Direct North Ridge on Mount Stuart

July 27, 2013

Stuart's Direct North Ridge with Great Gendarme had been on my list since my very first summer in Seattle when I heard about pitch after pitch of glorious alpine granite from a friend. With Dale coming into town and splitter weather in the cards, there was no way I was going to let it wait for another year.

After reading up on trip reports while Dale flew from Mammoth Lakes, the decision was made that an alpine start on Saturday was not necessary. We left town around 8:30am, stopped for provisions in Cle Elum, and didn't leave the car until after noon. The approach went quickly with little route finding thanks to some solid topos and beta online. We were at the base in about 4.5 hours with another group. Since they arrived first, we let them get a head start. Our initial plan had been to bivy at the base, but there was plenty of daylight left at ~5pm, so we decided to head up and find a ledge to sleep on.

The first pitch squeeze chimney was pretty memorable. With a pack and ice axe strapped on, I didn't fit through and ended up face climbing to the right, which was spicy, but fun. It felt like 5.11 slab for a move. After that, we passed the other group, burned through the quick face, and got to the base of the 5.9+? crack. Dale hit it in true tradmaster form. I laybacked it. Typical.

From there, we simul-climbed a long ways until the sun was getting dangerously close to the horizon. Just as things were getting a bit dark to climb, I finished a simul-block and was greeted by a perfect bivy ledge. High-fives, dinner, and whiskey ensued. We had a great spot above the Ice Cliff Glacier and could hear it calving quite a bit.

Since we'd already ticked off most of the lower North Ridge on Saturday, we got a leisurely start on Sunday morning. Dale put on a little Beethoven as we geared up. The other group of two came up at that time and revealed that they had spent the night roped in on a relatively uncomfortable ledge. Bummer.

We simul-climbed up to the notch pretty quickly, continued up to the more exposed knife-edge, and arrived at the base of the Great Gendarme at about 10:30am. I took the first layback pitch up onto the block and then Dale took the offwidth. It was a perfect split. He crushed it and we then simul-climbed to the summit by about 1:30pm. A trio of paragliders were zipping around the summit at the time and whooped and hollered to us as we finished the climb. It was awesome. So was the view of Rainier.

The descent was less than awesome. We traversed over the false summit and headed down the top of the Cascadian Couloir. There was some snow which looked pretty easy to get down, so we hit it up. Dale was a little overly confident and ended up losing grip on his ice axe, which didn't have a leash on it. He tried to self-arrest with his poles, but they weren't terribly effective. He slid into some rocks at the base of the snow at speed and cut up his wrist and shin. Thankfully things stopped bleeding after a little bit and we continued down. Unfortunately, we went a little too far East when looking for water and ended up doing some pretty epic bushwhacking to get to the trail.

The last climb and descent over Long's Pass is a bit of a kick when you're down, but it wasn't terrible. Things were smoothed over a bit by the rest of the whiskey in my pack. What an epic adventure!

On easier ground at the top of the North Face

North Face of Mount Shuksan

July 20, 2013

Day 1 - Bushwhacking & Awesome Bivy

We left Seattle at a very reasonable 8:30am, knowing that the road ahead of us included some serious bushwhacking through rough, steep terrain. Being mentally prepared helped quite a bit. There's no sense in fighting the inevitable. We found signs of human travel (I won't call it a trail) from the end of the dirt road which had started at the ski lodge. It took us down the steep valley slope through timber, which was relatively easy going, but tough on the feet in hot mid-summer, mid-day weather.

Our path led us to a large tree crossing at the stream and, after a little ways going along the water, we turned sharply uphill. The elevation gain and roughness of the trail did not abate until we had surmounted a few cliff bands and eventually reached some high meadows. Things were still pretty rough from there to the bivy location at the base of the ridge, but we soon forgot about the pains of the approach in favor of lounging in the sun with our sweat-soaked pants off. It was stellar.

On the ridge after the 'shwhack festival

Under clear, sunny skies, we made our dinners, drank a good amount of whiskey, and turned in for the night. There was no need for a bivy sack or tent. A light shirt over the face kept the mosquitos at bay and I was only awakened by an intense brightness at sunset when the mountain turned bright orange, then pink. I took a series of shots straight from the sleeping bag before pulling the shirt back over my face and passing out.

Day 2 - Great Climbing & Long Descent

We all woke up just before our alarms at 2 to the thunderous sound of the hanging glacier calving and spitting off a huge chunk of ice that crashed down the valley, possibly creating a small tsunami in the alpine lake below us. The sounds woke us all up and got our hearts pumping, but were nothing to be too worried about. We would be hundreds of feet above the calving face and would cross that section of the hanging glacier within the first 45 minutes of our climb that morning.

We packed up camp, got our ropes and prusiks situated, and headed for the North Face at about 2:45am. It was pretty dark except for the moon peering around the mountain from the Southwest. We quickly negotiated the hanging glacier's crevasses, traversing far to the East before coming back West and hitting a steep snow ramp that brought us up onto the long, continuous North Face. The snow was pretty firm, but held steps well, so it was ideal for climbing. We made great time, cruising up the face and pulling over the steepness just as the sun peeked over the horizon. From there, the technical difficulties were mainly over. We circumnavigated the summit, swinging down below it on the South side only to see nearly 10 different climbers on their way to the summit via a few different routes. We got ourselves up to a ledge, dropped our packs, and simul-climbed the mainly 4th class with some 5th class moves to the summit. Booyah.

With so many other climbers on the route, we decided to down-climb rather than rappel. It went really quickly and we were soon enjoying our lunch on a rock island just below the summit. With some calories in us and a successful summit complete, we descended Hell's Highway to the Fisher Chimneys. After a little route-finding, we found the path and down-climbed our way to easier ground.

Just as the technical difficulties eased, we learned from Robert and our map that we still had over 5 miles to go. At the first pass we encountered, we made the awesome decision to drink all of the rum we'd brought in the form of grape-flavored slushies. They were awesome and we were tipsy in no time. Floating on a cloud of rum (and with only a handful of slips on the snow), we briskly hiked the remaining 4+ miles out to the cars.

The North Face was a great route from the bivy to the Summit and down to the high camp above Fisher Chimneys. Before the bivy and after the high camp was nothing to write home about (though I guess I just did).

The party ahead of us traversing steep snow

Torment-Forbidden Traverse

July 13, 2013

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.

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.