April 2-4, 2004, Nooksack Traverse

Very cool! I can't wait to read the details and see the pictures.

Awesome.  Excellent job uncovering another gem.

Very cool! I can't wait to read the details and see the pictures.

Here are a couple shots from the Nooksack Headwall to keep your mouth watering:

Lowell:

Josh:

WAAAYY out there.  Congrats on a weekend well spent!

Cool news.

Been silently wondering if that would go (only starting from the Shannon Creek side).

Yes, for sure...
The only problem would be the long shuttle to the entrance and exit points...probably close to 4 hours, round trip, I'm guessing?

You just can't beat the 30 minute shuttle, though...

If you go, go soon.  That headwall entrance may only last a couple more weeks before some major cracks open-up. ???

Damn....like Sky said "you should have come along Dave"...another over-the-top trip that I missed out on.  Nice work.

Damn....like Sky said, "you should have come along, Dave."

Yeah, he was saying that the whole trip too. ;)
There will be other trips!  Maybe not as perfect as this, but who knows?

You know, I just barely noticed the zig-zagging tracks up Shuksan from the ski area on Saturday. Wow. Can't wait to live vicariously through the web page!  ;D

Hey guys !
This sounds all too well. So it makes my time here in the northern lowlands of Germany really tough. I am happy that you had another outstanding trip. I look forward to catch up with you in the future.

     Ciao Matthaeus

TR is done!  Go to the site and enjoy!
I'm going to bed now! :)

I've done many traverses in the Cascades and this was among the best.  The Nooksack traverse is unusual for how seasonally dependent it is.  Later in the spring the East Nooksack Glacier will become so broken that you wouldn't consider crossing it.  Yet we found it a breeze in good April conditions.  Some highlights for me:

- The two-mile glide from the base of the Nooksack headwall to the foot of Cloudcap Peak.  Jagged Ridge was festooned with flutings and snow feathers pasted to the rock.  It was spectacular but not very threatening.  The wall is so steep that most of the snow sluffs off during the storms, and in early April the sun hits the wall for only a short time in the morning. (The fans you cross at the foot of the wall are fairly steep, so you do need stable conditions here.)

- No ski packing.  Except for a few short hand carries, the route was skiable the whole way.  That's the way a ski traverse should be!

- Steep and far.  For me the ultimate ski mountaineering experience is a combination of steep skiable terrain and long distance traveled on skis (not packing them!).  This trip had both, but the steep skiing was entirely optional.  The Nooksack headwall had a short steep pitch, but you could have downclimbed it easily in just a few minutes if the snow had been poor for skiing.

- Good company.  It was great to get out with a new group of friends.  Thanks go to Jason Hummel for envisioning this trip and inviting me along.

No problem skoog. Thanks also go to sky for giving me the idea (he wanted to climb the nooksack and I said, "I don't want to climb that! How about a traverse?). I remember telling Ben about this trip and he was stoked to go give it a go. Having you along reminded me a lot of what Ben would've been like. You led, you were low key, and your shizzle was together. In the end, this turned out as one of the best trips I've been on.  ;D

I just added a map of our route to the last page of my TR...if anyone cares.

After spending half an hour reading Sky's TR twice, I gotta chime in. Looks like you guys had a blast! I'm jealous.  >:(

I just added a map of our route to the last page of my TR...if anyone cares.

Sam, nice trip report. But that map file is really HUGE. May I make a suggestion about this map (and perhaps other maps on your site)? You should save them as GIF files instead of JPG, I think they'll be much smaller and also less blurry. Some maps compress acceptably in JPG format, but others do not. Let me try to explain what has happened in this case.

This map has only 1.9 MB of original data (1384 x 1405 x 1 byte per pixel) from the TOPO program, yet the JPG file is actually bigger than this at 3.2 MB since it needs 3 bytes per pixel. The lossy JPEG compression also introduces blurriness. The lossless compression of GIF means that the online map would look identical to what you see in the TOPO program (no blurriness) and I think the GIF file would probably be 1 MB or less in size for this map (it certainly could not be larger than 1.9 MB in any case). That would be a huge savings in time and bandwidth for everybody who visits your site. You would need to resave the original map from the TOPO program in GIF format, not simply resave the JPG file as GIF. Anyway, just a suggestion...

Hey thanks, Amar! :)  
I tried what you said and it looks like it cut about .5MB off the file size.  I've never been pleased with the file sizes out of TOPO, but I think this is an improvement, for sure.  I'll save them as .GIFs from now on and will probably redo the other maps on my site as well.

Thanks again for the input!