South Early Winter Spire/South Arête

South Early Winter Spire/South Arete
September 12, 2014

3 climbers left Blue Lake TH at 6:30 am. All climbers reached summit at 12:10 pm. We did not experience any traffic jams on the accent. On the decent there was some traffic jams, but we mostly worked through sharing the route till be got to the last repel. Two foreign-speaking climbers repelled directly the line that we were repelling. Two of the participants stood by while the rude climbers proceeded to bully their way into rap slings and generally crowd out our lesser experience folks from coiling and throwing rope. The trip leader kindly inquired at first what the bully climbers plan was. After a bit of arguing the bully climbers proceeded to run through our rap stations while arguing that they were doing nothing wrong. Only after the climb did the leader learn that while our rope occupied the rap rings the bully climbers rapped directly off the nylon webbing we were relying on and then pulled their rope thereby potentially damaging the webbing. After consulting with other local climbers it was mentioned that they thought that the bully climbers were from Europe and that this was not viewed as bad climbing ethic in some cases where he climbed in Europe.

We reached the TH by 4:45pm. Conditions were mild during the day and reached freezing temperatures overnight. No snow present on route. Sky was clear with no smoke observed.