South Arete, South Early Winter Spire, Ram's North Cascades Adventure Camp

He keeps saying its the best trip of the year, and in 2008, with help from Bucky, I joined Ram for a few days of Cascade madness. Wow was it good. Wow was it hard. This year, various obstacles allowed me to duck out honorably, but... well, the pics were really good and the story of another superb adventure in the Cascades was volunteered for the Rave. - Tom

Story by Ram. Photos by Steve and Aaron Ramras. Formatting & photo editing by Tom Jones.

To wake up early in Colorado and deal all the transitions to where you are starting up a peak in Washington by 4:15 that afternoon, one that involves 3,000 feet of ascent and a couple of pitches of rock to 5.5........We hate travel days and as such we squeezed in the South Arete of South Early Winter Spire. We hooked in with Courtney, DB, their pal Andy, Sonny and his pal Mark, several of them joining us for the climb

The weather was rainy over in the western mountains, in the area we like best, with its true alpine flavor. But when it does rain there, we can usually find fine fare to amuse ourselves on the east side, here up around Washington Pass. We call it "alpine light." Sometimes the rain spills out far enough east. It did the 2nd day. We were on the South Buttress of Cutthroat Peak. This 8 pitch 5.8 is not sustained, but with wet rock, it was plenty interesting. a serious day.

The next day most of us ran the ridge from Copper Mt., to Pika Peak and then beyond, over a 1 mile knife edge, toward Blue Lake Peak. All summitted two peaks. Andy was swift enough to get to the third peak, before the lightning, thunder and hail chased us off the ridge, just 100 feet below the summit. Aaron felt and heard his ice ax humming on his back. Not good!! Still it was a grand day, as we got soaked to the bone, on descent.

We could see from our summits, that the weather was clearing to the west, so we ran up Wallaby Peak the next morning, before transitioning west, to the heart of the range.