QUINAULT RAINFOREST
Above: Dan Kraus is footlocking up the July Creek Sitka Spruce. The line is a single strand of 11mm Mammutstatic mountaineering rope that is 400 feet long. Notice the Mar-bar ascender he decided not to use, hanging on astub on a log. This log washed up on shore during a storm. More about driftwood, later. The large tree on the right is a dying Western Red Cedar, composed of two trunks growing side by side. You can just see an understory epiphytic Western Hemlock growing off the back side of it, about 15 feet off the ground. The tops are dead and the tree is hollow; just a rind is left holding it up. Cedars are amazingly rot resistant, and the wood cures to rock hardness in old growth. You could not break a stub the diameter of your thumb, if your life depended on it. |
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Left: The anchor for the climbing lineis the alder tree in the right foreground.
The large tree in the left foreground is a spruce that doesn't have quite the stature of the center tree. It tapersquicker, and has less fullness in thecrown, as well as being a tad shorter, (only?) 225-240'. The nice part about climbing sandwiched in between these behemoths is the gradual unfolding ofthe view as we ascended past them. 
Ascent close-up |
| View of the snowcapped Colonel Bob Wilderness behind Lake Quinault  |
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Trying to figure out the brake modification to the LockJack in the top of the July Creek Spruce. |
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