December 17th - 19th

South Early Winter Spire from the West

23 Miles round-trip

4350 feet elevation gain

3 days (without a snowmobile)

We did the SW Couloir on S. Early Winter Spire as a winter climb, but the conditions resembled those found in the spring. Normally this is an easy single day climb, when Hwy. 20 is open, but in the winter the highway is closed at Diablo on the West side and at Silver Star Creek on the East side. For climbers on the West side this means a 250 or so mile drive around to Mazama and then continue until you reach the roads end at approximately mile 170.5 on Hwy. 20. There is a large plowed out area to park, this area is frequented by snowmobilers and XC skiers heading out to play for the day. If you have a snowmobile it would be very possible to do this as a single day climb in the winter, even coming out in the dark would be easy, due to the fact that you are following a road. We skied West on Hwy. 20 until we reached the Blue Lake trailhead, where we set up camp (N. 48 31.129 W. 120 40.458; 5390 feet). This will take approximately 6-8 hours. The benefit of using spot as camp is that it is flat, and you get a bathroom, which still had two rolls of TP in it! The Blue Lake trailhead is the normal starting point for this climb when the highway is open. From the parking lot the winter route starts at the far end and goes more or less straight through the woods, but starts to trend slightly leftward as the forest opens up into the basin. Just keep working your way up into the basin until you reach a point on the slope to the right of the climb, from here make a traverse left to the entrance of the couloir. Beware that you are making your way up avalanche paths in the basin, so all take all snow travel precautions when approaching this climb, this goes for skiing up the road also, avalanches frequently slide across the highway in the winter. When you reach the base of the climb the first challenge will be getting around the chockstone, if it is exposed. After defeating the chockstone evaluate the route (right-hand branch) and decided whether to rope up or not. We opted to solo the route, due to lack of places to protect the leader, and we felt the climbing was easy enough. The lower section was soft snow that presented no real challenge. As we climbed higher the snow that remained in the shade firmed up some and was great for front-pointing and swinging tools into. The narrowest section of the route presented the only challenge, but was not overly difficult at all. After ascending the narrow section take note of the rappel station to your right located at a tree. There was a very thin smear of ice between two sections of loose rock, a careful sequence of stemming between the rock got us past this easily. The upper section of the route was the steepest, but consisted of great firm snow. When the top of the couloir is reached there is short section of 5.3 rock climbing that takes you up to the summit block. To descend we down-climbed the uppersection until we reached the rap station at the tree. From here we made a 200 foot rappel to the lower section of the couloir and then continued to down-climb to the base. To get back to camp if you are a skier, head across the basin until you reach an open bowl, this will provide you with great turns on the way out, if avalanche conditions permit, of course. Just trend to the right at the bottom of the bowl to meet your tracks from the ascent. If you are not skiing, just follow your tracks back out.