The Climbing Club

Jochen, Dylan, his housemate Alex and I set out Sunday to boldly assault... well, um, something not too avalanche prone, not too exposed, and not too far away. Being the baller overachievers that we are, we put up what appears to be the club's first ascent of Amabilis Mountain, one of the (surprisingly few) peaks in WA with more than 2000' of prominence: http://www.peakbagger.com/peak.aspx?pid=2157

Dylan lobbied for the Winter Direct route, and broke trail the whole damn way himself (in board shorts, of course). We made pretty good time considering the foot and a half of soft snow, and only got on the logging road at the very top, shaving a couple miles off the route. Looks like a popular place for XC folks; there were tracks all the way up on the road and we met a guy who was pretty nonchalantly skiing up as we came down. The weather wasn't quite as miserable as we'd feared, and the sun came out for the briefest of moments (marked by silence, so as to not scare it away), but views were few & far between. We got as close as we dared to the corniced summit -- empirically determined to be within spitting distance -- and retreated a couple feet away into the trees to have lunch and warm up with a sip of the good stuff (always have the best you can afford; the rest is false economy). Going down was straightforward, making it a perfect half-day outing: do a bit of work and then have a sandwich on a mountain.

Stats:
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Amabilis Mountain
5.5 miles
2100' gain
4h40m car-to-car (2h50m up)
lotsa snow.

_________________
good judgment comes from experience;
experience comes from bad judgment.

where pray-tell is this mountain?

there's a link to a map in the TR

it's also just the next hill SSE of Keechelus Ridge, our previous snowshoe: http://students.washington.edu/climb/forum/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=6713

_________________
good judgment comes from experience;
experience comes from bad judgment.

cool thanks, sounds like fun.