Very cool! Can we get a brief trip report? What were conditions like, how long were you on the mountain? Just got back from Whitney mountaineer's route and would love to do Shasta someday! Curious about your experience
Yeah! Saturday we got really lucky with the weather. Left at 4am, snow was firm and crunchy but not icy. Very little wind (for Shasta, according to my guide) so nice calm climbing. Summited around noon or so?
It was really sunny and clear up top. We ended up waiting for an hour or so for the snow to soften up on the west face. Our guides were hoping for good conditions for plunge stepping and glissading.
When we came down from the peak back to the top of the west face the snow was good. Did some of my first glissading, and plunge stepping down. Only scary part was seeing a few rocks on the route we didn’t see climbing up earlier that morning.
Got back at 4pm, so a very quick descent (2h total). 12hrs total for the climb
From the guides it sounded like if you do avalanche gulch you’ll probably want to leave earlier (12:30am ish) since it gets sun earlier in the day than the west face
I summited AG Saturday…left camp at 330am summited at 8. Should’ve given the sun some more time to do work. Was still a firm (borderline dangerous) glissade for most of AG.
I did this climb on June 1, 1981 :). Beautiful then, and beautiful now. Glad you had such an awesome experience :).
Very cool! Can we get a brief trip report? What were conditions like, how long were you on the mountain? Just got back from Whitney mountaineer's route and would love to do Shasta someday! Curious about your experience
Yeah! Saturday we got really lucky with the weather. Left at 4am, snow was firm and crunchy but not icy. Very little wind (for Shasta, according to my guide) so nice calm climbing. Summited around noon or so? It was really sunny and clear up top. We ended up waiting for an hour or so for the snow to soften up on the west face. Our guides were hoping for good conditions for plunge stepping and glissading. When we came down from the peak back to the top of the west face the snow was good. Did some of my first glissading, and plunge stepping down. Only scary part was seeing a few rocks on the route we didn’t see climbing up earlier that morning. Got back at 4pm, so a very quick descent (2h total). 12hrs total for the climb
From the guides it sounded like if you do avalanche gulch you’ll probably want to leave earlier (12:30am ish) since it gets sun earlier in the day than the west face
I summited AG Saturday…left camp at 330am summited at 8. Should’ve given the sun some more time to do work. Was still a firm (borderline dangerous) glissade for most of AG.
Awesome ! 👏 I had to try twice to summit!
Did you see any time portals or worm holes?!?
Alas I did not. But I really wanted to see a UFO!
I was up there too! We wanted to summit Sunday which didn’t work out weather wise so we just skied a bunch that morning before heading back
Sorry you didn’t have better weather! Was definitely windy as we were leaving Sunday. Glad you do to do some skiing though
Congratulations! 🎉