Elliot Glacier with the OMC

Last night I met up with a few members of the OMC at the Tilly Jane Campground on Mt. Hood after a great day of skiing again at Timberline on the Palmer Glacier. I got to the campground around 6pm after getting a bite to eat at Government Camp after skiing. After a few hours of writing in my journal to Ellie, and rating my absurd amount of MP3's on my ipod Kalin (president of the OMC) and his girlfriend Denise showed up. Denise I found out is a waitress at Bombs (oh.. got's the hookup now!). In about 15 minutes we had a raging fire going in the pit with wood Kalin brought and left over wood from previous campers. At nearly 11pm James, Brian and Demi showed up in Brian's killer $350 truck. We all chilled out by the fire chatting a bit until James announced we needed to leave camp by 7am to be able to ice climb before noon hit. Thus, we all scrambled for bed. James ended up sleeping next to me in the bed of my truck where I used my bag inside of my roomates bag to keep warm (worked great).
In the morning we woke up and left camp around 8am headed up towards the Elliot glacier. I had my GPS (and of course my great directional instinct) so we were able to find the trail easily up the moraine from the Crag Rats Hut and campground. We made it onto the glacier by about 11:00 and took our time climbing the glacier up past the beautiful seracs. It was a beautiful blue day and the views of Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, and Adams were fantastic. I tried to frame Mt. St. Helens between the seracs of the Elliot glacier in couple photos. Near the top James and I took Brian off our rope team and scaled a pretty sketchy and steep section on the way to the frozen waterfalls. Halfway up it and with some pretty scary exposure we both realized that the rope between us was longer than the fall and neither of us would be able to hold the other if one of us fell... sketchy but we made it. When we finally got up to the frozen waterfalls at the head of the glacier we didn't really have time to climb so James and put in a few ice screws he borrowed from Logan for practice and we headed back down to make it out by dark. Demi, Kalin and Denise were able to do a little rapelling from the ice they had climbed as well. On the way down James and I jumped into a pretty big crevasse that had a snowbridge over it and tunnel. Check the photo. We ended up walking out in the dark for about half an hour but all safe. Great day and I think I definitely found a couple more serious partners for mountaineering out here. Click the title for a great slide show as usual.