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Mt. Adams, Lava Glacier Headwall


forrest_m

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Mt. Adams, Lava Glacier Headwall

6/17-18, 2000

Summary: Chris Fast, Dan Aylward and Forrest Murphy made an ascent of the Lava Glacier Headwall on Mt. Adams, encountering firm snow and very windy conditions. We climbed with only one tool, placing pickets every ropelength for a running belay on the 800 foot headwall. Time high camp to summit: 6 hours, summit to high camp: 4 hours.

The three of us planned for a two day ascent of Liberty Ridge. Conditions seemed perfect: the weather prediction was good, it’s practically the longest day of the year and it’s a full moon. Unfortunately, a lot of other people came to the same conclusion. When we arrived at the park, we discovered that all the permits for every high camp on the mountain had already been given out. Thumb Rock was full – and you would have to share the route with as many as 10 other people. We sat in the car at the White River entrance, trying to decide what to do. It was hard to get motivated for another objective, especially one that necessitated driving back to Seattle. We flipped through the new Nelson guide, and we settled on the Lava Glacier Headwall on Mt. Adams, a route I had never heard of before tonight, but that seemed to fit the bill: steep and icy, big mountain. We pointed the car southwards. The driving directions indicate that you drive 5.7 miles beyond the turnoff from the Forest Service trunk road to the trailhead. Thus, we were dismayed to hit an impassible snow band about a mile after the turn.

We were on the trail by 8:30 the next morning. We carried snowshoes, crampons, pickets, four tools between the three of us and one ice screw each. We also had shovels and beacons, since several feet of new snow in recent weeks indicated that avalanche danger might still be considerable. The snowshoes were the only real wasted weight, since we didn’t use them and in fact ditched them 1,000 feet below our high camp. The extra tool and ice screws stayed in the packs as well, but conditions could well have demanded them. Ski poles, on the other hand, were worth their weight in gold.

Perhaps 80% of the road was drivable, but there were numerous long patches of deep snow that no truck could have passed. Eventually, we reached the real trailhead, and set off up the trail. At first it, too, was mostly dirt, but slowly the snow patches grew to be a continuous slushy mantle. We were following tracks and arrived in the glades of open trees around 5,500 feet without too much of a struggle. We split off from the track to contour more towards the east, striking a diagonal line in the direction of the route. The trail had seemed to strike a straight line directly for the Adams glacier; we still had to cross over to the North Ridge, quite a bit further to the left across Adams’ broad face. We continued to gain elevation while traversing strongly, crossing from one identical-seeming streambed into the next, then following a series of moraines up the flanks of the mountain until we arrived at a scenic plateau at around 8,000 feet, where we made camp around 4 p.m

We were walking away from camp at 2:25 the next morning. The snow was firm and the full moon rendered headlamps completely unnecessary. We continued yesterday’s leftwards traverse around the rounded toe of the North Ridge until we were able to move horizontally onto the lower flanks of the Lava Glacier. Features of the headwall were vaguely visible in the high-contrast white light. We roped up, and after dodging quickly around a wide bergshrund, moved out onto the low angle slopes of the glacier below. It was far longer than it had appeared in the half-light, and dawn had completely broken by the time the slope began to steepen in earnest. I led up on a rising traverse to the bergshrund, and crossed it where a solid self-belay was sufficient to kick the one vertical step required to move past. I placed a picket shortly above, and began switchbacking up the slopes above. I’m not used to encountering slopes that consistently steep and icy on Cascades volcanoes. The slope was 50 degrees and solid snow/ice. We kept one picket on the rope for most of the steep slope until the route began to wander among rock pillars at the top that would hopefully arrest a fall.

As we neared the top of the slope, we veered leftwards up a narrow gully that passed behind a tottering tower of brick-red shale. Above us was a menacing black cliff, undercut below by unstable rock. Frozen dribbles of water ice poured down its face like the remnants of a balloon filled with white paint thrown against a concrete wall. After 15 minutes of passing from one gully to another, the slopes opened up again, and after a short break, they ever so slowly began to ease off in angle. Soon we were on the wide open plain of the summit plateau, leaning into a wind that increased with every step. I could feel the altitude, suddenly, as a slight nausea, which increased sharply as strong gusts of sulfur from the crater began to assail us. I was prepared for the first several horizons to be revealed as false summits, but I was still surprised at how far we had to walk across the endless dome of ice. The wind continued to increase, and came at us just on the corner of our faces, so that it was not completely blocked by our hoods. Soon, I was walking at least half the time with my mitten covering one side of my face. I soon learned the pattern of walking without being knocked over, lean forward, move one leg, lean further, move upwind leg. It was fascinating to watch the lenticular clouds condensing out of the air as they swept down the far side of the gently rounded peak. At 8:30, we reached the summit; we immediately turned around and headed for lower altitudes.

Descending the North Ridge, we were in the path of the wind most of the way down. After the first thousand feet, the way alternated between broken rock and hard snow, with an increasing proportion of scree the further down we got. We pulled into camp at 12:30 and took a brief nap. We packed the bags and headed down, stopping briefly to load up our snowshoes left at a lower elevation. At first, we followed tracks, but soon lost them in the suncups and began traversing leftwards across the snowy meadows. It was easy travel, tromping across the downwards traverse. Chris and I began to get an uneasy feeling and tried to trend more rightwards. A short time later, feeling that we were still off, Chris and I whipped out the compass and discovered that we were travelling almost 90 degrees to the direction we thought we were. The contours of the multiple valleys had just kept shoving us further and further west. After 20 minutes of hard right traversing (even uphill at times) we encountered tracks and soon thereafter, wands. After dithering for a short while, we began to see signs of the summertime trail, and an hour and a half later, we reached the parking lot. Our woodland shenanigans cost us about an hour. We limped as fast as we could towards the car. Five miles of mostly-bare road later, we reached the car, glad to be finished with a very long day.

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