Winter Ascent of Mt. Borah

This is Shawn & Brothers Paul & Jared ...Weeze didn't go on this adventure
Enjoy!

Last week, Paul, Jared, and I went for a walk on Mt Borah. These are a few pics I took. I don't have Jared's yet, but thought I'd send a few out so you could see the fun we had. It was worthwhile doing, but as Paul and Jared had to listen to me complain, I'm not as much for the suffering as I used to be. I like the skills and adrenaline rush of using them, but I like them offset with time to eat, drink, and rest.

As practice for future, larger expeditions, we pulled a sled for about 1/2 hour. Paul's pulling in this picture. It pulled well on easy terrain like in this picture, but we left it when the terrain was not so nice, which is the rest of this hike.

For those that know the route, this is between the gnarly tree where we often take a break and a picture, heading straight up to the top of treeline. Even with snowshoes we'd sink to our knees, and without it was even worse. This is Shawn. It took hours to cover this short section of the route.

This is Jared. He just downclimbed the snowy rocks you see, which is the end of Chicken-Out-Ridge, and is now making his way across the snow bridge. It is a LONG way down both sides.

This is Jared again, now on the summit pyramid, just about to the summit ridge. The summit is still several hundred yards to the left (and higher). You can see by the way he's standing above me how steep it was. This is the opposite side of the pyramid from where the normal trail goes in the summer. Nothing looked easy for the final push to the top so we decided to try it here and it was difficult and slow going. It was largely rock slabs covered with snow and not as many holds as we'd hoped. We used our ice axes alot to drag through the snow, hopefully hook some 1/4" protrusion and pull ourselves up another foot. We later descended the "normal" route. If we did it again, still don't know which way we'd go up. Neither was easy.