"A definitional grepic on Buckner with some brutal routefinding, bushwacking, and veggie belays. After a 7am start in Basin Creek, we made it up into Horseshoe Basin before the sun fully hit the snow. Armed with the vague description from Jeff Smoot's 'Climbing Washington's Mountains', we tried in vain to find a bootpath leading up out of the basin to the east. Assume it was covered by the huge amount of snow in the basin; judging by the waterfall going under the snow I estimate it was at least 60-70 feet deep. We climbed a gully that looked like the best option out of the basin (it had a rusting cable in it), but it cliffed out and became totally impassible (we later saw this gully with the cable from above, it had a waterfall gushing down it). After a grim bushwack north, we emerged from the thicket and downclimbed to a point just south of the waterfall that drops into the basin. From here we scrambled up ledges on the south fringe of the drainage, but at the top were again thwarted by huge amounts of snow blocking the drainage with a fragile-looking snowbridge over another large waterfall that looked too sketchy. We searched for other options but everything cliffed out, so we ..." — scott • Jul 30, 2011