Early Winter Couloir on North Early Winters Spire

April 5, 2015

*Goran leading the first chockstone pitch*

After an all-nighter and smashing success on the Cauthorn-Wilson route on Saturday, followed by the longest sleep I've experienced in a while on Saturday night, Goran and I found ourselves in Mazama at 7:30am on Sunday, feeling very rested, but also a little worried at how late it was. We did a quick stop at the Mazama Store for breakfast sandwiches and coffee, then headed up to the pass. We knew from our friend Will that most of the couloir was in—he'd been up as far as the cornice solo and turned around at that point, faced with sketchy options.

We left the car just after 9am and made quick work of the approach, arriving at the base of the route in under an hour from the car. While the approach was baking in the morning sun, the ambient temperature was still below freezing and most of the couloir was already in the shade—we weren't too worried about conditions inside. Goran took the first chockstone pitch in the brilliant sunshine on secure neve and ran us a full rope length to a rock anchor where he brought me up. From there, it was most of a rope length again to get just below the crux chockstone where I got two good pins on the side of the couloir and brought Goran up. The snow alternated between firm neve and deeper, unconsolidated fluff.

The crux chockstone involved a mantle and stem into a corner where a #3 fit perfectly. It then took another couple of moves with bad feet to reach above the chockstone and get a good swing into neve. With two good sticks in the neve, my feet just dangled until I could lift them up around hip level and get them to stick. A bunch of spindrift flew down the couloir at this point and coated my face and sunglasses, making visibility a bit tricky. With a couple more moves, I was past it and then headed up on steep snow to a pin anchor Will had used to rap on Saturday, just below the last chockstone.

Goran ran us from there up to a cave below the cornice a bit after noon. Options up there were daunting—right of the cornice was steep, slabby granite that looked very insecure and tough to protect, the cornice itself was quite large and we were worried that tunneling through it would cause it to collapse, and just left of the cornice was about two feet of sugary snow plastered on vertical granite. I decided to do some excavating to see if there were cracks behind all that snow and to see if any of the snow would hold body weight. I eventually found a crack, but also found that the snow fell off the face with very little downward force, so I started the painstaking process of aiding. It was about 30 feet to the top of the cornice and it took a good while, with feet in slings, tools hooking granite and pulling through the unconsolidated cornice. I slowly made my way up the face and eventually got a foot in the cornice that didn't punch through. With that, a hooked tool, and a back-step on the face, I was able to do a not-so-graceful beached-whale move onto the top of the cornice. I was elated.

*Aiding over the cornice after excavating the crack*

I built a good rock anchor and fixed the rope for Goran to ascend. From the grunting, I could tell it wasn't easy to make his way up the rope and clean the gear, but he eventually made it and we celebrated with high fives and snacks. The summit was tantalizingly close at that point and Goran offered to head up and give the final mixed pitch a try.

It was exactly one 70m rope length up to the belay and Goran nailed it. After some snow, neve, and hooking, most of the pitch followed a steep gully that wasn't visible from the belay, on the left of a big corner system below a roof. Most of the climbing was with crampons and bare hands and probably went at 5.6 in the summer, but felt pretty tricky as it was in these conditions. Thankfully, the rock gear was good and we pulled up onto the summit plateau of North Early Winters Spire just shy of 3:45pm. The views were stellar and we couldn't have been happier to have pulled the whole route off.

The raps were much easier to find this time and we quickly descended the gully, headed back up to the pass above South Early Winters Spire, descended with ample glissading, and were back at the car by 5pm. A truly awesome route, requiring the full back of tricks, and an awesome cap to a perfect early-season weekend at Washington Pass!

Looking back at the route from the hairpin

Cauthorn-Wilson on Cutthroat Peak

April 4, 2015

Serendipity was the word of the weekend. First off, Goran and I planned this trip over a month ago as we both reminisced about our productive spring of 2014. We didn't know that Washington Pass would open so early and that we'd have the chance to take care of some unfinished business up there.

At about 11:45pm on Friday night, I picked Goran up at Seatac and we headed for the pass after a quick stop at home. Turns out Highway 20 at 2am is a quick drive—we made it to the pullout for Cutthroat Peak at about 3am and took a quick nap in the car, with alarms set for 4am. As we packed up our gear, we watched a beautiful lunar eclipse that took the valley, which had been bathed in bright moonlight, into darkness. We left the car at about 4:45am and the conditions were ideal for booting—the snow was firm, but secure enough to not need crampons for most of the approach. We made it to the base of the couloir at about 6:15am, where we geared up as the sun rose.

There was plenty of snow in the couloir, but the ice was a bit thin, aerated, and brittle. Nevertheless, it was climbable. I led a short, steep pitch on this combination of neve and ice up to a fixed anchor below the crux corner pitch and brought Goran up on that anchor, backed up with a good screw. From there, it was party time. The crux pitch was really fun. In many places, the ice wasn't thick enough to fully swing into and required delicate tapping and hooking. I was able to get 2 decent screws in and then found rock protection higher up. While it seemed like using a chimney technique was possible, I was having too much fun climbing the ice and neve, so I stuck to the face. Once the angle eased off, it was just a little further to get to steep snow and I was able to run up the snow couloir all the way to the cave below the next step. Inside the cave, I found a perfectly clear, thick ice flow which took two screws for an anchor perfectly. What a cool belay!

Goran led the next pitch, which ended up being a simul-climb to just below the summit. It was what I'd call sub-optimal, with sugar snow on rock and lots of post-holing in very steep snow. Goran found a few pieces of gear here and there and then brought me up just below the summit on a good anchor. I then headed past him on steep snow to the proper summit. It was about 11am at that point and completely gorgeous up there, with a commanding 360-degree view.

We knew that finding the descent route might be tricky. And it was. We searched for the first set of chains for over an hour in vain. They must have been buried under snow somewhere we didn't quite look. We found an old anchor which had been destroyed, but never found the true anchor, so we built an anchor off a horn with a pin backing it up and did a double-rope rap (we brought a tagline) off that and quickly found the next anchor. Just as we were setting up our rap, our friend Will was finishing the route solo—impressive! He joined us on our series of slow raps down the face and we all hiked out together.

This was an awesome climb in a beautiful setting with an unbeatable approach:climb ratio for this style. Now that I've summited, if I were to do it again, I'd rap after climbing the crux pitch—the rest of the route wasn't nearly as fun and was much harder to protect. Plus the West Ridge descent route is quite slow.

After getting all of 45 minutes of sleep, we napped in the sun at the car and then drove to the Fun Rock parking lot in Mazama where we proceeded to fall asleep in the back of my car at 4pm and sleep straight through until 7:30am the next morning. Now that's a day!

NW Face Couloir Attempt and Stuart Glacier Couloir on Mount Stuart

March 22, 2015

After climbing the Ice Cliff Glacier and the Stuart Glacier Couloir last spring, an experienced climber posted a suggestion that I check out the NW Face Couloir to complete the Stuart winter route trifecta. After doing some research, the route moved up my list and became the focus of a first outing with Will this spring, hoping that the magical conditions of early March would continue.

We left Seattle on Saturday morning and left the car at noon. The approach to the Colchuck Lake cutoff was quick and straightforward. From there, we made an ill-fated trek across the marsh and followed Mountaineer's Creek on the East side, which was an unfortunate choice. 5 hours and 15 minutes after leaving the car, we made it to camp in the flat area below the Sherpa Glacier. A couple of guys from Vancouver were there and made reference to terrible booting conditions which had stymied their plans of reaching the West Ridge notch that afternoon. With low expectations, we made dinner and crawled into bed before dark with alarms set for 2:30am, expecting tough going up to the route.

Thankfully, after a handful of painful post holes when we began moving at 3am, we were able to stay on top of the snow for the most part, and ascended relatively quickly toward our objective. It took 3 hours on the dot to get to the base of the route and it was still pitch black at this point. Especially in the dark, the first pitch looked intimidating—a thin coating of ice and rime was plastered on a steep granite slab. There was no protection to speak of. I decided to head up a little ways to get a closer look and, as the sun began to brighten the sky, I climbed up about 20 feet of the route, with one pin near the base. The ice was decently secure for being so thin, but it still felt pretty tenuous and I couldn't see any cracks for protection, so I down-climbed and we decided to head for the Stuart Glacier Couloir as a consolation prize. Thankfully, the routes start only about 200 feet apart.

Having climbed the route before, I knew the couloir was straightforward and not technically challenging, so we simul-soloed it, climbing two fun ice bulges and then a lot of steep snow with a good amount of sinking in to our knees. There was a lot of spindrift coming down the constriction and climbing the ice was a full-on snow shower. It was only a little over an hour to ascend the couloir to the West Ridge notch. During that time, the skies had gone from relatively clear to completely socked in. The wind on the South side of the ridge was a different environment completely and it felt more like we were on a mountain in Patagonia than Mount Stuart.

It was very helpful to have done the route before and have also done the West Ridge in summer. Route finding was a little tricky, but we could see far enough in front of us to stay on track. I took the traverse, down-climb, ledges, and North Face section. Will then brought us up to the ridge crest. We rapped off a horn and then I led a section of M5 before Will finished it up on some more M5 climbing straight to the summit. We briefly celebrated, but had no view to speak of, so we quickly packed up and began heading down.

With little-to-no visibility, it was a bit tricky to find our way down and around the false summit, but we found some cairns eventually and then made ample use of our GPS to navigate to the entrance of the Sherpa Glacier. From there, it was a lot of moderate snow back to the tent. We had one incident in the steepest, tightest part of the Sherpa Glacier with some snow sloughing and carrying me down the slope a little ways, but thankfully the Sherpa Glacier is relatively low-angle and the general risk was low. Nevertheless, we kept a keen eye out and stayed on the lowest-angle terrain we could from there. We made it to camp at about 2pm.

After packing up all of our wet gear and slamming a bunch of coffee, we began the slog out. Thankfully, we found a boot pack on the West side of the creek which brought us to the Stuart Lake Trail without having to go through the swamp. We were back at the car at 7:30pm. It was a big weekend and a long ways to get back there, but the sense of accomplishment was high, given the conditions and the weather we'd experienced. I'll take it.