charlybldr
08-03-2005, 12:14 AM
OZ/US Northwest Rendezvous
Monday July 25
Gorge Creek
Participants: Rob Cobb, Joe Bugden, John Hart, Ram, and Charly
After the phone call from Ram at baggage claim in the SeaTac airport on Friday we managed to play “message tag� back and forth and determined a time and place to meet Monday morning. We drove back from Silver Creek Sunday evening and made another visit to SeaTac to pick up John Hart. The next morning we got an early start, hit Starbucks for coffee and rolled out of Seattle to North Cascades National Park where we spotted Ram at our pre- arranged meeting place. We found him sitting at a sunny picnic table, pouring over maps and books, his other favorite pass time. Warm greetings and introductions were followed by a brief recon of one of the Northwest’s “Seven Undescended�, Ladder Creek.
Now there’s a good reason Ladder Creek has yet to see a descent. And it’s not because of lack of desire. Let me give you an idea what it looks like. Imagine a sinuous, twisting slot, featuring pothole after pothole similar in width to many of the narrow slots you’ve seen in southern Utah. Only instead of sandstone it’s granite, and instead of dropping 100 feet in one mile it drops hundreds of feet in less than a mile and oh yeah, it has a torrent of clear, icy water raging through it. Did I mention it is perched on a steep hillside covered in old growth forest with so much pine duff under foot that walking uphill off the trail is not a whole lot unlike hiking up loose scree? Good thing there was a trail.
The trail offers numerous vantage points from which to view this spectacular slot. “So this is a draught year� I said, or something to that affect. You really couldn’t tell. There was so much water pounding its way through the slot that the whitewater boils at the bottom of each waterfall only just settled into cold black pools before immediately plunging madly over the next drop. It looked like certain death. We could identify great stances at the lip of almost every drop. Problem is, how would you get there from the stance above? “Let’s see, rap into the pool, swim to the edge. Wait a minute. How can you swim to the edge of the pool when the waterfall will just pound you to the bottom of the pothole and keep you there?� Hmmmm…
“Wait ‘till you see the upper part� Rob said with an evil glint in his eye. But to get there we’d have to leave the trail. Striking uphill following the remnants of an old trail we steadily made progress to our next viewpoint behind an old dilapidated building. Picking our way around the building through the undergrowth Rob and Joe disappeared behind a moss covered boulder as big as the structure next to it. I couldn’t help but think this boulder would be awesome sitting in my back yard. Dry it off in the sun, clean off all the moss… “Charly, come here and check this out�. Rob called. I carefully picked my way around the boulder painfully conscious of the fact that the pine duff I was walking on was just barely supported over the edge of the void by rotting roots and leaves. I’ve heard stories of people hiking steep trails in Hawaii only to disappear through a hole in the undergrowth hanging hundreds of feet above the pounding surf. This stuff didn’t look a whole lot more solid. Carefully picking my way down to Rob I leaned out and gazed into the abyss. “That’s ****ed up� was all I could come up with to say. The canyon was no more than ten feet across and easily fifty feet deep. It was so dark down there you couldn’t see the water except for the fact that it was churned into a white roiling froth. “That’s ****ed up!� I managed to say again. Rob just cracked up laughing. It’s pretty obvious why this canyon has yet to see a descent. It’s going to take a lot of skill and nerves of steel to go down in there. Ok, so Gorge Creek should be a piece of cake, right?
Gorge Creek is a narrow gash in the side of a mountain just a stone’s throw from the highway bridge. In fact you can walk out to the middle of the bridge and look strait up the slot. Waterfall after waterfall dropped from above. From this angle they appeared to totally fill the narrow defile. This canyon had been the scene of hasty retreat a few years before when Ram and Stevie B made the prudent choice to bail out via a desperately loose gully (I think Ram rated it MIA 4) to avoid the rising water of the afternoon snow melt. Their gallant effort sans wet suits and a bolt kit was worthy of pioneering exploration status. The canyon would have to wait until another time.
In comes Rob, fresh out of a canyoneering course, ticking a season’s worth of canyons in Utah and Colorado, realizing on the drive back to Seattle his home turf was chock full of this kind of terrain. Somehow Rob found Ken Leibert, another Seattle local. Ken had turned his interest in southern Utah canyons into an unquenchable thirst (so to speak) for exploring wet canyons in the Pacific Northwest. So earlier this season, in a draught summer with water levels dropping steadily, Rob and Ken went in. They managed to fix a deviation avoiding the murderous waterfall in the tightest part of the narrows but still had to bail before finishing. Just a week earlier Rob finally made it back with partner Chris Hood from Vancouver and ticked the route. Ecstatic and anxious to see what canyoners from different turf thought Rob brought the four of us here first. Joe, (the hotshot from OZ), John (who has done canyons all over the world including Reunion Island), Ram (need I say more) and myself were to be the guinea pigs. Would the canyon stand up to our collective critical eye?
What seemed like thousands of feet of steep uphill thrutching (“don’t slip here�) through the dense undergrowth of Washington forest (“is this devils club?�) found us slinging a sturdy pine tree allowing a 100+ foot rap down into the upper gorge. Ram pointed out the down-climb (of course) but we all agreed rapping in was appropriate. Once in the bottom of the canyon we sorted out gear, donned wet suits and walked down to the first anchor. Blazing hot summer sun reflected off white granite boulders and in no time we were all sweltering in our wetsuits and begging to get into the water. The first drop was over 100 feet down the side of a beautiful horses tail of a waterfall that made the otherwise high friction granite “slick as owl shit on a barn floor� under foot. Committed, we were now ready to drop into the maw. Rob lead the deviation wanting to test three different solutions for dealing with the problem at hand.
In high water rapping directly down the waterfall is simply out of the question (as Stevie B and Ram can attest) so the deviation offers a way to avoid certain drowning. A fifty foot, fifth class traverse leads out to an airy stance on the nose of a prow that hangs directly over a huge chockstone blocking the slot the waterfall conveniently runs behind. A solid anchor on the other side allowed us to rig a guide line and by pulling the deviation rope allowed the remainder of the party to avoid actually getting in the waterfall. High-water problem solved. Unfortunately, the guide rope seemed to be rubbing across a rough edge and each consecutive rappel had to be adjusted to avoid a core shot. (Yes, Koen it was an 8mm rope. Will these yanks never learn?) As the last guy to come down I was more than a little concerned about this situation. So concerned in fact that I forgot to re-rig the set up to move the knots joining our two ropes to the correct side of the anchor. I clipped in and gently rapped down careful not to bounce and scrape the rope across that rough edge. Once down of course, this oversight completely prevented retrieval of the rope. Well, I may be slow, but at least I’m stupid.
Rob graciously volunteered to ascend back up, fixed the problem and was back down in no time. This time he rapped directly through the waterfall, which turned out to be less of a problem than expected. In these conditions the force of the water was significantly diminished and the rap only briefly exposed him to the icy face shot before dropping him in behind the waterfall. Nice. This set of drops look directly out to the highway bridge which by now featured a number of spectators and even a car or two. Great. We’re going to get busted for creating a disturbance and blocking traffic. Oh well, might as well continue on. “Shall we?� Rob said, and off we went.
Another drop into a cave behind a waterfall, a few down-climbs and swims and we were in walking territory. With the bridge directly over our heads we poked through the trash people can’t seem to resist dropping. Coins, cans, and old highway sign identifying “Gorge Creek� and three of those big plastic orange highway barriers, you know, the ones with the flashing yellow lights on top? Those must have been fun.
A brief walk out to the lake to change out of wetsuits and fairly painless scramble back up the steep hillside through the forest and talus to the road and we were back at the car. “Well, what did you think?� queried Rob. All we could do was grin.
Monday July 25
Gorge Creek
Participants: Rob Cobb, Joe Bugden, John Hart, Ram, and Charly
After the phone call from Ram at baggage claim in the SeaTac airport on Friday we managed to play “message tag� back and forth and determined a time and place to meet Monday morning. We drove back from Silver Creek Sunday evening and made another visit to SeaTac to pick up John Hart. The next morning we got an early start, hit Starbucks for coffee and rolled out of Seattle to North Cascades National Park where we spotted Ram at our pre- arranged meeting place. We found him sitting at a sunny picnic table, pouring over maps and books, his other favorite pass time. Warm greetings and introductions were followed by a brief recon of one of the Northwest’s “Seven Undescended�, Ladder Creek.
Now there’s a good reason Ladder Creek has yet to see a descent. And it’s not because of lack of desire. Let me give you an idea what it looks like. Imagine a sinuous, twisting slot, featuring pothole after pothole similar in width to many of the narrow slots you’ve seen in southern Utah. Only instead of sandstone it’s granite, and instead of dropping 100 feet in one mile it drops hundreds of feet in less than a mile and oh yeah, it has a torrent of clear, icy water raging through it. Did I mention it is perched on a steep hillside covered in old growth forest with so much pine duff under foot that walking uphill off the trail is not a whole lot unlike hiking up loose scree? Good thing there was a trail.
The trail offers numerous vantage points from which to view this spectacular slot. “So this is a draught year� I said, or something to that affect. You really couldn’t tell. There was so much water pounding its way through the slot that the whitewater boils at the bottom of each waterfall only just settled into cold black pools before immediately plunging madly over the next drop. It looked like certain death. We could identify great stances at the lip of almost every drop. Problem is, how would you get there from the stance above? “Let’s see, rap into the pool, swim to the edge. Wait a minute. How can you swim to the edge of the pool when the waterfall will just pound you to the bottom of the pothole and keep you there?� Hmmmm…
“Wait ‘till you see the upper part� Rob said with an evil glint in his eye. But to get there we’d have to leave the trail. Striking uphill following the remnants of an old trail we steadily made progress to our next viewpoint behind an old dilapidated building. Picking our way around the building through the undergrowth Rob and Joe disappeared behind a moss covered boulder as big as the structure next to it. I couldn’t help but think this boulder would be awesome sitting in my back yard. Dry it off in the sun, clean off all the moss… “Charly, come here and check this out�. Rob called. I carefully picked my way around the boulder painfully conscious of the fact that the pine duff I was walking on was just barely supported over the edge of the void by rotting roots and leaves. I’ve heard stories of people hiking steep trails in Hawaii only to disappear through a hole in the undergrowth hanging hundreds of feet above the pounding surf. This stuff didn’t look a whole lot more solid. Carefully picking my way down to Rob I leaned out and gazed into the abyss. “That’s ****ed up� was all I could come up with to say. The canyon was no more than ten feet across and easily fifty feet deep. It was so dark down there you couldn’t see the water except for the fact that it was churned into a white roiling froth. “That’s ****ed up!� I managed to say again. Rob just cracked up laughing. It’s pretty obvious why this canyon has yet to see a descent. It’s going to take a lot of skill and nerves of steel to go down in there. Ok, so Gorge Creek should be a piece of cake, right?
Gorge Creek is a narrow gash in the side of a mountain just a stone’s throw from the highway bridge. In fact you can walk out to the middle of the bridge and look strait up the slot. Waterfall after waterfall dropped from above. From this angle they appeared to totally fill the narrow defile. This canyon had been the scene of hasty retreat a few years before when Ram and Stevie B made the prudent choice to bail out via a desperately loose gully (I think Ram rated it MIA 4) to avoid the rising water of the afternoon snow melt. Their gallant effort sans wet suits and a bolt kit was worthy of pioneering exploration status. The canyon would have to wait until another time.
In comes Rob, fresh out of a canyoneering course, ticking a season’s worth of canyons in Utah and Colorado, realizing on the drive back to Seattle his home turf was chock full of this kind of terrain. Somehow Rob found Ken Leibert, another Seattle local. Ken had turned his interest in southern Utah canyons into an unquenchable thirst (so to speak) for exploring wet canyons in the Pacific Northwest. So earlier this season, in a draught summer with water levels dropping steadily, Rob and Ken went in. They managed to fix a deviation avoiding the murderous waterfall in the tightest part of the narrows but still had to bail before finishing. Just a week earlier Rob finally made it back with partner Chris Hood from Vancouver and ticked the route. Ecstatic and anxious to see what canyoners from different turf thought Rob brought the four of us here first. Joe, (the hotshot from OZ), John (who has done canyons all over the world including Reunion Island), Ram (need I say more) and myself were to be the guinea pigs. Would the canyon stand up to our collective critical eye?
What seemed like thousands of feet of steep uphill thrutching (“don’t slip here�) through the dense undergrowth of Washington forest (“is this devils club?�) found us slinging a sturdy pine tree allowing a 100+ foot rap down into the upper gorge. Ram pointed out the down-climb (of course) but we all agreed rapping in was appropriate. Once in the bottom of the canyon we sorted out gear, donned wet suits and walked down to the first anchor. Blazing hot summer sun reflected off white granite boulders and in no time we were all sweltering in our wetsuits and begging to get into the water. The first drop was over 100 feet down the side of a beautiful horses tail of a waterfall that made the otherwise high friction granite “slick as owl shit on a barn floor� under foot. Committed, we were now ready to drop into the maw. Rob lead the deviation wanting to test three different solutions for dealing with the problem at hand.
In high water rapping directly down the waterfall is simply out of the question (as Stevie B and Ram can attest) so the deviation offers a way to avoid certain drowning. A fifty foot, fifth class traverse leads out to an airy stance on the nose of a prow that hangs directly over a huge chockstone blocking the slot the waterfall conveniently runs behind. A solid anchor on the other side allowed us to rig a guide line and by pulling the deviation rope allowed the remainder of the party to avoid actually getting in the waterfall. High-water problem solved. Unfortunately, the guide rope seemed to be rubbing across a rough edge and each consecutive rappel had to be adjusted to avoid a core shot. (Yes, Koen it was an 8mm rope. Will these yanks never learn?) As the last guy to come down I was more than a little concerned about this situation. So concerned in fact that I forgot to re-rig the set up to move the knots joining our two ropes to the correct side of the anchor. I clipped in and gently rapped down careful not to bounce and scrape the rope across that rough edge. Once down of course, this oversight completely prevented retrieval of the rope. Well, I may be slow, but at least I’m stupid.
Rob graciously volunteered to ascend back up, fixed the problem and was back down in no time. This time he rapped directly through the waterfall, which turned out to be less of a problem than expected. In these conditions the force of the water was significantly diminished and the rap only briefly exposed him to the icy face shot before dropping him in behind the waterfall. Nice. This set of drops look directly out to the highway bridge which by now featured a number of spectators and even a car or two. Great. We’re going to get busted for creating a disturbance and blocking traffic. Oh well, might as well continue on. “Shall we?� Rob said, and off we went.
Another drop into a cave behind a waterfall, a few down-climbs and swims and we were in walking territory. With the bridge directly over our heads we poked through the trash people can’t seem to resist dropping. Coins, cans, and old highway sign identifying “Gorge Creek� and three of those big plastic orange highway barriers, you know, the ones with the flashing yellow lights on top? Those must have been fun.
A brief walk out to the lake to change out of wetsuits and fairly painless scramble back up the steep hillside through the forest and talus to the road and we were back at the car. “Well, what did you think?� queried Rob. All we could do was grin.