DEVIL’S LOOP Between August 18 and August 25, 2001 Will and I circumnavigated Jack Mountain. Our plan for the week was to hike from the Ashnola River road in BC down into Cathedral Park, set up a base camp and explore the Cathedral Lakes basin. In June Art and Jo Freeman (and their 11 year …
SPIDER GAP TO HOLDEN The week before labor day in 2000 Will and I hiked from Phelps Creek to Holden. On Saturday morning Odette dropped us off at the Phelps creek trailhead (about three miles from the old mining town of Trinity.) It was a day of broken clouds with a forecast of unsettled weather …
ENCHANTMENTS, PART I Will and I backpacked into the Enchantments from July 17 to July 23 1999. Will was eleven years old then. Here is a picture of Will at Leprechaun Lake. The first day Odette dropped us off at the snow lake trail head and we hiked to Nada lake – six and a …
SMALL EXPEDITIONS Odette and I backpacked quite a bit before Will was born – in fact he was conceived way up Thunder Creek. When Will was really tiny we did a few trips and even though they worked they were complicated by all the baby stuff I had to carry. As Will got older we …
PICKET RANGE BOOK LIST Jim Nelson & Peter Potterfield – Selected Climbs in The Cascades. Luna Peak p. 197. “With a hard approach and a 3rd-class route on mediocre rock, the climb of Luna Peak has little to recommend it except the setting and the view – a view into what is probably the …
The Picket Range – August 6 – 13, 2004 The mountains in the Picket Range got good names. Luna. Fury. Phantom. Terror. Challenger. Everybody that writes about them seems to start out by commenting on that. The Picket that they’re named after was Captain George Pickett – a distant relative of mine who became famous …
Washington’s 100 highest In Search of Higher Ground – Washington’s Top 100 by John Lixvar (Lizard) This essay, reprinted from an earlier Echo, is an excerpt from John Lixvar’s forthcoming book on "Climbing Washington’s 100 Highest Peaks". In order to appease the impatient publishers at Mountaineer Books, Lizard is looking for contributions and/or volunteers to …
PEAK BAGGERS: WASHINGTON’S HUNDRED HIGHEST People obviously climb for a lot of different reasons. There is a special group of climbers who climb, at least in part, to check off items on a list. In the late eighties and early nineties there was a legendary group of climbers in Seattle called the “Bulgers”. The Bulgers …
MT. BAKER VIA BOULDER GLACIER JUNE 14 & 15, 1998 I’ve been on my share or trips that, in hindsight, were farces. I remember spending a night on Foggy when a couple students were too slow. I remember missing the summit on Dorado Needle when I was too slow. I remember starting in for …
KENDALL PEAK JUNE 5, 1999 I remember early in my climbing career hearing Dan Davis, one of these Northwest climbing legends, describe Mountaineering as a "blood sport". He said that if I was serious about it either I would get killed or someone I knew would get killed.. I heard what he had to …
