[RichP]

I heard on the new that some climbers are stuck on an 18 inch ledge on Spire Point. They apparently dropped their climbing gear. A long cold night awaits for these poor folks. I wish them a safe trip home.

[Elvis]

KOMO news story

[Backpacker Joe]

God bless, and good luck to the two of them.

[Snow_Knot]

They are in for a long night, in a tight spot. Wishing them the best of luck.

[Jason Hummel]

That's certainly not a place you want to be stuck! Hopefully they stay well. Not good conditions right now. Not at all.

[stacymarie]

this is the third story in as many days of someone needing to be rescued. This being my first real year of hiking, is this a normal thing or are people just going up unprepared? In any case, god speed to these guys up there.

[Opus]

I think partly it's a hard year to be prepared for since the weather has been so unusual. I've already been snowed on this month and had to retreat into my sleeping bag three times well before sunset! August is normally the month where you can go fast and light. Who knows what happened in this case though? There aren't many details yet. I hope they get through alright.

[The Angry Hiker]

Not again. Don't they have weather reports where these people live?

[Quark]

It's also the ready availability of cell communication and media frenzy - we hear about each incident. To me the 3 Fngrs one wasn't a huge deal, but riding on the coattails of the snow cave, the media's ears are perked up. This stuff has always happened and folks in the teens' situation on Three Fingers in the BC (Before Cell) era just sucked it up and walked out all through the night. Not to say this recent incident or any other one involving SAR didn't warrant SAR - I would think that in the days BC more folks probably died as a result of these incidents. I had an exchange with a rescue ranger last year who expressed a little bit of frustration with the reliance of cell service and SAR calls, rather than honing skills and judgment. We also agreed that nowadays the mindset is a little different; lots of pride and self-gratification drives people to try fantastic epic journeys to tell all their freinds about; rather than turn around and admit they were beat, they call SAR so they can say, "see? it was soooo bad that we had to be rescued!" Immediate gratification trumps learning and perfecting skills at a slower pace. I saw a little of the justification attitude in the Meetup.com/Melakwa incident last year. After they were rescued, one of the party pointed out that the snowfall was sooooo bad and sooooo deep that the SAR people couldn't even use snowshoes, which in his mind justified the criticism that the Meetup group didn't even have snowshoes at Melakwa in winter in the first place.

[wamtngal]

Hope they make it out unscathed.

[mountaineer ordinaire]

[Guiran]

With respect to checking the forecast, even mountain forecasts: Spire Point is near the end of the Ptarmigan Traverse, probably 4-5 days into the trip. I'm not sure when the last time was that I saw a weather forecast around here that was reliable five days out.

[Quark]

[The Angry Hiker]

It's one thing for there to be reports of good weather all week, and then get caught in a freak storm. It's another thing entirely to go out knowing the weather will be crappy but hoping for a miracle. Pretty much everyone who followed the weather reports knew that we would have wacky weather this week and into the weekend. And in Washington State, you better err on the side of rain anyway. Especially this time of year.

[mountaineer ordinaire]