South Face on Aiguille du Moine

September 21, 2024

With our last weather window, Dale and I decided to get up high and stay the night in one of the huts. To mix things up from our other days at the Aiguille du Midi, we went up the Mer de Glace from Montenvers to the Couvercle Hut. With the recession of the glacier, the gondola keeps getting extended down and the walk up the Mer de Glace is increasingly broken up. The ladder system getting above the glacial moraine and past polished near-vertical slabs is a nearly comical exhibit of humanity adapting to climate change and overcoming obstacles. It’s not for the faint of heart!

We started our hike at about 2pm and arrived at the Couvercle Hut at about 5:15pm, which sounded similar to Dale’s prior approach there in the summer. We kicked back and enjoyed a lovely evening in the hut. It was quite the luxury to eat a multi-course meal, including a roasted filet mignon with mushrooms.

We got going before dawn, but not that early in the grand scheme of things. We left the hut somewhere around 5:30am. The mostly 4th-class nature of the route seemed to suggest that we’d be able to move reasonably quickly.

The snow to gain the route was reasonably steep for our approach shoes and aluminum crampons, but it went. We spent a few minutes investigating the wrong lick of snow to the climber’s right before realizing we were in the wrong spot and heading up higher to start on what felt to be more challenging rock climbing than either of us expected—probably slightly off route. It went and we found ourselves at a bolted belay before too long. From here, a bit more roped climbing through a steep gully system which was pretty snowy took us onto the exposed 3rd and 4th class ledges with cairns.

We scrambled on for a good ways before hitting the cut back and descent into a snowy gully. We stopped at the ridge crest for a bit here, contemplating our timing and the schedule needed to catch the gondola back down to Chamonix (which, if missed, would require us to walk down—not at all unreasonable and far from the intensity of most North Cascade descents). In the end, we decided that the additional scrambling to the summit wasn’t worth having to walk out and lose a casual last evening together, so we turned around here after soaking up the views. There was nothing technically stopping us—just time and priorities.

The descent was without incident, including the ladder down climb. We made it to the gondola with plenty of time to spare and enjoyed goblets of beer upon arriving in Chamonix to celebrate a lovely week together.

This was a fun, moderate route with stellar, up-close-and-personal views of the range throughout and a memorable trail and hut—a great experience.

Cosmiques Arete on Aiguille du Midi

September 15, 2024

I touched down in Geneva on Sunday morning after a full day of travel from Seattle, hopped on a bus to Chamonix Mont Blanc, and was greeted by my now local friend and climbing partner, Dale. “The weather is good,” he said. “We should go climbing today.”

This trip was multiple years in the making and had been postponed multiple times due to accidents and injuries. After a ski injury this spring, we’d pushed it from July to September. Inevitably, a week before I headed out, it snowed multiple feet on the massif. We decided for me to come out regardless and simply play the hand we were dealt in terms of weather and conditions. So, with good weather, we went straight for it.

We suited up, got to the cable car base station at about 1pm, and were heading down the snow arete from the Midi by 2pm. 9,000 feet above the valley floor, we had been quickly transported into a completely different world—a winter wonderland with snow crystals whipping over the arete in the wind. After a short but heads-up walk through this section, the scene changed again to that of calm on the gentle glacier below. We walked across and then spent some time at the base of the route, eating our lunch in the sun.

The first section of the route was mainly scrambling in boots and crampons with an axe handy. It wasn’t terribly exposed and was pure Type 1 fun. We eventually got to a rappel station where it seemed prudent to use our rope rather than solo down, so we did, taking in the alpine ambiance and views of both Mont Blanc as well as the Aguille du Midi looming above us with tourists leaning over railings for photographs. From the base of the two short rappels, we simul-climbed through fun terrain, eventually getting to the crux, which felt strange to have such obviously manufactured foot holds for crampons. It was fun nevertheless and we soon emerged high on the ridge with just a short traverse to the Midi observation deck.

If this climb reached the summit of a peak in the North Cascades, it would be an absolute classic—the climbing reminded me a bit of the Stuart Glacier Couloir but was more straightforward and without the solitude or nerve-wracking commitment associated with being 10 hours from the car. We’d casually left town at 1pm and were back down having burgers and beers by 5:30pm. Chamonix is a different world.

Mary Green Glacier on Bonanza Peak

July 13, 2024

Colin and I had been talking about climbing Bonanza together for years. We’d read that early to mid-July was the best time of year to make the bergschrund crossing simple while keeping the upper scramble free of snow. With a perfect, albeit hot, summer weekend over July 12-14 and the ability for each of us to take Friday off work for the extra travel logistics, we conspired to make it happen.

We left Seattle early on Friday morning to get to Chelan for the 8:30am Lady Express. We learned a few things about the logistics. First, it’s a bit faster/easier to sail from Field’s Point Landing since the drive from Seattle is shorter and the boat goes there from Chelan, so it would have saved us a 5am departure. Second, the school buses to Holden Village only make the journey once a day, so even though we took the fast boat, we had to wait in Lucerne for ~1.5 hours before heading up the hill. No matter—the slowed-down pace forced us to get into vacation mode and enjoy the lake swimming and sunshine. Our bus driver to the village was a perfect ambassador, replete with a Hawaiian shirt and comical stories.

After an all-we-could-eat lunch at Holden Village for $12, we set off for Holden Pass at about 1:30pm. It was scorching hot and both of us had picked up daycare colds from our kids recently, so we were dragging, but the conversation helped pass the time and dousing ourselves in the streams we crossed took the edge off as well. We hadn’t been sure if we’d camp at the lake or pass, but upon hiking around the lake, it became clear it was good for swimming and not ideal for camping. After a wonderful dip, we continued on to Holden Pass through the hottest part of the day. We stopped to fill water at the last switchback, expecting the pass to be dry, which it mostly was.

The campsites at the pass were a medieval torture device of mosquito blood letting. Slapping one’s shoulder or neck would come back bloody with multiple carcasses of the foul creatures. Harried by this onslaught, we erected our tent and dove inside despite it still baking in the direct sun at about 5pm. Thankfully we were still able to take some naps despite the heat before dinner—an activity which continues to be one of my favorite backcountry activities.

We got moving at about 5:30am on Saturday morning, a little while after a party of four who were also sleeping at the pass had set off. At first, we were just moving to keep the mosquitos away. Once we reached the ridge crest, the breeze picked up and we could think again. The waterfall slabs had a straightforward path through them without much hazard and we put our harnesses and rope on at the top of them at the margin of the glacier.

The glacier turned out to be incredibly well-behaved without any real crevasse hazard. It was a bit of a trudge up the snow, but the increasingly motivating views more than made up for it. We caught the party of four as the glacier steepened into the switch-back snow thumb leading up to the East face. This section was steeper snow but our high-top approach shoes with aluminum crampons worked fine since the East-facing snow had softened quite a bit by this time.

It turned out that the bergschrund crossing was very straightforward, with just a few steps on rock through a moat before regaining snow on the other side. We scampered across and up this snow for a little bit before traversing right onto the rock and removing the rope and our crampons. The terrain from here looked to be 4th class, so we decided to solo until/unless we felt the rope was needed.

Just behind us, the team of four was making this same transition when the third member of their party lost his footing in the soft snow and slipped down about 10-15 feet, dragging the first two members of his party, who had stepped onto rock in their crampons and walked across to keep the rope taught, down the rocks. It looked quite ugly, with the first member of their rope team getting bounced and bashed down a series of rock bulges on his side. Thankfully the injuries didn’t seem to require an emergency response and they were self sufficient so, despite feeling a bit shaken, we pressed on up the route.

The scramble was pretty fun. It was reasonably steep 4th class in places, but the holds were all there and it wasn’t too chossy. We soloed past 6-7 rap stations, staying left of both snow patches, eventually traversing slightly climber’s left into a second gully system just below the summit, then following the summit ridge just a bit further to the very top. What a position and view! It had taken us a little over 4 hours from camp at the pass to reach the summit.

The descent wasn’t noteworthy. We down-climbed from the summit ridge a long ways, through the relatively steep terrain, all the way back to the bottom steeper section where we did three rappels with our 60m x 8mm rope, then scrambling back down a little ways to the rock-snow transition. We roped for the moat crossing and steeper snow, which weren’t as sloppy as we thought they might be at 11:30am or so when we were back on them.

From the base of the snow finger, we decided a rope wasn’t necessary and fast-walked back down our bootpack to the waterfall ledges where we had lunch and then scrambled back down the ledges and to our tent at 1:30pm, roughly 8 hours after we’d started. We packed up, marched down to the lake for another swim and brief laze, and then pressed on through the heat back to Holden Village. We arrived just in time for dinner and enjoyed all the pizza we could eat with an accompaniment of cold beverages before a river swim, then whiskey on the rocks in the Adirondack chairs. It was a lovely evening, save the bugs.

We spent the night at the Ballfield Campground about a mile back up the trail, came back into the village for breakfast, and caught the school bus convoy down to Lucerne. Given the option to wait there for 2.5 hours for our boat or take the same boat up to Stehekin for a brief stay up there before coming back and then out, we chose the latter and thoroughly enjoyed burgers and beers on the deck in Stehekin along with a view of Buckner.

This was a fabulous adventure into the heart of the Cascades which made me feel like a tourist in the state I’ve been living in and exploring pretty extensively for 14 years. Thank you, Colin!