Because wasoxygen has shamed me enough times on Strava for not posting pictures on Strava, goddamit. I'm going to type this up in parts over the course of the next few days because (a) I'm doing other things and (b) if this post were to not save or post after I pull all the photos and descriptions, I'd be pretty annoyed.

ALRIGHT, you all know by now that I, uh, partake in climbing in various disciplines. Rock climbing at crags on both sport and trad routes, alpine rock climbing, glacier mountaineering, and a little bit of ice and mixed climbing (very little mixed because it scares me). I run, a lot, and I log all these things on Strava partially so I can export my own goddamn gpx files when it's all said and done.

This is probably going to be a 3 part series, since I am shifting climbing disciplines dramatically starting on Tuesday next week over to focusing more on alpine rock, here's a collection of glacier ski tours and climbs from May through July. Have another big snowy scramble this weekend, though. Also since I got dumped I have looooots of free time to climb, also contributing to the 3 part series.

PART 1: Glaciers and Scrambles of WA

Subpart A: Mesachie Glacier Ski Tour. Buddy of mine was, and has since, moved to San Antonio, that fucker. We celebrated by going on a big ole ski tour in North Cascades National Park in May, on the Mesachie Glacier, not trivial to get to, forested approach and exit, but you get some amazing skiing in-between. It's also just a lot of work, at about 11 miles and 6,000ft of elevation gain, on a horseshoe shaped route, so you have to either drop a car at the exit or hitchhike. We opted to hitchhike for the fun of it.

...it's not all glamerous...in fact, very little of all this shit is glamerous.

...but you sure do get some good views. This was one of the first hotter and sunny weeks/weekends of 2022 out here, great for skiing, absolutely terrifying hearing the sound of rockfall and cornice collapse-causing avalanches in the valleys to the north of us. Fortunately all this was happening on different aspects of mountains than what we were up to, but also, we had pretty bad runout in spots where a fall would absolutely get you pretty hurt.

See the three people in the photo below? That's us making a mistake! We had a hard time figuring out which of the 3 notches we were supposed to drop into for touring the glacier on the other side of this ridge, ended up booting up this fucking thing, and having to downclimb part of it because we set off an avalanche when we tried to ski cut it. NOT THE BEST PART OF THIS TRIP.

Then the best part of the trip - skiing! We skiied the line following from top left to bottom right of this image below, a good 2,500 vertical feet of pure glacier skiing.

And then a whole bunch of garbage forest skiing and forest walking and a mile of road walking before some dude visiting in a sprinter van picked us up and drove us the rest of the way to the trailhead, none of which is worth talking about.