On April 8, Wade Joseph Meade, 29, an experienced climber, and his partner, Tyler Grundstrom, who has been climbing about 10 years and is also an EMT, had decided to explore the Whipple Fork area, high in Big Cottonwood Canyon, for first-ascent po...
Step, step, swing. A serpent of white ice slithers down a bullying headwall above, forcefully compelling, drawing me: gravity’s inverse. Down here, though, the portal to the unknown is but scraps and slivers of ice. Engaging. Fatigue from last ni...
On December 27, 2019, I took a long fall while attempting a sport climb at the southern tip of the Smith Rock Group, belayed by my father, who had no outdoor climbing experience. My parents were visiting me in Bend for the holidays, and we had gon...
A group of three was climbing Wherever I May Roam (5.9), a popular multi-pitch sport route, on the afternoon of August 8, and they decided to rappel before completing the climb. The team reportedly did not find the middle of their rope and tied a ...
On July 25, an experienced climber from Kennewick, Washington, slipped and fell to his death while traversing a glacier high on the slopes of 10,495-foot Mt. Jefferson (likely on the Whitewater Glacier route). David Freepons, 68, who had decades o...
On December 4, a climber, Caroline Sundbaum, 32, of Portland, fell 15 feet into a fumarole on Mt. Hood, injuring her shoulder. Sundbaum, whose two climbing partners had continued up the mountain ahead of her, had sat on her pack to rest at the t...
The body of Austin Mishler, 27, an experienced climber and wilderness guide, was found October 29 in a crevasse at about 9,400 feet on Mt. Hood’s north side. The Bend resident likely fell while soloing in technical terrain, and he ended up in a cr...
At 9:42 a.m. on Sunday, July 26, the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office was notified of an accident on Mt. Hood. A married couple (both in their early 30s) had fallen about 700 feet (initially reported as 1,000 feet) and had suffered injuries. Oth...
On June 18, Scott Miller, a 25-year-old skier from Utah, missed a turn while descending from the summit and took a long fall that ended in a fumarole below. He had planned to ski Mt. Hood and Mt. Shasta en route to a job posting in Northern Califo...
On May 23 at approximately 12:30 p.m., search and rescue coordinators were notified of an injured climber who had been in an avalanche. In the early morning hours of May 23, Danielle (23) and Shelby (28) set out to climb the Leuthold Couloir, on t...
On May 22, a snowboarder (male, 31) lost his bearings in whiteout conditions while descending from a summit attempt and had to spend the night out, leading to a severe case of hypothermia. According to a post he made at Facebook after these event...
Melrose Mountain is a relatively new climbing area, near the South Carolina border, that hosts top-rope, trad, mixed, and sport routes (5.7–5.11). On December 19, Jesse Watson (32) and his partner EC (31) were finishing their day by climbing Feeli...
On June 14, I was belaying a very experienced climber who was attempting to stick-clip through the crux on a route. The climber clipped the second bolt from the ground and then began to pull up on the belay strand of the rope while I pulled in sla...
On May 27, following a two-week period of heavy rain, a pair of very experienced climbers planned to do the popular route Break on Through (5.10a) on the Circus Wall of Sentinel Buttress. The route begins from a ledge approximately 60 feet up an a...
On August 1 a party of three, Michael Hall (26), M. Johnson (26), and D. Jones (28), were climbing Cowboys and Heroes (5.7), a 40-foot route in the Foreign Trade Zone area. Hall was leading the route and fell from a harder variation near the top o...
During the late afternoon on October 1, a solo climber notified 911 and reported he was uninjured but physically exhausted and unable to finish his climb. He said he was high on the second pitch of the Great Arch (3 pitches, 5.5). Wilkes County di...
On October 11, Alamosa Volunteer Search and Rescue (AVSAR) was contacted about a missing female climber, who was last heard from at 3 p.m. the previous day at the summit of Ellingwood Point (14,042 feet). The missing person was described as Joy Ci...
On August 30, I (male, 59) started up Pas de Deux (5.8 PG-13). I placed two or three good cams in the first 20 feet of the climb. Above that, I saw a couple of places I could have placed cams, not far above my highest piece, but decided to move hi...
During early December 2020, on a way-too-early ice hunting trip to the northwest face of Snoqualmie Mountain (6,278’) with Tom Beirne and Christian Junkar, I spotted a plastered smear that I had never noticed previously. This smear was located muc...
In 2020 the Mohonk Preserve experienced a statistically anomalous year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For two months, the land was closed to visitors and no access passes were sold. When the preserve was open, there was a significant increase in no...