Photos by Ian.

Steve (Ian’s dad) was our shuttle king. He dropped us off at the southern end of the range in the wee hours of the morning. It was pretty smoky from California wildfires.

Smoke does have some upsides… like insane basin-and-range sunrises.

You get up from sage to scrub to aspen groves pretty quickly.

Sheep dogs are not so pretty. As we ran uphill along one forested stretch of trail, we heard about 500 sheep bleating ahead. When we left the trees into their pasture, we then heard barking. Four massive Great Pyrenees charged down the hillside towards us. They definitely wanted to eat me, and we escaped into a thicket and bushwhacked to safety.

Red scrub along the trail gave the landscape a ruby hue. Apparently the Rubies are so named because the rocks have garnets (not actual rubies) and some early explorers got excited. We did not see many garnets.

Ian running about halfway along the traverse. Amazing landscape!

Looking down at the lakes.

An old mining or hunting hut by one of the lakes. There were some deer bags inside.

The northern end of the range gets spectacular. Big granite.

One of our favorite parts of the trail. Totally open, epic, flowy singletrack.

The second-to-last lake at the northern terminus of the range. Given it was late season and there wasn’t any snow, we were pretty thirsty by this point. Between mile 18 and 36-ish there wasn’t much water. Definitely something to be aware of.

All photos by Ian.

We started at Bighorn Lake instead of Coffeen Park campground (the normal start). I was concerned about getting up the road to Coffeen Park in my small, yet mighty 2WD bread truck. It turns out the road up to Bighorn Lake is probably not very much better, and we added ~5 miles onto an already long day. But the views of Cloud Peak on the way in are amazing.

We estimated it would take us more than 18 hours (that was the FKT). Overnight was the best weather window we had, so we started shortly before sunset, going clockwise.

Cloud Peak in the twilight.

For most of the night, we followed singletrack and granite cairns through alpine tundra and evergreen forests. This brought memories of nighttime hikes and runs through the White Mountains, where I cut my teeth. It’s funny how similar the scents of pine and feel of granite underfoot can be in different places.

“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” - Carl Sagan

Sunrise started about when we crossed the halfway point in the southern part of the loop. Here we entered granite canyons which cut across the range, just south of Cloud Peak.

Big canyon meadow, where we saw a bull moose.

A couple of geologists loving life.

The morning light show was spectacular as we climbed up to the trail’s high point.

Ian did all of our runs with his camera and multiple lenses, most of the time running with camera in hand. He’s a tremendous photographer (with very strong legs and undefeatable positivity).

Early morning headed into the western part of the loop. This side opened up to high tundra with many lakes.

Nearing the final pass, still with 10-ish miles to go. Sitting down was very needed at this point.

After we crested the final pass, we ran down to Coffeen Park and still had 4 miles to go to the car. We got drenched in a storm, waded up a steep trail through ankle deep runoff, and both of us were moderately hypothermic and shivering by the time we made it to the car. The next day on the way home, we needed a few drying stops.

All photos by Ian.

The run starts with a little detour to Mount Rushmore. Optional, but probably a better way to see it than driving there. Start early, and you can enter before it opens and avoid the tourist hordes.

Lincoln remains my favorite president. It was a true honor to visit this landmark with my favorite Scot on Earth.

Dreamy, cushy singletrack. Near here, we ran into a couple of backpackers hiking the Centennial Trail from South to North. They were old, old friends and very friendly — in their late 50’s/early 60’s. I love seeing people out enjoying nature with good friends.

The Black Elk Loop is pretty much all runnable. It’s really, really good running.

The tower on the top of Black Elk Peak. High point of North Dakota. This is where we learned about the nearby particle physics experiment. Clemmie and I just knew Momo would be most jealous.

Per Ian’s request.

Atop one of the domes. Here we met and ran a little ways a baptist missionary who lived in Papua New Guinea, who was visiting his daughter in Rapid City. By the sound of it, he could only get home by several airplane and helicopter flights. Interactions like this are a good reminder that there are a lot of ways in the world.

Legend says there is good climbing in the Cathedral Spires. Ominous.

It’s also exceptionally flat. Over 100k, we went up and down an elevation profile of 300 feet, maybe less. But this flatness belies one of the most interesting forestscapes in the United States.

Florida is underlain by limestone built up over tens of millions of years, in a shallow sea. As it rose above sea level, precipitation falling on the limestone surface started to create subtle topography. Because it is so flat, water does not drain quickly, but water always finds a way... The resulting landscape drainages and high plateaus are no more than ten feet different in elevation, but that elevation is enough to create fundamentally different forest systems including high pine forests, hardwood and palmetto forests at moderate elevation, and cypress swamps in the lows.

Most photos by Ian.

We stayed at a bee-themed AirBnB in between the start and finish. Really early in the morning of the run, we dropped a car at Hobe Sound, and took an Uber to the start. I imagined Lake Okeechobee was very big. It was certainly very muddy.

The run was rich with wildlife we saw was amazing. Lizards, turkeys, and lots and lots of other birds of all types, shapes, and sizes. Only one alligator from far off.

The first half of the run was underwater. The cypress swamps at the start were… swampy. Lots of bromeliads on the trees and we even saw a few budding.

Bromeliads over a pool.

This song captures pretty much describes it:

The first part was largely a combination of high pine forests and cypress swamps.

Possibly the wettest photo I’ve ever taken.

After the first 50k, you get into some dirt roads along canals that link up into hardwood-palmetto forests. This part was nice running after all the splish-splashing.

Ian grooving through cool trees.

The latter half has a lot more wood work over the swampy bits. This was a welcome change from the morning.

Managed pine forests on the eastern portion of the run. These are regularly burned to keep the understory down, and turkey and deer hunting seems popular in these zones.

Km’s 92-95(ish) are through white sugar sand. They’re dunes grown over by beach veg. A welcome sign that we’re nearing the end.

The last bit goes by the road through Hobe Sound. Many loud trains. We were not close to 35 MPH at this point.

We reached the Atlantic a bit after sunset.

All photos, except selfie at the end, by Ian.

Selfie by the indomitable, unstoppable Clemmie.  

The sun rose after we left the parking lot and starting climbing towards Pawnee Pass. Ian has always been a jolly man, but he seemed particularly alive and well on this morning. We stopped on the edge of a meadow to spy on a eight-point buck, who lounged until the sun warmed him.

The first sign of the wind was the whitecaps on Long Lake. I’d looked at the wind forecast, and expected gusts to 30 mph, but we felt a lot more than that while crossing over Pawnee Pass (50 mph? Venturi effect on passes is a thing to remember when looking at zone forecasts). My hat and sunglasses blew off and we leaned hard into the wind. Wind through hair is a delightful and life-giving sensation.

We ran down the other side on some phenomenal trailwork reminiscent of the Stairs of Cirith Ungol (going down a lot easier than going up), and the winds subsided. 

Flowy, fun, fast single track at the head of Cascade Canyon. 

The PB might be most scenic to run in the counterclockwise direction, because as you drop down into the Pawnee Basin and then head Cascade Canyon, you’ll see spectacular panoramas of 1.7 billion year old gneiss towers. You won’t miss them going the other direction, but you might have to stop and turn around. 

October is a great time to run the PB. As we dropped below treeline, autumn swallowed us up. Yellow aspens cluster across the landscape, and Woods’ rose blankets the ground in crimson. Mix it with the orange and purple hues of Clemmie’s wardrobe, and you’ve got every one of the rainbow of fall colors.

Running is fun. Running with great friends, having great conversations, is pure joy.

On the day, we covered a lot of ground. The merits of the world’s largest aircraft. Expectations and surprises in fatherhood. The immense quality of our best friend Brynn. JTT. Whether we are stronger on ups or downs. And stories of other, old friends trying new things. 

I must issue a correction, as earlier I wrote, “The Fifty is a fun project.” Not quite… 

The Fifty is a joy project.

I played from 2014 through 2018 and during that time I had many close calls. Since then, I’ve lost three close friends to the mountains. In 2018, I was forced out of play when I shattered my right femur (not while climbing). I have not checked back into the game in the six years since my injury. First, because of loss of function, and now, because I am scared. I am scared, because alpinism is totally fucked. 

When I was just starting, I followed a framework for success. I climbed a lot. I developed a training plan and worked hard at it. I got grants. I Instagrammed. I got a few sponsor-ish deals. With all that hype, I thought to myself that other people cared that I did this stuff, and early on in my success I wrote, “Suddenly, there were other people out there, people I didn’t know, who thought that I could do this. That I should try it.” For the love of the sport and the love of the likes, I believed this story and hit the throttle. 

So, I edged into a world I will never forget, one where people go to places they surely don’t belong. For so many reasons, the world of alpinism is addictive. It is kinesthetic and maximally sensational. It all feels very big. It is, in fact, very big. On a flight out of the Alaska range after my second season of climbing and guiding, I vividly recall looking out of the plane’s window thinking, “We should turn this thing around.” I was high on adventure, adrenaline, and awe — I couldn’t stay away.

In retrospect, a huge part of that high was how I felt when I viewed myself within the context of adventure, adrenaline, and awe. I cultivated an identity. When I began to broadcast that out into the world, I stepped over a line from the love of the game, into a love of my ego. 

Out beyond the edges of my ego, I was standing in a desert of human experience — in reality, it is you, a handful of friends, and a sliver of humanity beyond that cares what you do, and how or why you do it.

Today, most people who follow alpinism do it via social media. Folks swarm up for the glory shots which accumulate likes and kudos. And what follows are the shiny goods — clothes and shoes and climbing widgets. People love their gear. All of this packaged into slick magazines, publications, and films. You can almost smell the sex appeal.

Now, I’m not about to decry capitalism or outdoor brands broadly. For many reasons, I like well-regulated capitalism. Gear companies need to make money, and athletes supported by those companies need to make money too. The fair exchange of goods and services is a necessary part of modern life. 

However, over the past twentyish years the grand reinvention of human communication (i.e. the advent of the ‘virtual’ life parallel to ‘real’ life, and the constant decision to live in one over the other) has piled on financial and social incentives to every adventure sport, including alpinism. Like most other human endeavors, adventure sports have been caught up under the overwhelming crush of limbic capitalism. Today, eyeballs pay the salaries of most branded professional athletes. And generally, the more eyeballs someone draws, the higher their paycheck.

At one point, I wanted that life. Today, I definitively do not. In the rest of this essay, I’ll highlight four stories I believed from 2010 to 2020. These stories contributed to my assessment of mortal risk-taking as a worthwhile moneymaking endeavor. They alone did not cause me to act — but they certainly changed how I thought.

But first, what does it mean to “be fucked?”

TOTALLY FUCKED

Though I didn’t know him personally, Kyle Dempster was my hero. I looked up to his general demeanor and his impressive list of ascents, and read and watched as much of his storytelling as I could. I really admired his spirit of adventure, particularly well-captured in “The Road to Karakol” which I watched maybe fifty times.  

In 2015 I wrote to Kyle, looking for beta for my first trip into the Alaska range. 

Hi there Kyle, 

Got your info from my buddy Austin. I've got a couple of AK-related questions that I think you might be able to answer - if you're willing! 

First, I'm flying onto the Kahiltna on 4/21 for my first trip to the Alaska range - woo hoo! My partner and I have gathered a lot of info on the Bibler-Klewin from friends in NH, but we're looking for more info on Deprivation. I heard that you've done Deprivation. I wonder if you have a route description, trip report, or (most hopefully) a topo for the route?..

Thanks for any info you can share!

Rock on,

Jimmy 

Kyle’s reply: 

Certainly willing! 

Bibler-K is def the better route! Deprivation is, honestly, a pretty mediocre route. At least in the conditions we found it. 90% of dep is really easy/cruiser low angle snow climbing. 5% of it is fun steeper ice. and another 5% is TOTALLY FUCKED sketchy and steep snow/snice climbing. Truly fucked is this one pitch down lower on the route. It is the Crux for sure. Maybe it's better in better conditions, but honestly dude, not psyched on how dangerous that pitch felt…

Looking forward to meeting ya. And feel free to fire away with your questions.

Kyle

For a situation to “be fucked” is a binary. It is to be wrong and unacceptable. Of all the times I’ve used the phrase, it has always meant “if I do this wrong, I am going to die at this moment.” Or, if something happens that is out of my control in this moment, (rockfall, avalanche, etc.), I will die. 

Kyle died while climbing in Pakistan in 2016. Before he died, Kyle wrote an article called Student of the Game: “As a student of the game in a classroom that is deadly, I know that sharing our experiences and our blunders helps to further educate and keep our class alive.” 

Of course, we’re all terminal. That is part of being human. That aside, everyone I’ve known who’s died in the mountains said some variation on “I’d rather not die in the mountains,” and then died in the mountains. I think of how many times I said that exact thing when I look back at my own register of close calls: 

• “Daggers of glacial ice hung above us. The moat pinched into a gully then and opened up again. I saw some (not small) rocks fall close to my right, through the pinch. I drilled a thread as Mike descended. ‘Dangerous spot, move fast,’ was the extent of our conversation.” (Alaska, 2016)

• “I planted my tools into the hard snow, sat down against the tethers that bound me to them and prostrated myself before [a block the size of a microwave as it] ‘whizZZ‘[ed] from above... The boulder exploded immediately above, and sparks and the acrid scent of rockfall whooshed around and past us.” (Patagonia, 2017)

• “Ethan was following, approximately 15m into the pitch, when a snow mushroom the size of a VW bug fell and strafed the couloir below. It fell below our belay spot; we had avoided a direct impact by ~1 hr.” (Canadian Rockies, 2018)

In each of those situations, I could have measured my salvation in feet or by minutes. We were climbing in places that were inherently dangerous, as though passing corridors where a gunman randomly shot at untold intervals. Much risk can be managed, for example by choosing not to climb where rocks and ice and snow mushrooms can fall on you, in good weather conditions, and so on. But then, you still must execute perfectly — no falls, no slips — no mistakes. Humans make mistakes. Ergo, Alpinism is fucked.

STORIES I TOLD MYSELF

Which brings me to the stories I told myself, that aren’t true for me anymore. 

Story #1: Social media is “necessary”

When I started doing bigger climbs, I also started Instagramming. Other climbers were doing it, as it is a simple storytelling platform, and those who were particularly capable were squarely in the crosshairs of brands. At the time, I wanted to be there too (see Story #2). 

But instead of actually telling stories (or in today’s parlance, “creating content”), I would spend a lot of time scrolling mindlessly, or in targeted ways, and comparing myself and my climbing accomplishments to others’. Before I deleted my Instagram in 2017, I was living probably quarter-time in the virtual world. Every time I shared something out into the void, I hungered for the metrics that returned. I would go about my day twitching to check for likes and comments. 

Social media rewires people’s brains in ways we are just beginning to understand. With Instagram and Strava, smartphones become tiny stages reaching massive audiences — I’ve heard them called ‘ego machines.’ Virtual engagement bathes brains in dopamine, stimulating neurochemical feedback for ‘more me,’ not dissimilar to feedbacks for chocolate, orgasms, ciggys, and hard drugs. 

What I did not understand about myself in my mid-twenties, is that I have strong addictive personality traits. At various times I have been addicted to books, writing projects, work, exercise, and video games. 

So, when I was digitally bathing in imagery of epic mountain landscapes and hardcore climbing, cocaine rat really worked overtime in my brain. I constantly thought about taking my own photos of epic mountain landscapes and hardcore climbing -- not for the memories, but to share on Instagram. I bought a camera for social media, because I wanted to be a pro-ish climber and I thought this was necessary. 

Today, I still use social media on occasion. But my relationship to social media is more akin to my relationship to the 19 cigarettes I’ve smoked in my life — I try to use it precisely. 

The addictiveness of adventure combines with the addictiveness of social media platforms to produce a potent cocktail, and I believe this mix changes humans’ moral behavior and risk-taking frameworks in powerful and poorly understood ways. So, to young Jimmy, I’d say, “Take care, as social media will rewire your brain. It will change the way you think about what’s right and wrong for you, and it’s easy to get carried away.” 

STORY #2: I should seek sponsorship by a brand to make money

Branded athletes are a unique type of salespeople. Sales is a core part of the job, which Nick Paumgarten captured well in a 2020 New Yorker article: 

“The panel that afternoon [at a North Face athlete retreat], featuring Tate [a grief counselor], me, and a social-media guru, was on “storytelling.” What did I know about the kind of storytelling that they were there to ponder—the framing of their adventures, which they refer to as projects, in such a way as to secure funding, attract an audience, and burnish a brand? It is the job of a professional adventure athlete to create media: films, photos, articles, social posts. You go out and perform amazing feats in amazing places while wearing the amazing gear. The framing and the depiction of these feats give them scale, reach, and meaning—and commercial viability.”

I have a mental model, a 2x2 in which ‘outdoor athletes’ exist on a spectrum, from Olympian to NARP (non-athletic regular person), and good to bad at sales. Take a look. 

In my framing, there are two main ways to create value. Be a better athlete (and let your accomplishments speak for themselves) or be better at sales. For sales, storytelling seems less important in a time when sci-fi has become reality. Rather, we’ve evolved to a place where personality makes the big bucks. Hence, the rise of the influencers.

In retrospect, I don’t know why I wanted to make money from outdoor brands. But I did, and I tried to get there. I didn’t get very far, and felt kind of icky with how far I did get. Looking back, here’s what I’d tell young Jimmy: “The bottom line is, when you exist in an environment where you are incentivized (via money and exchange of goods) to create media based on risky athletic feats, either your feats or your media must carry what you owe. If you still want to do this, and your media is carrying, figure out how to do it in a way that feels authentic to you and good for your soul — but be open to the chance that this may not be possible for you.” 

Today’s brand expectations get a lot darker than for social media posts. I recently spoke to one professional athlete who shared that their sponsor offers “send bonuses” to their alpinists, which are direct financial incentives to do hard, dangerous climbs — a lot different than a salary for your general vibe and accomplishments and social media aptitude. It's more like a paid round of Russian roulette. Perhaps this is the outdoor industry’s grandest expression of late-stage capitalism — “we demand eyeballs, you supply them — through glory or death.” 

STORY #3: There’s wisdom in hardcore climbing training literature 

In 1999, Mark Twight published a book called Extreme Alpinism: Climbing Light, Fast, and High, which established a hardcore, minimalist climbing ethos. Twight writes in aggressive prose, and his words pulse with testosterone. A couple of years after I started ice climbing, I devoured Extreme Alpinism and Twight’s book Kiss or Kill, and the literature of his peers who shared a similar “a muerte” attitude (including Steve House). 

So I was thrilled to read Twight’s introduction to Steve House’s 2014 book Training for the New Alpinism, the modern bible of training for climbing. It summarizes his writing style well.

My approach to training echoed how I climbed. The romance of climbing didn’t interest me.  I didn’t seek harps and wings. I heard no opera up there. Instead, my mountains had teeth. The jagged edge we walked up there dragged itself across my throat, and the throats of my friends and peers. I took the mountain’s indifference to life as aggression, and fought back. I armored myself against that indifference; with training, with thinking, with attitude. I trained with friends who shared a similar approach. Our mantra was dark, but it motivated us. 

When we ran we breathed in rhythm -- no matter the speed -- and that beat had words: “They all died.” We inhaled and exhaled the great alpine epics… to push ourselves to a place where we would never come up short, physically. 

The consequences of falling short made training important. I realized early that controlling the things that I could control gave me greater freedom to address the things that I could not control. And the mountains offered those in spades. (13-14)

As a young climber, I ate this stuff up. I gushed about it to my climbing partners. My admiration was not unique. Kyle, writing in Alpinist 42, professed an early devotion to Extreme Alpinism.

I studied Mark Twight’s Extreme Alpinism with the same devotion that a monk strives to connect with God’s purpose. I didn’t just want to respect Twight and his tribe. I wanted to embody their knowledge. As The Book instructed, I took my training journal to the crag. I tallied every pitch I climbed, noting what felt right or wrong and what I needed to work on. At the gym, I punished myself under the weight of heavy barbells. I documented each rep to quantify improvement. I quoted Twight’s bible with unwavering faith: “The harder you are to kill, the longer you will last in the mountains.”

Feeling strong after training is an amazing feeling. In 2018, I hired a coach to help me prepare for a trip to the Waddington range that I never got to go on. My effort paid dividends. At one point I emailed him, “There’s no doubt that the training I’ve done in the past four months has helped me out immensely. I felt stronger on the approach, fresh leaving camp, and had no doubts about my physical capability when we got to the difficult climbing.“ 

It’s not at all incorrect to describe training in terms of ‘making yourself hard to kill.’ The thinking goes, if you’re fit, you can spend a hell of a lot less time in places that are likely to kill you, thereby reducing the chance you will be killed. It makes a lot of sense.

Rather, I think a problem with Training (and Extreme Alpinism), is that it presents this material as front matter. The foremost training methodology for alpine climbing today starts with a treatise on hardening yourself to Death. At least in Training, the ‘why take the risk?’ section is relegated to the last few chapters -- mere afterthoughts.

Later on in his Alpinist 42 article, Kyle described his recovery after a close-to-the-edge solo attempt on a wall in Pakistan:  

During my six-month recovery, I shelved Extreme Alpinism. I realized The Book was someone else’s story. It didn’t have to be mine. Although I held on to some of its ideals, I returned to a more-lighthearted approach. Alex Lowe’s adage echoed in my thoughts, “The best climber in the world is the one having the most fun!”

Couldn’t agree more, Kyle (and Alex), couldn’t agree more. So to young Jimmy, I say “Knowing your why is most important. Take all climbing writing with a pound of salt. What’s true for others may not be true for you. ”

Which leads me to my final story…

STORY #4: It won’t happen to me

With all of this, I told myself, “I will train hard. I will make myself invincible.” 

That is a fallacy. 

In the same email to my coach (Story #3), I wrote: “There were several scary moments on the route. I want to proactively monitor threats like snow mushrooms and think about roping up over schrunds before charging ahead. I want to add these elements into the decision-making framework [I’m developing]...  Increasingly I see value in systematic risk-assessment.”

Again, Kyle in Student of the Game: “‘I nearly died...’ [and now] I’m grateful to have learned. And because of that lesson I’m now a safer climber… As a student of the game in a classroom that is deadly, I know that sharing our experiences and our blunders helps to further educate and keep our class alive.”

See the parallels? I do, now.

So, young Jimmy: “You may die in the mountains. If you play, accept it as a fact. If you are thinking that you won’t, you’re no longer living in reality. You may want to stop climbing until you come back to Earth.”

AND YET

When I am having a hard time and I doubt myself in the world, I close my eyes, and think of standing atop the Alaska range. Through visions of blue and white, the warmth of sunshine and the chill of icy air, I recall all that I and my partners have endured to get here. These memories are acid-dreams, embedded in my marrow. They summon to mind absolutes of love and trust for myself and my closest friends. I wouldn’t give them up for just about anything.

There is a story about Abraham Lincoln which I’ve grown to love. It goes something like this — when he was angry, Lincoln would write a letter. Then he would put that letter in his desk drawer. If he woke up the next morning and was still angry, he would send the letter. If he wasn’t — he would burn it in his hearth.

I take it to mean that timefulness and reflection and an ability to step outside oneself are most important qualities for a man to possess. All things that modernity, in its current state, depletes.

So no, I wouldn’t tell young Jimmy to avoid taking risks. I wouldn’t tell him to stop climbing mountains if deep down, that was what he felt drawn to do. Instead, I’d finish my soapboxing with this:

“Think about it. Why -- really why -- do you want to climb mountains? Write the answer down. 

Take three months entirely off social media. Then come back to it and ask, again, 

Why -- really why -- do you want to climb mountains?”

We packed up back at the hostel and returned to park on the GCC around 3 PM. Ethan crossed over Athabasca river in a little canyon, but it required a bit of scrambling that I wasn’t keen to do in mountain boots so I walked back upstream and waded across. The rest of the approach was relaxed, with quite a bit of sidehilling around to the mouth of the valley under the north face. We arrived at the base at 6 PM and set up camp.

As we knew we had to move fast, we sat for a while discussing where our decision points were on the route. We agreed on certain timelines for where we had to be on the face before deciding to continue, based on when we thought we could safely descend before things warmed up too fast. The question we would each answer ‘yes/no’ to was “Is there any reason not to continue right now?” If we disagreed it would warrant a conversation, if we agreed we would head up or down depending on the answer. Chris and I didn’t establish decision points previously and I think this was a big improvement in my risk-assessment framework.

We got about four hours of sleep before waking up at 2 AM. The night was clear and the glacier had frozen slightly, making a breakable crust until about 200m from camp, where things had really frozen and we could stand on top of the snow. We punched it to the base, stopping where the slope started to rise appreciably to put on harnesses and crampons. We started climbing at 3 AM.

Ethan and I simul soloed up the first 300m of the route, until the schrunds started getting big. We crossed one big gaper that was well bridged, and I started across another bridge that I thought looked solid. It woomphed and shifted underneath me and I backed off, scared. We found another spot to cross, I pulled one half rope out, and got into the schrund while Ethan climbed up over it. When the rope ran out he planted his axes and I climbed over. We continued up, simuling with the rope on (no gear) for speed. I belayed him over one more schrund.

When we turned into the couloir which led to the ice climbing higher up we were at another decision point (it was about 4:30 AM). We decided to continue up to the base of the ice climbing (we’d decided we needed to reach it at 5:30 AM to continue on). We punched it up steepening snow until we got to 70 degree ice at the base of the corner. We started simuling and climbed 100m before Ethan kicked off a dinner plate that struck me in the left boob. It was very painful so I told him to build a belay and bring me up. He continued up while I nursed my chest. It was a bad bruise but nothing broken. Ethan arrived at the base of the mixed corner and I climbed to him. It was just about 5:30 and we were on track.

The Blanchard Doyle ice strip looked good so I started climbing. This pitch offered very cool climbing with one axe in the strip and both crampons on rock, some moderate (m5-6) mixed moves, generally poor gear in the rock and good gear in the ice. Here sun hit the face up high and stirred up the wind, causing snow to shower down intermittently. This moment stands out- I was high on a north face using everything in my toolbox to climb and protect a complex 60m pitch while getting spindrifted. There aren’t many moments where I call myself an alpinist but that was definitely one of them. I think it took me 45m - 1hr to lead.

Ethan was following, approximately 15m into the pitch, when a snow mushroom the size of a VW bug fell and strafed the couloir below. It fell below our belay spot; we had avoided a direct impact by ~1 hr. It was pretty cold up there so I think it was a random event (not brought on by temps). The other snow mushrooms on the face started to look much more threatening after that so we cooked it up the next 200m of lower angle ice. I belayed 1 60m pitch and then we simuled 140m. I think I placed 5 screws over 200m of AI3-4 climbing.

I climbed one more mixed pitch (veneer of ice over rock) that was difficult to protect because the cracks were icy. I made a few balancey moves to thick ice and  romped up to the summit bowl, where we faced cornices on each side. Ethan climbed up to me and we discussed what to do. From our anchor, he climbed up and right towards the narrowest lip. From here he dug for ice and ended up with a bucket belay in 1.5 meters of snow. I climbed past him and started up the glacier-cornice wall until I got a good ice anchor in the glacier. He came up from his bucket and then started gopher-ing upwards through the cornice. He dug for two hours while I lost the sun and regretted my decision to skimp on the long underwear. I got very cold while waiting, but he made it through, brought me through, and we danced on the summit around 12:30 PM. The entire route took approx. 9.5 hours.

From there we did a leisurely descent to the base (except for one two hour, 10 meter pause in a ‘4th class notch’ that was pretty fucked up with melting snow and loose rock). We chilled in camp for an hour before leaving around 7 PM. We were back to the hostel at 10 PM.

Three things I did well:
- Decision making in the alpine: The conversations we had before getting on route were critical to our success. Without these we would have been much more hesitant while on route, slowing us down and exposing us to overhead hazard while faffing.
- Moving quickly: There’s no doubt that the training I’ve done in the past four months has helped me out immensely. I felt stronger on the approach, fresh leaving camp, and had no doubts about my physical capability when we got to the difficult climbing.
- Eating: I ate approximately every hour on route, using carbohydrate sources (shot blocks and skratch powder) on the initial coulouir, then switching to mixed carbohydrates-fat-protein sources (stroopwaffles and trail mix) during the other climbing.

Three things for improvement:
- Risk assessment: There were several scary moments on the route. I want to proactively monitor threats like snow mushrooms and think about roping up over schrunds before charging ahead. I want to add these elements into the decision-making framework I discussed above. Increasingly I see value in systematic risk-assessment.
- Eating on descent: I spent so much energy going up that I moved much slower on the descent (albeit it was chill). I should consider my reserves more carefully when faced with a route that has a complicated descent.
- Clothing: Because we cooked it up the couloir, I chose not to wear long underwear. My legs were freezing up top and I shivered pretty badly at the cornice belay. I think shivering was a large part of the energy expenditure that increased fatigue on the descent. Look into (especially bottom) clothing options. Somewhat difficult with a harness…

Please describe the climbing project for which support is sought. What is your objective? (60 words): I will travel to Patagonia in mid-December 2016 – January 2017 with Chris of Seattle, WA. We will attempt several routes in the Chalten Massif, with the ultimate goal of summiting both Cerro Torre and Cerro Fitz Roy in our first season in Patagonia.

After discussing it for a long while, Chris and I decided we’d go for the Supercanaleta, though we knew it was a highly popular – perhaps the most popular – objective in the area. It would be our final attempt at climbing in the mountains here, after 42 days. In fact, it was our final attempt on any objective at the end of six months of travel together. Through that time we’d climbed across the Western U.S. and Canada. I’d been elated by good weather, moments where Chris and I were totally in sync, and personal breakthroughs, while I’d been frustrated by bad weather, ‘married life,’ and my reactions to endless travel. Well, we had three more days together, and I wanted to cap it off on the summit of Fitz Roy. That’s what we’d come here to do. That’s what we’d dreamed about. I even said to Chris, “It would be cool to stand on top of that thing.”

We approached and waited out half of the night, then started packing our bags next to a boulder. We were surprised when headlamps shone to our left, then our right – where are these people coming from? – and we shouldered our bags to vie for the start.

We hurried and started climbing second in line, though we knew there was a party high above us. We presumed they were asleep. Over two hours, we climbed great neve for 750 meters. At some point the group up high had started climbing again. When we’d reached a point where the couloir narrowed to two meters wide, the leader pulled a block the size of a microwave off the mountainside.

In unison, Chris and I stopped climbing and listened. We heard it coming. I planted my tools into the hard snow, sat down against the tethers that bound me to them and prostrated myself before a ‘whizZZ‘ from above.

Oh God. Oh God. I’m an atheist.

I screamed ‘rock’ twice, lengthening the O’s.

“ROOOOCK!”

Sweat, hot on my face, felt cold when I pressed it to the snow.

“ROOOOCK!”

The boulder exploded immediately above, and sparks and the acrid scent of rockfall whooshed around and past us.

“Are you OK?”

“Yes. Are you?”

“Yes. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

We bailed until dawn, and spent a while back under our boulder sipping hot drinks. Hours later, as the sun crested over the bulk of Fitz Roy, we stepped off the glacier, and spent a few hours napping on sunny rocks at the edge of a lake.

Forty-two days earlier, we drove towards El Chalten. We watched a wall of clouds advance from the west, engulfing Cerro Torre. When we arrived, an hour later, Fitz Roy was obscured as well.

At the outset we declared we’d be ready to ‘stick our noses in it’ and climb sheltered objectives in marginal weather. The first day we decided to venture into the mountains – a week after we arrived – we made plans to establish a cache of gear on the Torre glacier and go climbing if the weather improved. We were blown around the glacier by gusty winds – our notions of ‘marginal weather’ shifted from romantic to realistic. So like every hungry Patagonian climber, we sat in our hostel and watched the forecasts closely, trying to determine when we’d have good-enough weather to go into the mountains.

Our first opening in the weather came a few days before Christmas, when our friend Austin had joined us. We decided to return to the Torre valley and attempt a few climbs. The day we arrived we walked up to El Mocho, a small sub peak of Cerro Torre that hosts some low-elevation ice climbs. We discovered that all of the ice routes on that mountain were out of condition. We returned to camp and rested the following day, and launched early on our third morning for an attempt on Cerro Stanhardt via the route ‘Exocet,’ an objective much higher than those on El Mocho.

We arrived at the start of the climb on a cloudy, windless day – novel calm – and Chris did a fine job leading us through the first several pitches, along granite weaknesses plastered with rime ice. As we climbed the clouds threatened to break, and Austin grew agitated, repeating “This mountain is about to come alive! We’ve GOT to hurry up!” I stared up at the rime-covered walls through the lessening clouds. It looked like the mountain was freezer-burned. Gulp.

We continued along snow slopes and rime started to trickle down the face. We did a short rappel to reach another snowfield. Rime was now pouring down. We were almost to the base of the chimney that leads to the upper mountain when Chris stopped around a corner. Austin and I were tucked under an overhang. The rope started to come slack, and I heard him yell, ‘I’m coming back!’

I reeled him back in. We sat in our protected nook for a few hours on Christmas day, relaxing and thinking of our families back home. Holiday cheer flowed from the speaker on my phone.

Feliz Navidad / Feliz Navidad / Feliz Navidad / Prospero Ano why Felicidad / We wanna wish you a Merry Christmas / We wanna wish you a Merry Christmas / We wanna wish you a Merry Christmas / From the bottom of our heart

As the sun disappeared the rime showers subsided. We continued around the corner to the base of the chimney. A team had been here a week before and found this section out of condition – they were Italians, which explains why Austin and Chris looked very confused after I looked into the chimney, saw great ice, and yelled back; “I dunno what the Ruskies were talking about, but this ice is FAT!”

I led three pitches up the chimney. At the top of the third pitch, just before the end of the difficulties, we reached our cut-off time. Five minutes after we started down, the wind picked up and a spindrift waterfall began to pour down the chimney. We rappelled until dawn, reached the glacier cold and tired, and trudged back to basecamp. Twenty-six hours after leaving, we got back into our sleeping bags.

A few days of rest followed, and just before the New Year, Austin, Chris and I decided to try the North Ridge of Cerro Solo. We approached in the evening and slept at the forest’s edge, protected from the wind by the friendly, flexy branches of the lenga trees about us.

We woke to an early alarm, had a quick bite, approached the base of the ridge in the morning twilight, and began climbing after sunrise.

I’ve spent a lot of time walking and climbing around on snow and ice, and climbing on clean rock, but I’ve never spent much time on bad rock by choice. Austin and Chris, on the other hand, are pedigreed Cascadian chossdogs. So, as I tiptoed ever so gently along the ridge, they bounded ahead sniffing out the least-bad way through variegated bands of metamorphic crap-rock the likes of which I’d never touched before.

We scrambled along the ridge, up the first tower, and made a rappel to the base of the second. We climbed and rappelled the second tower, soloed the third tower, and did several more rappels to a notch dubbed ‘Puff Puff Pass’ (the start of ‘El Dragon’). From here, Austin led as we simulclimbed -and belayed one pitch – to the summit of Cerro Solo. We reached the summit in the early evening and descended to our packs just before the sun went down.

Now that we’d tasted success on a humble Patagonian summit, Chris and I were hungry to return to Exocet. We stared at poor weather forecasts and rationalized plans to get it done in ever more marginal conditions, until we realized we should have a plan B. Yet our general plan A was to approach the climb with a light bivy kit and continue up as the weather allowed.

We put plan A into motion during the next clearing window. At the snowline under Cerro Stanhardt, we decided we’d wait out the winds. So we dug an alcove in a wind-shaped snowbank and spent two hours cuddling under a tarp. While this was very cozy, Plan B began to look pur’dy good.

We returned to our basecamp and prepared for the more moderate – but still excellent – ‘Super Domo.’ The following day we approached and did the climb – a few easy mixed pitches to one tricky mixed pitch topped off by three beautiful pitches of ice. When I started up the final pitch, clouds began to waft overhead. As I crested the last of the ice, thirty minutes later, a squall punched me in the face. 

Once again we rappelled through whiteout. We slogged back down the glacier, which had baked in the sun for the entire day, looking for traces of our filled-in tracks. Chris punched through a bridge to his waist, so we roped up. We continued slowly after that, testing for cracks, and in total the descent took about one and a half times longer than the approach. We got back to our tent without enough time to return to town in the light, so we enjoyed a hearty one-bar dinner and spent the night.

El Chalten is a tourist town nestled in a valley hemmed in by bluffs. We spent a lot of time in town because of the weather in the mountains. Looking back, I find it funny to think that on my first trip outside North America, I spent the majority of my time living in a very windy hole full of tiny houses and very friendly people. There were lots of opportunities to practice Spanish, make new friends, eat ice cream, and go climbing on nearby crags, yet there were moments where cabin-fever set in and town started to feel very small.

At one such moment I started running, aiming for the closest prominent point I could see from the clifftop north of town. After a few kilometers, I’d gotten high enough to find some proper wind – it’s never far off – and soon running turned to hiking, to walking, and finally, to leaning. I tucked behind a slate outcrop for respite. While I enjoyed a snack and drummed up the courage to poke my head into the wind again, I noticed a mollusk in the outcrop in front of me. I abandoned my high point for the prospect of finding more clams. Thirty minutes later I’d made no significant discoveries. On my way back to town, I wondered – was I a lucky paleontologist that found one unlucky clam, or an unlucky paleontologist that found one lucky clam?

On Day 42, before we followed our ambition into the choke of the Supercanaleta, Chris and I waited out the cold of the night sitting on our packs, wrapped in a single sleeping bag, passing a liter bottle of hot tea back and forth. We talked about climbing for fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. And then we spoke of the things foremost on our minds – what life had brought us, what life would bring us, love, and possibility. All the while, we stared up at the brightest twinkling stars I’d ever seen, through the clear of a cloudless night.

We climbed a variation to the Helmuth-House line ‘First Born’ over seventy three hours from May 10-12, 2016. Of that time we spent thirty hours waiting for weather to improve. Ours was the fourth ascent of the Father and Son’s Wall. The route follows ‘First Born’ for its majority, deviating just above the second rock band and returning just above the third rock band. All in all we climbed 500’ of new vertical terrain and about that much contouring back to the line.  Since we weren’t there to hug our moms on Mother’s Day, we’re naming it the ‘Mother’s Day’ variation. As for a grade? In the spirit of the past ascents: Alaska Grade 5, Scottish grade VI.

Author’s note, 2024: You just can’t avoid objective hazard on these climbs. Our route started in the couloir to the left of the avalanche runout pictured here. These ran regularly from serac fall from the Upper Peter’s glacier.

“What’s a Scottish grade VI?” Really the only thing we know about Scottish climbing is that it only happens in bad weather. Two of the three routes on Denali’s Father and Son’s Wall were climbed by Scots; one party almost got smoked by an ice avalanche (Guy Willett and Paul Ramsden on ‘The Great White Fright’) and another party claimed they set out with ‘no tent, no sleeping bag, no idea’ (Kenton Cool and Ian Parnell on ‘The Extraterrestrial Brothers’). The first route up the wall was climbed in 1995 by Eli Helmuth and Steve House. Not one party has climbed it to the top. Last year, over pitchers of beer and Brandi Carlile harmonies, Mike Gardner and I traced lines up the few photos we could find.

Dreams / I have dreams / when I’m awake / when I’m asleep

For both of us, it was our second trip into the Alaska Range; we thought it might be over our heads.  But, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in our combined experience working on Denali, it’s this: when in Rome, you go big or go home – either way, carpe-fucking-diem.

We staged for two days in Talkeetna before we boarded a de Havilland Beaver (no relation to Castor canidensis, the most industrious of North American fauna) and soared northward in the wash of its throaty roar. Before sun hit the North Buttress of Mt. Hunter and we were camped just off the airstrip. The next morning we jaunted two-thirds of the way up the West Face of Humble Peak before we decided it was too warm to continue. On the way down, we quadrupled the total number of snow bollards we’d ever rappelled off.

Over the next seven days we moved from basecamp (~7000’) up to the 14,000’ basin. As we dragged heavy sleds down the Kahiltna and up the West Buttress, it struck us how karmic our situation was. As guides, we’ve laughed at people anchored by their sleds, but as climbers we were happy no one was around to laugh at us. When we arrived at 14,000’ we planted this year’s flag of civilization.

BEEP. The screen of our sat phone read stacked lows for the next week. It was never terrible, but never good. We tried to get a cache in at the top of the Father and Son’s Wall but turned around when we found scary snow conditions below the fixed lines on the West Buttress. Four days passed in a blur of skiing, gambling in-town beer on card games, and discussing the route and the weather. We thought a lot about the descent – we would either go down to Kahiltna Pass, over Mt. Capps, and up the Peter’s Glacier (4000’ of elevation gain over six miles) or drop off the West Buttress at around 12,000’. We decided the latter meant less walking and more climbing.

We staged for an attempt on a ‘clearing window’ but by the time we arrived at the start of the descent, snow fell. A sucker hole opened as an avalanche ripped across the lower part of the Father and Son’s Wall. When we returned to camp we decided on ‘go’ terms – little to no new snow for 48 hours, sunlight for most of that time, and generally low winds at launch.

After four more days at 14,000’ it looked like we would meet our terms. We got our gear ready. At 6:30 PM we left 14,000’ and descended to the base of Squirrel Hill. We looked at each other, nodded confirmation back and forth, and dropped in.

An easy descent on snow brought us down to a band of seracs. Skirting around them, we arrived at an ice ledge and set a rappel. I landed in an ‘ice moat,’ a feature we’d seen on a topo of the descent. A better description would have been ‘shark’s maw.’ Daggers of glacial ice hung above us. The moat pinched into a gully then and opened up again. I saw some (not small) rocks fall close to my right, through the pinch. I drilled a thread as Mike descended. “Dangerous spot, move fast,” was the extent of our conversation. One more quick rappel landed us underneath a boulder. Sheltered, we took a moment to breathe. There was no going back up that.

Four more rappels brought us to the glacier. We packed up a rope and Mike started across the Lower Peter’s. Bare ice was patched with windblown snow and open crevasses. Halfway across Mike stepped on a patch of snow and disappeared. I was yanked eight feet across the ice before I stopped and started digging frantically. The rope between us slackened, and I stopped digging and started pulling in the slack.  

“Mike! Mike!” I yelled. Muffled grunts came out of the hole.

His head poked out of the hole, “Holy shit!” He’d taken a thirty foot crevasse fall and climbed out uninjured.

He led across the rest of the Peter’s and up over the bergschrund to the base of gully at the start of First Born. We’d spent hours tracing lines on our camera screens, and connected a continuous white ribbon from the bottom to the top. This was the most promising option.

We kitted up and clicked on our headlamps as darkness fell. Two thousand feet passed before we stopped to brew up. We turned our headlamps off after we fired the stove, and watched the dawn run to salmon. An hour and a half later Mike climbed out into the first rock band. The Helmuth-House topo suggested we’d find a difficult-to-protect 5.8 rock pitch, but deep snow led to thin ice, and Mike brought me up. Two more pitches of hero ice and fun movement led us through the band to any icy traverse.

Through the first rock band, the wind and snow picked up. When Mike and I switched leads below the second rock band, spindrift began to pour down from above. We couldn’t climb through the cascade, so I climbed across the drainage to an ice arete where we chopped a small ledge, dozed, and traded thoughts.

“We should go down or go up.” / “I’m getting nervous.” / “Let’s listen to music.” / “It’s getting better.” / “It’s not getting better.” / “I can’t get this song out of my head.” / “Not much improvement.” / “Time to go.”

Again, we nodded confirmation back and forth. We rappelled once to gain our line. House describes these pitches as ‘steep waves’ of ice. As I climbed through them I screamed, “Waves! Waves!” Mike yells his agreement as he comes up.

The spindrift started again but one more short pitch brought us to a snow arete. The weather got worse and we chopped an ice ledge. After several attempts to spoon lying down we find the most comfortable position possible – sitting up, our heads on each other and our feet nestled down low. We dragged our shared sleeping bag up over our heads and tucked it behind us. For sixteen hours wind and snow are lost to us. We spoke little and slept less. The remainder of our solid food and Ray Wylie Hubbard’s lyrics fortified us.

I saw this ol’ dog he was chasin’ this rabbit / I saw a dog a’ chasin’ this rabbit / I saw this dog he was chasin’ this rabbit / It was on Sunday, about noon / I said to the rabbit, “Are ya gonna make it?” / I said the rabbit, ” Ya gonna make it?” / I said to the rabbit, “Are ya gonna make it?” / The rabbit said said, “Well, I got to.”

The next day we departed in the evening when the winds calmed and the snow stopped. I led up toward curtain of ice flowing down a weakness in the third rock band. Steve and Eli trended left here. More traversing and one steep pitch brought us ‘above the difficulties’ to a broad slope of blue ice. When Mike arrived, we drank deeply from water flowing down the rock wall on our left.

Mike lifted off, but soon realized this ice band didn’t connect to the upper slopes we’d eyed in the photos. He found a block and we rappelled in tandem to the ice bands. Four hundred feet of traversing brought us back in line with ‘First Born.‘

If Hell froze over, it would look like an endless sheet of 50 degree blue ice. To us, salvation appeared as discontinuous runnels of neve. Following the snow the best we could, we simul-climbed the rest of the route; Mike led a few hundred feet until our screws ran out, and then I led until the screws ran out, then Mike led the rest. We gained the top of the ridge around 7:30 AM. The wind was relentless, but the sky was blue. Our remaining rations consisted of two handfuls of gels and nut butter packets and one freeze dried meal.

We decided to wait for improvement before going for the North Summit. After all, that was part of our dream. A small cornice offered some shelter from the wind. We augured in. Two hours later, we awoke cold and shivering to intermittent whiteouts and strong gusts blowing snow into our shelter. We dissolved gels in hot water and sipped the drink to warm ourselves. As we sat there our choice became simpler. Eight hours later, the clouds broke enough to offer quarter-mile visibility, and that’s all we needed. Still, the walk across the Upper Peter’s was breezy.

As we slogged through fresh powder towards the fixed lines we heard a faint “woo hoo!” We looked up to see a group from Alaska Mountaineering School standing on the ridge at the top of the lines. Now, I almost recall that we ran right up and hugged them, but really we were trashed. We trudged up to them and noshed their offered candy. On the walk down to 14,000’, we stopped on a rise, turned to each other with tears in our eyes, and embraced. We stepped into camp seventy three hours after we left. There wasn’t much to say that night, and after dinner, sleep came easy.

Really it was the sixth or seventh stop after I entered California because I kept inventing reasons to pull over and avoid entering the park. In truth, all of those reasons loosened the big knot of anxiety that was growing in my stomach. The knot was on par with what I’d felt while A) doing a public presentation on my graduate work and B) being ten seconds away from kissing a pretty girl.

As I drove into the park it grew tighter and tighter, until I rounded a corner and the valley opened before me. Two things happened at once – my anxiety-knot pulled so tight it snapped, and I opened my mouth to puke. Instead of lunch, peal after peal of wild laughter came out.

I parked by a meadow below El Capitan and called Chris; the only thing I could say was, “This is stupid, it’s so big!” as though that was something we didn’t know when we decided to try to get up it. A few days later I picked him up in Fresno, and he pretty much agreed with my assessment. What happened in the next ten days was a jumble:

LEARNING TO WALL: Our first question was, “Austin, how do you haul?”

His response was, “Oh GOD. You guys are going to die!”

Eventually, with gentle encouragement and some amount of begging we convinced him to show us how to haul, and with that we were off to tackle our first wall, the West Face of the Leaning Tower. We left the ground at noon and got to our bivy ledge at around five PM. We learned that all the room on the ledge was ‘taken’ by the three guys on it, it was definitely too ‘crowded’ for us to come on. Wall gumbies we were, so with no further inquiry of the residents we forged upwards to top out at sunrise. That afternoon we learned we’d been lied to.

HEALTH FOOD: Although Chris started the trip on a healthy food bent, my insistence on taking a two pound bag of candy for every can of sardines really paid off. On the Leaning Tower, he finished far ahead of me in the Peanut M&M category.

THE PRE-ALPINE START: We napped for a few hours at the base of El Cap before starting to haul at 4 AM. A lot of squirrels joined our pajama party, but Chris thought they were bigger and furrier than they sounded.

“Jim, did you hear that?” he’d ask.

“What, the squirrel?” I’d respond.

At one point he heard a noise, reached out into the dark, touched my hair, and screamed. I did not sleep well.

CLASS FOUR: Perhaps the hardest pitch of the Salathe Wall was a traversing fourth class bit. We discussed carrying the bags and hauling the bags and settled on trying to haul them. Chris would push the bags while I pulled.

“PUSH, CHRIS!” I yelled.

“YOU’VE got to PULL!” he yelled back.

It went on like that for a long time – neither of us could do very much.

POOL PARTIES: We figured out early on that our wag-bag situation was very dire. We decided to share bags so we wouldn’t have to break into old ones. The accepted vernacular changed from “Time to bring the kids to the pool,” to “Time to bring the kids to the POOL PARTY!”

TEN O’CLOCK: We pushed up to Long Ledge from El Cap tower in one day. After a very impressive lead of the Salathe Headwall by full moon, Chris got to the ledge and fixed the rope.  When I arrived he whispered “It’s like, 10 PM, and these guys are sleeping,” to which one of the sleeping guys chimed in, “It’s TWO AM.”

THE PIN: Off of Long Ledge is the last pitch of any serious aid climbing on the Salathe. I was climbing to salvation until I stepped up on a fixed pin and it tore out. I fell 50 feet into space to the right of the belay ledge. I landed on par with Chris, whose wide eyes said what I’d screamed on the way down, “Holy shit!” I took the fall three times before I got through.

ROIBOOS: What I remember most fondly is sitting on ledges after sunset with an old friend, drinking vanilla tea and getting to know each other again after a long time spent apart. We’d do that for hours, until we nestled into the warmth of our sleeping bags as monkey calls echoed down into the night.

Many thanks to Cabot Cheese, Teddie Peanut Butter, and the Earle Family Farm for their support of our trip! Cheese, chunky PB, and maple syrup are great fuel for hungry climbers.

If you’re unfamiliar with the North Buttress route, read Clint Helander’s great description on Mountain Project.

The first day I spent with Jeff was also my baptism into the world of ice climbing. In the winter of my second year in college at Tufts, he invited me to climb on the frozen seeps of a fifteen foot tall road cut in Franconia Notch. We built our anchors off clumps of inch thick paper birch tied together, and though I thought I was going to die the whole time I climbed as many times as I could before my forearms blew out.

After that, there was nothing I wanted to do more, so Jeff took me out more. I don’t know why he liked to climb with people who were no good at climbing, but he seemed to genuinely enjoy it. I kept going back to climb with him and slowly got better – from Cannon Cliff to Mt. Washington, Mt. Washington to Katahdin, Katahdin to Lake Willoughby.

While I was in grad school we stopped climbing together as much. I focused on getting fitter – I lifted weights and dedicated dawn patrols to toprope laps on vertical ice. I became a decent ice climber. We still got out now and again, but our relationship changed. I envisioned him more as a close friend and reliable partner and less the leader of a motley crew of newbie climbers.

Last fall I took off to spend time out West. Then I came back to the Northeast and started guiding in Conway. In January of this year I convinced Jeff that he and I needed to go to Alaska, and that it was important for me to take my first trip there with him because he’d showed me the ropes. He committed whole hog by using all his vacation time and then some.

I met Peter while I was in grad school, I don’t remember exactly when. He was quiet guy in a mineralogy course I was a teaching assistant for, and when we spoke after lab one day, it was clear that he just wanted to be in the mountains. All the time. I learned that, in high school, he’d skip nordic practice to spend afternoons touring in the Chugach. When he visited his sister in Bozeman they’d go climbing in Hyalite every day. He’d just gone to the Bugaboos last year, and really wanted to go back. I tried to argue that the Northeast has great climbing, too, but he wouldn’t have it.  

Pete opted to go on Dartmouth’s roving geology field camp, which I worked on. We ran and climbed a bit while driving around the West, and we got to know each other much better. I flew back east in September, and drove out to Yosemite for a month. Then I went to Zion. In November, I picked him up in Flagstaff, and we ran the Grand Canyon Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim. Three days later we were in Red Rocks, where I hobbled between climbs while Pete onsighted most of them. We visited Indian Creek then drove north to go ice climbing in Bozeman. In the middle of December, I said goodbye and drove back east, while Pete went home to spend the winter working on the North Slope of Alaska.

 And so it was when months later in the first days of May, Jeff, Pete, and I stood around a pile of climbing gear and food under the North Buttress of Mt. Hunter. Pete had flown onto the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna Glacier the day after Jeff and I arrived, a week before. He thought we might be, as described by the staff of the flight service, “the goofy guys from New Hampshire.” I had no idea he’d be here. Jeff had no idea who he was. None of that mattered now, we decided.

Jeff took the first block, starting up over the bergschrund. After four pitches, to the base of the Twin Runnels, Peter led off. The first crux was a tricky iced up corner just below the Prow. Pete stopped sixty feet below this and built a belay. He stopped again just below the corner so Jeff and I could assemble a fortress from our backpacks. As he moved on, we cowered underneath our shelter while ice rained down from above.

My block started at the base of the Prow. The pitch was caked with snow, so I did a lot of scraping to reveal cracks. The corner offered engaging, steep climbing. After Jeff and Pete came up, I briefly described to them how to lower out and then climbed down and pendulumed onto the McNerthy Ice Dagger. After I climbed up and put them on belay, I was surprised to watch Jeff launch himself across the ice dagger, hollering as he swung back then forth above the Southeast Fork. Pete was clipped into a lower-out piece and didn’t take the ride. They climbed up and I climbed the rest of the block, finishing Tamara’s Traverse while the sun set over Foraker’s shoulder. We started chopping ledges into the first ice band and and crawled into our sleeping bags long after the sun had set. Jeff was the last in bed as he sorted the rack, boiled water, and got our food ready.

A few hours later Pete was off into the Shaft. Thirty feet up, the way was blocked by a substantial snow mushroom. I thought it might be the end of the line but Peter had a different idea. He climbed up to just below it and placed a nut to his left, then started chopping away. Jeff and I watched gobs of snow rain down. He chopped away for 20 minutes until the rope slithered upwards again. He’s through! While Pete was climbing, Jeff radioed down to basecamp to check on the weather report we’d missed the previous day. A storm forecasted to hit tomorrow had ‘fizzled out,’ deflected to the east. The new forecast called for a few more sunny days.

Pete styled his way to the second ice band, where Jeff took over after a quick pit stop. A flightseeing tour glided by on our level and we waved. Jeff led up through the Vision in a very verbal manner. By this point we were all bonkered, so Jeff handed the next pitch to Pete, and I finished off to the top of the third ice band. Thankfully there was enough snow that we didn’t have to chop ledges from ice.

The next day I led from the bivy. As I climbed the Come Again Exit my body tensed and relaxed. Everything felt tired. Can’t stop now. We had a ways to go to the top of the buttress; I broke trail. I’d set my eyes on a chunk of snow fifty feet above. I don’t have far to go now, not far at all. Can’t stop. When that one came I’d pick another target. Can’t stop. Not far at all. Eventually, I pulled onto the crest of the buttress and we grouped up.

Pete led on, breaking trail around a rock buttress. Then Jeff led for a while. Then I led for a while. Exhaustion hounded us. We discussed bivying in a hole, but no good hole appeared. We trudged on, forever up through the deepening twilight, until all of a sudden we were on top. After three minutes we went over and down onto the broad plateau below the summit. We built a snow wall and settled in for a cold night.

Dawn warmed us for the first time in three days. Clouds billowed off south, drifting slowly towards us. Rappelling was not an appealing option, but we had not brought a description of the descent off the West Ridge. Jeff recalled some details but we were uncertain of their accuracy.

I took out my phone to see if I had copied down any information about the descent. Thinking it was a long shot, I turned off airplane mode and was surprised to see we had good cellular service. I called a friend in Boston I knew would answer the phone. “Sam, think you could do me a favor?” He will never let us live it down.

A description of our descent plan in hand, we started down the West Ridge. We rappelled a few times over seracs to gain the top of the ridge proper. We descended into clouds to where we thought the Ramen Couloir started. Pete cleared some snow to build a thread, then found two pieces of cord frozen into the ice. Bingo.

Five foggy rappels later, the snow firmed up enough in the couloir to walk down the remainder. The cloud we were in lifted enough to reveal the glacier rising up before us, and we were back on a rope. A short walk uphill, three more rappels, and a short walk across avalanche cones and we were on the main fork of the Kahiltna. 

On the walk back to basecamp we didn’t say much to each other. When we turned onto the Southeast Fork, everything was shrouded in clouds. But as we made our way up Heartbreak Hill, the clouds parted to reveal the summit of Hunter, then the North Buttress. Above us, a faint river of green light flowed in the night sky. The solstice was not far off, and I expect it was one of the last times the Aurora shone before the midnight sun rose.

Pulling off the interstate in central Maine, the lonely mountain rose before us. Over three years we’d driven to Baxter State Park through fog and snow, but never saw Katahdin from thirty miles out. The year before I joked that we were ‘Team Preparation,’ ready to tackle anything, and we sat in our sleeping bags for five days.

“March rocks!” Jeff decided. Ryan and I agreed.

Team Preparation rolled into the parking lot in the early afternoon and spent the next hour deciding exactly what, besides our climbing hardware and winter camping gear, we should pack. This year’s essentials included a bottle of cough-syrupy brandy labelled ‘Mr. Boston,’ one thousand Magic cards, and a lot of sausages. We loaded up our sleds and skied fourteen miles into Roaring Brook campground through the March twilight. When we arrived, sleep came quickly.

We woke to frigid temperatures and one of our two stoves not working. We scored a replacement pump from a man named Steve who’d just finished skiing around the Katahdin massif with his oldest friends. An hour later – full of sausages, grateful to Steve, and inspired by his trip – we skied up to Chimney Pond, our basecamp for the next week and a half.

After we arrived we claimed a lean-to and cooked a pizza lunch. But pizza wasn’t enough to satisfy our hunger because the weather was perfect. Cheese and pepperoni fueled the way as we climbed the Cilley-Barber in six hours back to camp, belaying on the first ice bulge and the crux pitch. We’d already done more climbing than in the past two years, yet we had eight more days to go.

The climbing on Katahdin is bound in two large, east facing glacial cirques – the South Basin and the North Basin. The walls of the South Basin are buttressed by ridges and veined by gullies, including the most popular Cilley-Barber (so named because it was first climbed by Henry Barber and Dave Cilley in 1973). The Cilley-Barber is arresting, but it is just one of many features, some climbed often and others ignored for the classics. On the floor of the basin a dense pine forest surrounds the pond, and a few small cabins and lean-tos nestle among the trees. From the frozen surface of Chimney Pond, the view north is of Hamlin Ridge. On the other side of Hamlin Ridge lies the North Basin.

After we woke up the next morning, I decided to ski into the North Basin while Ryan relaxed and Jeff recovered from a consumptive hack. A few miles through the woods from camp, I emerged in a knoll at the foot of the basin. The wind raged, thrashing snow about. Pointing my skis towards where I thought I should go, I started forward without much visibility. In contrast to the friendly, pine-fresh feel of the South Basin, the North Basin is bouldery and sparsely vegetated – as I travelled into the cirque, I imagined the ice planet Hoth. I knew that standing above the barren heath was the nearly thousand foot Taber Wall, easily the tallest, steepest piece of rock on Katahdin. I skied around for an hour before I laid eyes on it. Then all of a sudden, it rose through the whiteout. For a while, I stared upwards, trying to pick out possible lines. Snow swirled, obscuring corners and cracks. Eventually I found a rock, hunkered down for a cup of tea, and then went home.

The following day dawned cold and clear. Jeff and Ryan, properly rested, agreed to come check out the Taber with me. We arrived at the base and discussed the line I thought we should take, following a corner system that makes up the rock climb Hanta Yo. Near the top and to the left of where I thought Hanta Yo continued, we would traverse or pendulum onto a wide ice smear and top out from there. We planned to attempt the climb over two days, by fixing lines to the ground at the end of the day and ascending them later. Though the climb is short enough to push in a single day, we didn’t think we could do so. Besides, Baxter State Park has stringent climbing regulations – climbers are expected to check in at the end of each day. We agreed, our plan made sense.

I started climbing at noon, and after a short rock step established myself in a broad gully. We followed this for several hundred feet to arrive at the corner system of our proposed line. I led one pitch, following iced-up cracks that offered good gear. At the top of this pitch, we fixed two 70-meter ropes to the ground and hiked back to camp.

The next day brought us back to the North Basin, but high winds convinced us to stay on the ground. That night, the winds died out and a high pressure system settled in. In cold and sunshine we packed for the climb. We hiked out and geared up in silence. We ascended our ropes, pulled them up after us, and then Jeff led the next three hundred feet while Ryan followed and I jugged.

I came up to an anchor two hundred feet below the top of the wall and cast off, looking for a way to the ice to our left. Breathing to focus, I climbed up a slab where I found purchase for tools and crampons in frozen wads of grass, then pulled onto a ramp. I inched up on a frozen veneer until I was about twenty feet right of the waterfall. A tiny ledge angled down to the ice. I placed a small cam above and started the traverse. Going was slow as I searched for solid holds on the rock. As I hooked behind one block, it tore free and trundled away. Instead I scratched grus from a thin seam until I found purchase. One foot followed the other until I was just next to the ice, twenty feet from my last piece of protection, one tool ready to sink into security. The thought was calming.

I brought it around and swung into the ice. Cracks spiderwebbed in every direction. Again. A dinner plate shattered away. The pace of my breaths increased. Further left. A piece of ice the size of a tabletop thundered away. Shit. The entire waterfall was a half-inch delaminated from the face. There was no way forward.

I looked down. Jeff and Ryan shivered at the belay. While I climbed, night fell cold, getting colder. ‘I’m reversing!’ I yelled down.

‘Woo-hoo!’ They yelled back. I traversed back across the ledge, slung a pinch in the rock, and cleaned my gear while I lowered back to the anchor. We rappelled off into the dark. As I went down I saw grainy horns and knobs and imagined them snagging our ropes as we pulled them. I built an anchor around some perched blocks and clipped in. Jeff and Ryan came down, clipped in, and pulled the ropes. They stuck. Shit. Somehow, we managed to free them. I threw the ropes for the last rappel and they snarled on a ledge. It took me a long time to untangle them.

As soon as my feet touched the ground, the stress that boiled higher up evaporated. Jeff and Ryan came down; we breathed a collective sigh of relief. The rope snagged on the last pull and we left it for the following day. By a full moon we packed up and hiked back to camp. Friends who’d come in for their own five day trip greeted us back in our leanto, nestled deep in their sleeping bags to ward off the bitter cold.

After our time on the wall, the days passed quickly. I was excited for the clear weather of the next day and Dan, a good friend from college who’d flown in from Chicago, was ready to go. We walked into the North Basin with the hope of retrieving my rope and continuing up a gully to the east of the Taber, then swinging around and hiking back across the entire massif. I opened my bag to rack up and discovered that I’d forgotten my crampons. We retrieved the rope and walked back to camp. The following day, Dan and I climbed the first two pitches of a climb called Waterfall Gully and then traversed out onto a ridge to the right, climbing to 300 feet below the summit ridge. At this point the snow became unconsolidated – sugary, hard to protect, and scary to climb, so we rappelled into the gully and finished the climb.

On our final day I convinced Dan we should return to the North Basin and attempt a climb called Black Fly. I tied into the rope at the base but ten feet off the ground I had flashbacks to the top of the Taber, ice shattering to pieces under my picks. What looked like fifty feet more of unbonded ice instantly seemed too much, and I backed off. I was exhausted from a week of climbing and winter camping, and frustrated I had not acknowledged it this morning. Dan agreed to head back to the South Basin, where he was able to recruit someone else to go climbing. I called it a day, warming up in the cabin where some of our group had scored a two-night stint.  

That evening, I learned that Bob Baribeau, a prolific Katahdin climber, was staying with a group in a nearby cabin, preparing for a rescue training the following day. We visited with them for a half hour or so. Bob asked us about our trip and told us stories about some of his favorite climbs on the mountain. Naturally quiet, he did a lot of smiling and nodding, and soon our group was out of questions.

I hung back for a moment. When everyone had gone, I asked him, ‘Is there anything I shouldn’t include in writing about this mountain?’ He’d spent a lot more time here than me.

He thought for a moment then responded ‘Don’t share specifics. Say you climbed this and you climbed that, but try to preserve the adventure of this place.’ We shook hands and I took my leave. Back in the cabin, I mulled over the trip while Mr. Boston was passed around. It tasted awful.

The next morning, halfway through the ski out, I stopped for a moment and turned around to look at the mountain. Clouds obscured the massif. I turned away and skied the rest of the way to the car with a smile on my face.

My attempt on the Taber was predicated on a few pictures taken from far away and the encouragement of some close friends. Altogether, they made me think, this sounds feasible. This is an at-least-okay idea. Getting a grant was a stronger statement. Suddenly, there were other people out there, people I didn’t know, who thought that I could do this. That I should try it.

I went to the mountain brimming with excitement, uncertainty, and fear in the pit of my stomach. I came away with no less, but slightly more: an experience that formed the nucleus of a sea change in my relationship with the mountains and an accordant change in my identity as a climber. It’s hard to pin down exactly what has changed – a lot, I expect. Confidence, for one. Conditions dictated that I would not reach the top, but I think it’s important to observe that it was not an ascent that sparked the change; it was the effort of one. Now there are are moments when I feel fear, and in the halls of my memory I relive the feeling of tension high on the wall. With it rolls the thought, You can do this. You should try it. And I commit.

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