On my family's trip to Crater Lake, I noticed a wicked looking mountain as we traveled. It even ended up in the background of some of our pictures. It's Mt. Thielsen and a few weeks ago, I climbed it with the Santiam Alpine Club. It's the second technical peak I've climbed and one of the most fun.
Here's a picture of the mountain showing the gnarly summit. The entire hike toward the mountain, you are just looking at the steep summit block, wondering how you could possible climb it!.
We traveled along the ridge on the right side of the picture up to the summit block.
The summit block doesn't require very difficult climbing, but we did protect the last pitch with rope because there was quite a bit of exposure. Just the week before we were on the mountain, a climber had been rescued after falling and breaking a leg and arm and injuring his head. Here's a picture of the summit block. We climbed the pitch on the left, just above where all the people are standing.
Mt. Thielsen was a lot of fun to climb and since it was such a far drive from Portland, we decided to do two mountains that weekend. On Sunday, we climbed Diamond peak, which isn't a technical mountain, but was nonetheless a lot of fun. In contrast to the clear blue skies we had Saturday, there were low, scattered clouds on Sunday. The clouds made the already pretty hike even more interesting, because we climbed up into them.
This was the view of the mountain from my tent Sunday morning.
The climb to the top of Diamond Peak was mostly a hike, with a few areas requiring two-handed scrambling. But the view of the mountain and surrounding area were awesome and made the hike a lot of fun.
The summit is just off my left shoulder in this picture.
By the end of the weekend, I'd racked up over 20 trail miles and 7,500 vertical feet. It was a great weekend. Check out the rest of my pictures form the weekend on flickr.
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