The decision was made on Friday afternoon that TFT was in the cards. Goran and I went back and forth a bit about logistics and decided to get some sleep in our own beds on Friday, then head out early on Saturday morning. Regardless of the strategy, it was clear that we wouldn't get much sleep.
Looking across the ridge line from Torment to Forbidden
Fueled by coffee and danish, I made the drive and enjoyed a bit of rallying on the long dirt road to the trailhead. We'd left the city by 5am and were hiking up the trail to Boston Basin by 8am. In a very short 2.5 hours, after some bushwhacking across Boston Basin and travel up the Taboo Glacier, we reached the couloir start to Mount Torment. Goran led out the first pitch and we started simul-climbing as soon as enough rope was out. We traded leads back and forth after exhausting our gear (4 cams, 6 nuts, and 2 hexes) and headed past some pretty crumbly, dirty low-5th class climbing until reaching a notch on the ridge line. We descended, hiked across on the face until we found a good spot to head up, dropped our packs, backpacked the rope, and headed for the summit.
Torment was not my favorite climb, but the summit view was pretty gorgeous and the perspective on our traverse objective was stellar. After signing the summit register, we down-climbed our 4th class ascent route, grabbed our packs, and headed for the notch for our committing rappel.
The free rap was really fun and put us on a heavily crevassed steep snowfield which we traversed in order to get back on the rock. A few more sections of ridge line rock followed by steep snow traversing brought us to an intimidating looking steep snow slope where we saw a party of 3 ahead of us very carefully making their way across. My favorite photos of the trip were of this group on that section of the route—it was just so picturesque and captured the exposed feeling experienced throughout.
Our bivy spot
Shortly after that snow traverse, we climbed one more rock tower until finding a glorious bivy site with views in all directions. A dinner of chicken noodle soup for 8 knocked me out and I barely stayed awake enough to snap some pictures of the sunset from my bivy sack.
With much of the route-finding challenges behind us, there was no need to wake up super early. We slowly roused at 6:30am, made some coffee, and soaked up some morning sun before packing up camp and hitting the ridge. Things went very quickly after some initial "is this going to go?" moments early on and we cruised to the notch at the base of Forbidden without much fanfare. As expected, the classic moderate route was busy with a bunch of other parties on the way up and down.
We continued our method of simul-climbing, having not pitched out anything so far, and traded leads on the classic route. I ended up taking over at the crux (all of 5.6) and successfully stepped on some granite crystals in my mountaineering boots and pulled through, then continued simul-climbing up close to the final stretch. Goran took over to the summit where we briefly celebrated a very successful TFT.
The descent was unfortunately slow due to some traffic jams on the route, but went without any issues other than speed. We grabbed our packs at the notch, made 5 raps to the glacier, and descended to glory.