such as the north face of Castle, Conundrum Couloir, the Pearl, and the Pyramid’s Real Banana. Enjoy the photos.

Scott Eubank en route to the Pearl (Cathedral Peak).

Scott climbing The Pearl.

Looking back at Cathedral Peak (right) from the summit of Leahy. The more distant, high peaks in the center are two 14ers, Castle and Conundrum, which we skied the next day.

Scott dropping in on the north face of Leahy - a nice bonus lap after the Pearl.

Approaching Pyramid peak in stormy conditions was seriously hardcore. There’s a lot of gated road you have to cover. I rode an e-bike, towing Scott. I have never been this wet in Colorado.

Psyche remained high nonetheless. Jenna Brown and Johnny Youngs.

The north face of North Maroon. A classic ski descent I will have to come back for.

Climbing ‘The Real Banana’. Full conditions.

Stoke is high in the steep and deep.

DROPPING

A Season of Spring Skiing in the San Juan Mountains

Or, my test-drive blog post.

I started skiing when I was 2. My approach to skiing has gone through a lot of different phases over all that time - from not really enjoying it at all, to being a wannabe racer, to just wanting to ski the backcountry, to being a park rat, a wannabe freerider, a Baker bro, a turns-all-year acolyte, to someone whose ski season doesn’t really start till April.

I’m still adjusting to the continental snowpack after moving to Colorado from the PNW four years ago. Ice climbing tends to fill my winters, though I did ski more powder in 2024 than other recent years, but those six weeks from the middle of April to the end of May are still my favorite six of the year.

After a month on a work assignment in Baja, my ski season began with a series of epic powder days on the Trout-to-Ophir tour, a popular shuttle mission in the NW San Juans.

ALT

Yours truly in Gemini (top). The Himalayan Face, always calling (lower).

After one T-to-O day, Dani made me take a picture with my photo of her in Backcountry Mag, and I’m quite glad she did.

One day skiing Gemini with Dani, I brought the drone along. Check out the video here.

Shortly thereafter, stuck again yearning for someone else to get into the mountains with, I did a solo mission, Trout-to-Ophir-and-back-to-Trout (nixing the shuttle option in favor of my own legs: the hermit’s choice, not the smart one). I skied the Big O, one of the more prominent couloirs in Waterfall Canyon, made some GS turns through hero hippy pow into the bottom of the canyon, and upon realizing it was too warm to stick with my original plan of climbing back up an adjacent couloir to regain the ridge and descend back to my car, I took the long way out, tracing Waterfall Creek through low angle but consistent terrain, safe from the warming slabs and cornices that would haunt me otherwise. Not safe from dehydration and sleep deprivation, which always hit me like a train those first couple warm spring days.

Hero turns upon exiting the Big O.

I regained the ridge at a new-to-me location on the west shoulder of Pilot Knob, with a steep, exposed, unknown face between me and my car. My “safer exit” suddenly was feeling much less safe. I had a lot of words that day to describe the position I found myself in, dropping in blind on a face that I knew deadends in cliffs for 95% of it’s width. Today, 3 months later in the middle of a record setting July heatwave, I don’t seem to have as many. I trusted my intuition, ski cut a windslab, and followed my gut down towards what I hoped would be a sneak line through the cliff band. It went, but barely - just a couple centimeters wider than my 184cm skis through it’s gut, I made almost 1000 feet of hop turns before exiting onto familiar below-treeline terrain and lovely cruise back to the car.

Is it gonna go?

It goes! We got lucky. The ‘Pilot Pinner’ is a couloir I would actually welcome skiing again.

Next stop, The Coors Face, on Shandoka (Wilson Peak). This line needs no introduction. For me, it had been the only line in the San Juans to ever turn me back, having attempted it 3 times in the previous year (wind slab, a late start, and a rocky, not-filled-in crux being the 3 reasons I bailed).

Three previous bails left me feeling stubborn, I guess, and Nick and I skied it in mediocre conditions that I would not repeat again. Of all the '50 Classics’ I’ve skied, this was by far the worst in the given conditions. An inch of sugar snow often covered large, lurking sharks. I blew out an edge on one of them. It was kinda scary, and not really in the calculated, controlled sort of way, more of the 'this is stupid’ kind of way. The crux was largely rock, and I booted a small section. I’m glad I did it, but it truly felt like checking a box, which is not the way I want any of my mountain experiences to feel. I would need a record setting snowpack to come back.

Nick on the thin face. Shark attack!

Once through the choke, the lower couloir and apron was phenomenal. I would ski that section any day.

Photo by Gus Bosch, who skied the line a couple days later. You can see my and Nick’s tracks in the central couloir, lower on the face.

After that, I racked up 30000 feet of vert in a week of skiing in the Elk Mountains. I skied a couple more San Juan classics too, such as the Naked Lady.

The last Colorado ski mission of the season was in the La Plata Mountains, whose western facade presides over Montezuma County and is a never ending source of beautiful sunset landscapes from the mesa above my house in Dolores. The small sub range of the San Juans offers incredible powder skiing in the winter (often receiving greater and wetter snow than other parts of the range, comparable in some ways to Wolf Creek Pass or Marble) and plethora of fantastic couloir descents, complicated only by long and difficult access. A sled helps. On this day we chose mountain bikes to cover 5 or 6 miles of singletrack before reaching snowline.

We skied a perfect north-facing couloir off of Spiller Peak, which I have heard referred to as Ray’s Couloir, though I’m also partial to 'The Spillway’. Owen Basin, the headwaters of the not-so-mighty yet vital Mancos River, was criss-crossed with bear tracks and packed with fun-looking ice climbs, and one incredibly good looking quartzite boulder. An inspiring amphitheater indeed.

Bear report, above treeline, all aspects: active.

Nick climbing the couloir. Dibe Ntsaa (Hesperus) and Lavendar Peaks behind. An inspiring mountain venue indeed, if only it were easier to get to.

3, 2, 1….

Baja, March 2024.

A selection of landscapes from an assignment with Hidden West Adventures, driving the length of Baja California and back. March 2024.