Huge avalanche/rockfall on Rainier?

check out the video (not ours) .. the debris flow is mind blowing

Holy crap!

And thanks to Amar for the timelapse...very cool. I like watching the terrain slowly emerge from its 220 inches of snow.

Looks like that might signify the end of the Nisqually Ice Cliff descents for the year?

Probably not for DANsanity. He seems to like rockier routes.

Ha, Dave, that's funny -- I was going to post almost exactly the same thing as you did in response to Sky's comment, but I was on the road when I read it a few days ago and didn't feel like logging in to post. Actually, now that the route has rock-avalanched and altered so significantly, I think maybe any future ski should count as a first descent again -- go get it Dan!!

How do you get to the archived pictures?

I have a script which saves various webcams around the world onto my home computer, including some of the ones on Rainier. I only save the images every 10 minutes to keep things manageable, even though the Paradise webcams are updated every 2.5 minutes. The NPS does not archive any of their webcam images.


[hr]There's an article about the rock avalanches in today's Seattle Times, notable for its use of the word "skedaddled", the first time I can ever recall seeing that word used in a major newspaper story (outside a quotation):
Huge rock avalanches rumble down Mount Rainier
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews...3613_rainier29m.html


There's also a post on the Whittaker Mountaineering blog with photos of ANOTHER rockfall on Monday June 27:
whittakermountaineering.wordpress.com/20...t-rainier-yesterday/



I skied Rainier last year with Nick Poggiali, the author of that blog post, roping in with them at 12500 ft and then completing a ski ascent to the summit, followed by a memorable ski descent which included a short stretch of the worst breakable crust ski conditions any of us had ever skied:
May 11-12, 2010, Mt Rainier, Ingraham Direct
(thumbnails in old TAY TRs are still broken, but click the broken image icons to see the pics)

I edited the time-lapse above to include a June 28 image which shows additional debris from the June 27 event.

very, very cool stuff, amar. thanks for taking the time to do that- watching the icefall move as the spring turned to summer was the most exciting moment of my day.

what a powerful display from The Mountain!

trevor

Obviously these are huge geologic events on the mountain - Just curious if there are any historic photos of the Gibraltar ledge collapse from the 1940's? That someone might have.
I did some brief internet searches but couldn't come up with anything.
Do you have anything in your database Lowell??

Obviously these are huge geologic events on the mountain - Just curious if there are any historic photos of the Gibraltar ledge collapse from the 1940's? That someone might have.
I did some brief internet searches but couldn't come up with anything.
Do you have anything in your database Lowell??

No, that's outside my area of interest.

On the other hand, it's known that the first party to discover the collapse of Gibraltar Ledge were members of the Ptarmigan Climbing Club, after whom the Ptarmigan Traverse is named.

I think I read that in Harvey Manning's article, "Ptarmigans and their Ptrips" , but I'm not sure (without re-reading it). The fact that it was not discovered until a climbing party attempted the route suggests that the event was not as obvious as the recent Nisqually rockfalls.

More noteworthy, perhaps, was the big rock avalanche that swept down the Emmons Glacier from Little Tahoma in the 1960s. I'm blanking on where I read about it, but I bet somebody could find information about it pretty quickly.

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Edited to add:

Well that didn't take long:

www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/geol...bul/1221-A/intro.htm

I googled "rainier rock avalanche little tahoma" and it was the second link on the page.

This link:

www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/geol.../bul/1221-A/sec6.htm

records how the avalanche was heard by Forest Rangers at Crystal Mountain. The avalanche occurred in December 1963, which was the beginning of the ski area's second year of operation.