Osceola North Slide Climbing

SummaryNone
OwnerEric Gilbertson
Creation Date2011-03-21 19:47:10 UTC-0400
DescriptionEric Gilbertson, Andy Stachyra
3.20.11

I discovered this slide on the north side of Mt Osceola a few weeks ago while driving along the Kangamagus highway looking for a snow gully to practice snow and ice anchors on. There wasn't enough time that day to do a full ascent, but I vowed to return and try to climb the whole slide. Turns out this is a known ice-climbing area, though the only information is online and not in any guidebooks. I found a report online that someone had bushwacked in on saturday to climb, so Sunday we could save time and just follow that person's tracks.
Andy and I drove up Sunday morning to the East Pond trail, hiked about a half mile, and then started bushwacking up to the slide. The bushwack was only about another half mile or so until we popped out at the headwaters of Pine Brook. It looked like there had been a lot of melt-out and avalanching recently because there was a ton of snow debris in the brook, and the water had cut out a deep 3-ft chasm in the snow.
We reached the first ice bulge by about noon and geared up for the climb. The first bulge was only about 10ft tall, so we did that unroped. Then we came to a steeper and taller bulge about ~30-40ft tall. I took the lead up that and we proceeded to swing leads up the gully. There was a surprising amount of ice from what I remembered before, and it looked like all the snow must have avalanched off in the warm spell the previous week. We got in about 5 pitches of ~WI2 ice before reaching the top of the gully, and it was pretty fun. Of course, we could have weaved our way up almost completely avoiding all ice if we wanted to, but that wouldn't have been as interesting.

At the top of the slide we met a wall of snowy spruce traps and Andy sunk in twice up to is chest. Luckily we had anticipated this and hauled snowshoes up with us. We bushwacked another quarter mile and ended up right on the summit of Osceola. It was clear enough to get good views of washington and almost all of the whites from there.
After a quick food break we hustled down the trail past East Osceola, making it back to the car not too long after dark.

-Eric