We were a bit weary of the opening pitches and their reported runout nature, but they turned out to be very reasonable and quite pleasant. The climb ramps up nicely in both difficulty and quality. The wall becomes steeper and the features more defined. Wild climbing on the third pitch brought us below the crux hand crack. As usual I psyched myself out pretty well going in to the lead. The climbing was exhausting at the altitude, but I managed to hold it together for the 100′ of difficult climbing. The splitter crack continues on for the next crack. Chris had good beta to keep moving up his large cams, and made steady work of the nearly 200′ pitch. From an awesome, comfy belay ledge, it was just one more moderate pitch up to table ledge. As the first party on the raps, we had no waiting to endure, making for a relatively care free descent back to our camp.

Overall, an outstanding quality climb. The only downside was the dangerous feeling race up the north chimney in the morning. I think in the future I’ll keep my Diamond climbing to weekdays.

PHOTOS:

Loaded up with the essential gear, most importantly a Hot ‘n Ready pizza

The Diamond near sunset.

Last minute preparations by headlamp.

The north Chimney

And why it should be avoided on weekends:

Sunrise

Almost ready

pitch 1

pitch 2

pitch 2, looking down
pitch 3

pitch 4, crux

Looking down the crux

Starting the steep fists on pitch 5

Almost done and nobody on our heels

Finished (i used a dead mouse as a handhold here)

D7 Raps

Parting Shot

                        

Pics from the new camera:

From Flying Buttress

Finally out of the woods

From Flying Buttress

Sunrise

From Flying Buttress

Sweaty Chris

From Flying Buttress

Morning Pano: Meeker on left (buttress splits the middle), Ships Prow in center, Long’s on right

From Flying Buttress

Moon over Ship’s Prow

From Flying Buttress

Cold and dejected Chris

From Flying Buttress

Sending

From Flying Buttress

Decisions, decisions: 5.10- direct, or 5.9 bypass?

From Flying Buttress

5.10 Direct

From Flying Buttress

Me on the roof

From Flying Buttress

Extreme nut cleaning

From Flying Buttress

More sweet climbing

From Flying Buttress

On top of the buttress, with clouds starting to build

From Flying Buttress

Go this way

From Flying Buttress

Socked in 5 minutes later

                        

From martha couloir

this makes waking up at 2AM worhtwhile:

From martha couloir

From martha couloir

From martha couloir

From martha couloir

Joe put together a nice little vid with his new camera:

Breakfast Alpinism from Joe Sambataro on Vimeo.

                        

We seemed to skip spring altogether this year, going from heavy May snow to 90 degree temps in the course of 2 weeks. My plans for the spring involved lots of great skiing, but unfortunately the means for many of those plans are rapidly swelling the local creeks and rivers. Luckily, I managed to ski one of the classic lines of CO a few weeks back. Even this trip almost wasn’t though. With the weekend nearing, the forecast seemed to get warmer and windier. After waking up at 4 AM on Saturday, I checked the Snotel to find 40F temps and 60 MPH winds. I went back to bed…

The forecast the next day wasnt much better, but we were desperate and decided to go more or less regardless. We modified the plan a bit, waking an hour earlier, and heading for the more difficult Dead Dog Couloir instead of the Tuning Fork. Having never skied a long steep couloir, we decided to boot up it and check it out, rather than taking then standard summit hike and dropping in blind. This also provided Pete with his first experience in steep snow climbing. The route was severely runneled, which made for nice climbing, but foreboding skiing.

From 2010 [05] May – Dead Dog Couloir (Torrey's Peak)

From 2010 [05] May – Dead Dog Couloir (Torrey's Peak)

From dead dog couloir

By the top of the couloir, the snow had started to soften, and skiing was starting to look a little more appealing. We finished the short hike to the summit and relaxed a bit to allow some additional softening.

From dead dog couloir

It turned out that some of the 1st turns off the summit were the most serious of the day. With tired rust legs, one must make a tight turn, where the consequences (however unlikely) of a screw up would result in a potentially bad fall down the main face. From here, we reached the entrance to the couloir. The steepest turns (55 degrees or so) are right off the bat, making for an exciting drop in.

From 2010 [05] May – Dead Dog Couloir (Torrey's Peak)

From 2010 [05] May – Dead Dog Couloir (Torrey's Peak)

From dead dog couloir

Snow conditions in the couloir were pretty difficult, with a choice of the rough runnel in the middle, or the steep double-fall-lined edges. It wasnt always pretty, but we made it down safe and sound, skiing 99% of the way back to the car.

From dead dog couloir

From dead dog couloir

After being out of town the last two weekends, and now staring at a wet and cloudy weekend forecast, this may have been the only real spring trip of the year , but I’m still holding out hope that the heat wave will leave enough scraps for next weekend.

                        

From RMNP Skiing

We decided to check out the south facing Dragon’s Tail couloir on Flattop Peak. If it started getting too warm, we’d just have to head down, or change objectives.

Ah, May 13th:

From RMNP Skiing

From RMNP Skiing

As we neared the couloir, we observed that a large portion had slid the day before, leaving behind a pretty hard bed layer. This made for great climbing conditions, but had some of us a bit worried about ski conditions. Although almost completely non-technical, the couloir does provide a very pleasant ascent, with steep rock walls and some narrow constrictions. It was hard to understand how such a trivial climb could receive so many 4 star ratings on mountainproject and summitpost, but now I can see.

From RMNP Skiing

From RMNP Skiing

From RMNP Skiing

Climbing higher in the couloir, with increasingly variable snow conditions, I became more concerned about the safety and enjoyability of skiing it. At the top, we discussed it and decided we’d rather wait to ski that line until we had more forgiving conditions. Instead, we headed over to the Corral Couloir where we enjoyed great soft snow conditions on more moderate terrain, eventually passing beneath the North Face of Hallet, and arriving at Emerald Lake. All in all, an awesome day in the hills, and hopefully the beginning of a great spring ski season.

From RMNP Skiing

From RMNP Skiing

From RMNP Skiing

                        

2) jettisoning my crampons and riding the gully like a slip and slide to the powder cone below

3) down climb the sketchy terrain, accepting the powder crashpad as a reasonable outcome.

Luckily good judgment and luck won out, and the downclimb went off without issue. At the base, the route was nice enough to drop a few wet slides on to all of our gear.

                        

After a brief and somewhat humorous run in with the law, we made it to our motel shortly after midnight. We got up the next day and climbed the mega classic Mean Green. It proved to be a pretty long day, with some hard (for us) climbing, a somewhat sketchy descent, and some route finding issues on the hike out. Nonetheless, it was probably the best ice climb I’ve ever done, so well worth the effort. We didnt get back to the motel until around 11:00, and after a microwave dinner, an early start the next day was basically out of the question. Instead we decided on a leisurely start, and a climb of Stringer.

Although located in a dark cleft, the route is still on a south facing aspect. Unfortunately, the warm temps had melted out a significant portion of the climb. This was a bit of a mixed blessing, as we were pretty worn out from the day before. We spent the afternoon driving around and looking at various ice climbs, before returning to the motel for a nap and some BBQ dinner.

Day 3 we hoped to climb the classic Moratorium on the lower bench. One of the longest continuous flows in the valley, and rarely as fat as this year, this seemed like an obvious objective. On the approach, we noticed the climb looking a lot harder and thinner than it had the day before, so we opted instead to head up to Bozo’s revenge. It turns out, the climb we were seeing on the approach was not actually moratorium, but Joy After Pain, a much more difficult line. Moratorium was out of view around the corner. Still, Bozo’s proved to offer some classic moderate climbing, with an excellent 50m long main pitch.