by Chris Comair
Fun easy climbs for fun
Jess and I had spend the last week tracking the snowfall closely. Our goal was to climb a north side Rainier route on the Memorial Day weekend, but a half-yard of snow dump a few days before ruined our plans. We drove as far away from the snow we could get- out to Vantage for [...]
Jess and I took a random Tuesday off with the hope to climb. As of Monday early morning, the overall conditions looked too warm and we called off the climb…or so we though. Sitting around at 5pm and feeling guilty/fat, we said “Why not shoot for Dragontail?” We had just got a good look at the route previous week during our run up Colchuck and we figured it would be pretty stable in the warmth. And similar to Colchuck, we wanted to get to know the route we would use to descend our more technical winter/spring attempts on the peak. [...]
After a fairly intense (ie. extremely dangerous) experience on Mount Hood’s North Face recently, Jess and I were feeling pretty risk adverse in approaching a tight weather window between periods of heavy unseasonal precip. We’ve been wanting to climb Colchuck’s North Buttress Couloir, but had never actually climbed Colchuck to begin with. Why not check it out? [...]
I had always wanted to climb the Leuthold Couloir, an apparent Pacific Northwest classic, but being a grade II climb I just never really got around to it. When we saw a 2 day weather window open up, we made the call to shoot for the Leuthold Couloir with a camp at Illumination Rock. It would be a little easy, but hey, it’s supposed to be a classic.[...]
One of the most frequently asked questions I get from new climbers eyeing Mount Rainier is about altitude sickness. Altitude sickness is one of those things that looms over most new climbers before their first big climbs. Rainier also happens to be many budding alpinists' first big climb. First thing's first, short of trying to [...]
Upon gaining the ridge we were presented with an amazing view of Illiniza Sur, our primary objective. The day was beginning to warm up, and the skies were clear. Climbing in Ecuador comes with the expectation of bad weather, so I was super happy that the mountain gods seemed to be on our side. [...]