Neil
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The Sabers and the White are on Upper Wolf Jaw. The Rainbow Slide is on Gothics. (If you have pics of any of these feel free to link to them here in this thread.)
Teaser pic thread on ADKHP.
And now, for the report:
Having read a fair number of Mudrat’s trip reports I highly suspected that he had a screw loose, maybe more than one. Now, after having spent a day hiking with him I know that to be true so that makes three of us.
Prior to executing this outing we conspired via emails that went to and fro as we sculpted a mission that we both felt excited about. Hence, we signed out at 6:40 with the goals of hunting two saber-tooths, an albino and a rainbow. This would give me a whacked 46er peak and plenty of new slides for each of us. We spotted a car at the Garden in case the stars lined up in such a way as to make a descent off of Gothics via the True North slide an interesting and reasonable option.
The first thing we achieved after leaving the Beaver Meadow Trail was to get lost and almost climb the wrong peak. However, being somewhat gun-shy due to having done just that on my most recent hike I unhesitatingly employed GPS technology to make us un-lost and we side-sloped 500 yards across one more hogback to get into the correct drainage and were at the base of the easternmost and longer of the two Saber-Tooth slides. Total time lost getting lost and then un-lost: one hour.
On the steep lower headwall of the Saber the first thing I noted to myself was that my Raptors were past their peak stickiness and I got some back-slip on moderately angled rock if I wasn’t careful. Not a huge issue though and we had nice climb (800 feet roughly) up this not-so-new slide with several patches of young-ish vegetation to traverse. The rock itself was very clean and fairly grippy although there wasn’t as much Feldspar embedded into it as on some other slides. Overall, it was quite smooth. We had direct views across to the White Slide and agreed that it appeared to be quite steep. The lower portion was pure white and not too steep looking, the middle section was much darker and the upper part looked intimidatingly steep and was shining like a bright white beacon in the hot August sun.
The first Saber-Tooth having been bagged, we whacked over to the top of its shorter, westernmost twin. The whack was what a hunter-gatherer’s life is thought to have been like: nasty, brutish and short. The off-trail woods in the Great Range are no place to be growing wheat or corn crops.
The White Slide was a very different experience than the Sabers. The rock was very clean lower down but then we encountered patches of black lichens in the middle section. These we could avoid for the most part but they restricted our route path choices. The pitch increased and then we hit our first crux. Plenty of sweat and grunting was used to get up a 30 foot pitch with way too much lichen growing on it. However, there was a 3 foot vertical wall on our left and it offered us something to grab onto, sort of. There were more cruxes and I exercised poor judgement regarding my shoes and found myself between a rock and a…rock. Kevin had already downclimbed it and asked me if I wanted the rope. Having found a place to rest my feet flat on a crack I said, “yes, please” and he did an end-run around that nasty pitch, looped the rope around a handy tree and tossed it down to me. I remember saying, “this changes everything”, as I hauled myself up hand over hand. Kevin, ever the artist, snapped pictures of me as I ascended. It seemed as if we were taking turns getting into and out of difficult situations while the other took pictures.
We were fairly whipped once at the top and after I required yet another rope “rescue”. It took 90 minutes to do the slide bottom to top. The whack to the summit of UWJ took maybe 10 minutes. We were able to use visual and audible nav aids in the shape of hikers on the summit to guide us in and we hit the Range Trail at the junction with the spur to the summit. We were hot and sweat-soaked, bedraggled, stinky, torn up and covered in spruce needles when we joined the well-dressed and neatly turned out foursome that was already there. We dropped our gear, stripped off our shirts, probably swore a bit and they immediately left the area.
After that, we hiked over Armstrong and followed the Beaver Meadow trail for 20 minutes before stopping for rest, food and water and here we took a good look at the map. This was the plan: we were going to whack 800 feet down due south, then turn west until Cascade Brook, follow it upwards and arrive at the Rainbow Slide that we had carefully scoped and photographed. The descent was a piece of cake but the traverse to Cascade brook was tougher due to considerable blow-down that litters the forest floor.
Stepping out on to the (several) football field(s)- wide Rainbow Slide was totally awesome. All around and above us were multitudes of various rock faces stretching from Armstrong around to our left on Pyramid. The summit of Gothics was way, way overhead. It was at this moment that Kevin detected that there remained exactly 50% of his pair of climbing shoes that he had attached to his pack when we were on UWJ. However, the lower slab was of gentle pitch so one dilapidated trail runner and one climbing shoe worked out pretty good for him. As the pitch increased his route options did the opposite and at one point it was my turn to save him with the rope. I myself did a final bone-headed move of my own before we left the rock for the woods. I figured I could gain another 40 feet on some nice looking slab that appeared to have enough irregularities for me to make use of higher up. First, I needed to launch myself upwards and over a featureless section to get there. Well, when my upward momentum ceased the knobs and cracks never materialized. Instead, I was on a luxuriant layer of foliose lichens that disintegrated into a powder that formed a frictionless layer between my shoes and the rock. Down-climbing was going to kill my arm and leg muscles and I was already beginning to slide so I lay flat and became a human sled just like you see in the winter Olympics (the skeleton?) only with my head facing uphill. Until I came to a safe landing spot it was a tense moment and hopefully Kevin didn’t get any pics of me doing that.
We were only 300 yards from the summit so we were thinking we were pretty much there but wouldn’t you know it but those 300 yards required over an hour of exhausting and debilitating full-body effort through interlocked, prostrate, downwardly growing “wrap-around” spruce. When we hit the trail at the Pyramid-Cable-route junction, nearly 14 hours out, we were totally spent. My arms had nothing left in them after all the slides and then the endless prying apart of the stout, interlocked spruce branches. The black flies tended towards abundant but, kindly, they focused only on biting me in the corner of my eyes, behind my glasses.
As we staggered like drunks to the summit of Gothics the breeze felt heaven-sent as it chased away the flies and carried away our excess heat. I was so absorbed over those final 300 yards that I had barely drunk and my throat felt like sandpaper so I got caught up on that as we rested. Then it was just a quick hop, skip and a jump over Pyramid, past the Sawteeth col, down the Weld Trail, across the Ausable River, down the AMR road and along the golf course to my car.
Toatal time out: 17 hours.
Total calories burned: 11,000.
Total number of loose screws between us: unknowable.
--Pictures.--
There a few points to remember:
Each full-size picture is a hot-link to the next one.
I am using a new thumb-nail creator and can't get rid of the gray border around the full-size pics.
Always, always hit F11 when looking at my pics.
Enjoy!
Teaser pic thread on ADKHP.
And now, for the report:
Having read a fair number of Mudrat’s trip reports I highly suspected that he had a screw loose, maybe more than one. Now, after having spent a day hiking with him I know that to be true so that makes three of us.
Prior to executing this outing we conspired via emails that went to and fro as we sculpted a mission that we both felt excited about. Hence, we signed out at 6:40 with the goals of hunting two saber-tooths, an albino and a rainbow. This would give me a whacked 46er peak and plenty of new slides for each of us. We spotted a car at the Garden in case the stars lined up in such a way as to make a descent off of Gothics via the True North slide an interesting and reasonable option.
The first thing we achieved after leaving the Beaver Meadow Trail was to get lost and almost climb the wrong peak. However, being somewhat gun-shy due to having done just that on my most recent hike I unhesitatingly employed GPS technology to make us un-lost and we side-sloped 500 yards across one more hogback to get into the correct drainage and were at the base of the easternmost and longer of the two Saber-Tooth slides. Total time lost getting lost and then un-lost: one hour.
On the steep lower headwall of the Saber the first thing I noted to myself was that my Raptors were past their peak stickiness and I got some back-slip on moderately angled rock if I wasn’t careful. Not a huge issue though and we had nice climb (800 feet roughly) up this not-so-new slide with several patches of young-ish vegetation to traverse. The rock itself was very clean and fairly grippy although there wasn’t as much Feldspar embedded into it as on some other slides. Overall, it was quite smooth. We had direct views across to the White Slide and agreed that it appeared to be quite steep. The lower portion was pure white and not too steep looking, the middle section was much darker and the upper part looked intimidatingly steep and was shining like a bright white beacon in the hot August sun.
The first Saber-Tooth having been bagged, we whacked over to the top of its shorter, westernmost twin. The whack was what a hunter-gatherer’s life is thought to have been like: nasty, brutish and short. The off-trail woods in the Great Range are no place to be growing wheat or corn crops.
The White Slide was a very different experience than the Sabers. The rock was very clean lower down but then we encountered patches of black lichens in the middle section. These we could avoid for the most part but they restricted our route path choices. The pitch increased and then we hit our first crux. Plenty of sweat and grunting was used to get up a 30 foot pitch with way too much lichen growing on it. However, there was a 3 foot vertical wall on our left and it offered us something to grab onto, sort of. There were more cruxes and I exercised poor judgement regarding my shoes and found myself between a rock and a…rock. Kevin had already downclimbed it and asked me if I wanted the rope. Having found a place to rest my feet flat on a crack I said, “yes, please” and he did an end-run around that nasty pitch, looped the rope around a handy tree and tossed it down to me. I remember saying, “this changes everything”, as I hauled myself up hand over hand. Kevin, ever the artist, snapped pictures of me as I ascended. It seemed as if we were taking turns getting into and out of difficult situations while the other took pictures.
We were fairly whipped once at the top and after I required yet another rope “rescue”. It took 90 minutes to do the slide bottom to top. The whack to the summit of UWJ took maybe 10 minutes. We were able to use visual and audible nav aids in the shape of hikers on the summit to guide us in and we hit the Range Trail at the junction with the spur to the summit. We were hot and sweat-soaked, bedraggled, stinky, torn up and covered in spruce needles when we joined the well-dressed and neatly turned out foursome that was already there. We dropped our gear, stripped off our shirts, probably swore a bit and they immediately left the area.
After that, we hiked over Armstrong and followed the Beaver Meadow trail for 20 minutes before stopping for rest, food and water and here we took a good look at the map. This was the plan: we were going to whack 800 feet down due south, then turn west until Cascade Brook, follow it upwards and arrive at the Rainbow Slide that we had carefully scoped and photographed. The descent was a piece of cake but the traverse to Cascade brook was tougher due to considerable blow-down that litters the forest floor.
Stepping out on to the (several) football field(s)- wide Rainbow Slide was totally awesome. All around and above us were multitudes of various rock faces stretching from Armstrong around to our left on Pyramid. The summit of Gothics was way, way overhead. It was at this moment that Kevin detected that there remained exactly 50% of his pair of climbing shoes that he had attached to his pack when we were on UWJ. However, the lower slab was of gentle pitch so one dilapidated trail runner and one climbing shoe worked out pretty good for him. As the pitch increased his route options did the opposite and at one point it was my turn to save him with the rope. I myself did a final bone-headed move of my own before we left the rock for the woods. I figured I could gain another 40 feet on some nice looking slab that appeared to have enough irregularities for me to make use of higher up. First, I needed to launch myself upwards and over a featureless section to get there. Well, when my upward momentum ceased the knobs and cracks never materialized. Instead, I was on a luxuriant layer of foliose lichens that disintegrated into a powder that formed a frictionless layer between my shoes and the rock. Down-climbing was going to kill my arm and leg muscles and I was already beginning to slide so I lay flat and became a human sled just like you see in the winter Olympics (the skeleton?) only with my head facing uphill. Until I came to a safe landing spot it was a tense moment and hopefully Kevin didn’t get any pics of me doing that.
We were only 300 yards from the summit so we were thinking we were pretty much there but wouldn’t you know it but those 300 yards required over an hour of exhausting and debilitating full-body effort through interlocked, prostrate, downwardly growing “wrap-around” spruce. When we hit the trail at the Pyramid-Cable-route junction, nearly 14 hours out, we were totally spent. My arms had nothing left in them after all the slides and then the endless prying apart of the stout, interlocked spruce branches. The black flies tended towards abundant but, kindly, they focused only on biting me in the corner of my eyes, behind my glasses.
As we staggered like drunks to the summit of Gothics the breeze felt heaven-sent as it chased away the flies and carried away our excess heat. I was so absorbed over those final 300 yards that I had barely drunk and my throat felt like sandpaper so I got caught up on that as we rested. Then it was just a quick hop, skip and a jump over Pyramid, past the Sawteeth col, down the Weld Trail, across the Ausable River, down the AMR road and along the golf course to my car.
Toatal time out: 17 hours.
Total calories burned: 11,000.
Total number of loose screws between us: unknowable.
--Pictures.--
There a few points to remember:
Each full-size picture is a hot-link to the next one.
I am using a new thumb-nail creator and can't get rid of the gray border around the full-size pics.
Always, always hit F11 when looking at my pics.
Enjoy!
Last edited:
