Birds of Prey - loose block status

[BK]

Re Joffre: traveling all on snow from the cut block up. about 1.5 meters at the hut. Fresh snow from last week messing up the rocks down to treeline, and there's tons of winter snowpack, cornices and remnant mushrooms hanging all over. Too much cloud cover for good crust recovery over night but generally reasonable ankle top boot penetration. Its still good corn skiing above 7000' or so on select aspects. That slab in the photo was cornice triggered and looked to be 2 to 3 m thick. All in all its like early May.

[c-plus]

Dang. Impressive photo. looks like it'll take some time before the mountains (and everywhere else) get into summer mode. Thanks Jessie and Bruce for the beta and sorry to everyone else for the thread-drift!

[scrubber]

The mission was a success. Video footage should be up tonight. Stay posted...

K

[scrubber]

As promised, here it is. With a bit of artistic flare I might add, thanks to Reuben. By my calculations based on the weight of granite per cubic foot, this thing weighed in the neighborhood of 5000 lb, give ot take a thousand. It was about 15' tall, averaged 4' wide and tapered from about 18" thick at the base to about 4" thick at the top.

The tree was taken down because it had been crushed downwards and was filling the preceeding 20 foot corner of Birds of prey. Most of the roots were broken off, I just couldn't get a good angle to get the last one with the tools we had, so I opted to cut it off at the trunk and come back to deal with the stump later.

Amazingly only one bolt on the route to the left of Birds of Prey was damaged. It was sheared off cleanly, so we climbed that route after we were done, dusting it off and redrilling the bolt. All of the routes on the Eagle's Domain slab will be a bit dusty until after the next heavy rain, but they're fine to climb.

Enjoy!

[squamish climber]

Big props to you guys. That surfboard block definitely needed to go and it didn't need much help. A big fb like for the video, with two camera angles and everything. Thanks again to everyone involved.

[psi4ce]

Thanks for sharing the experience!

Equal parts terrifying and entertaining

OK more like 40% terrifying 60% entertaining ...

[jipstyle]

That was crazy! Thanks for the work and thanks for sharing the video.

[PJH]

Crazy to think I climbed right past that without noticing it was loose. Thanks for the efforts guys. Did I see chalk on the flake? Was it in a place where you would pull on it to get up?

[scrubber]

The block was at a place where you could have pulled on it. It's unlikely though. It was just a few feet before the bolted anchor above that tree. (top of the second pitch) After you stood up on the trunk of the tree, it was a couple of juggy low angle moves to the anchor, without even touching the flake. I didn't see any chalk on it at all. It would be more likely, in my opinion, that someone may have dislodged it by pulling hard on the tree and shifting the stump, or by hanging their pack on the pointy top of the flake and tugging on it.

K

[psi4ce]

OK I watched the video 3 times already. I may watch it at least one more time, too.

Looks like that root grew behind the flake and may have pressured it off.

It just looks like it would have destroyed anything in its path...

[damien]

"She a man eater." Quite the sound track.

[Stephen Hooper]

Great work and loved the video.

BTW. I have free time on my hands this week and the weather is crappy so feel free to message me if you need help cleaning routes or trail building.

[pinner]

Great work everyone, nice to see the coordinated safety efforts!

[cbovard]

The big boulder they trundled at Lumberland was MASSIVE... Hope they release the Video soon!!!!
YEE HAW