Climb: Nooksack Tower-Beckey-Schmidtke
Date of Climb: 8/8/2004
Trip Report:
Hal Burton and I made the long drive from Portland to the Nooksack Cirque trailhead on Saturday, arriving around 2:00pm. We blew by the turn-off on the main trail down to the Nooksack River, so had to backtrack a good ways. It's not very obvious, but we should not have missed it the first time.
The key to getting up Price Creek is finding the trail early, obviously. We did not and ended up bushwacking on steep slopes. Once the trail is found it is surprisingly well-worn. I did not realize that many people go up to Price Lake. To compound the annoyance, we were still in the rain clouds and every bush, tree, pile of dirt was soaking wet. We were drenched by the time we reached the slopes above Price Lake.
Clouds on the approach.
We made it up to the slabs near the glacier and called it good for the day. The clouds began to clear that evening and conditions looked promising.
The approach to the tower is somewhat complex right now. We had to weave between a number of bergschrunds on fairly steep terrain to gain the steep snow gulley up to the start of the route. I'm not used to doing a lot of ice work with dull aluminum crampons so this was a bit interesting. Eventually we were at the start of the rock, which did not greet us with a warm welcome. Water was coming down over the slabs, and a somewhat desperate thrutch-fest ensued to get up on to the dry stuff:
Once on the route, it was pretty straightforward, easy climbing. We pitched it out, as the rock was quite loose in many places.
After many pitches, we found ourselves on the final ridge traverse to the summit:
It was good to see some cc.com folks in the register, and some guy who soloed the north face. You won't see me doing that.
The tower gives you an excellent perch in some rugged terrain. Here's the pickets and jagged ridge from the top:
The business of this climb is getting on and off of it. Even armed with every route description and beta, it still took some head scratching to get off the thing, though it was not too bad.
We came close to some stuck ropes, but luckily avoided it. We also cut loose some huge boulders pulling the rope, and one of our ropes took a core shot from a boulder high up. It got really nasty-looking after a few rappels. I'm glad it was intact enough to get off the tower.
The trip down the snow gulley to the bergschrunds was slow and tedious. I was pretty tired and am sure I slowed down HB with my incessant step-kicking. We ended up rapping the bergschrund and making a wild move back on to the lower lip of the schrund, swinging out with an axe to pull ourselves across on rappel.
Blah blah blah! Sorry for the long-winded details. Anyway, this route was a lot of fun, but the loose rock, steep snow/ice approach, and complicated exit make it a fairly serious (at least for me) outing.
Gear Notes:
Small rack of nuts and hexes, 2 cams, a lot of webbing, a few pitons, rap rings
Approach Notes:
You can pick up a faint trail down to the Nooksack River to find the log crossing right after the Mt. Baker Wilderness sign. We missed it the first time, and hiked some unnecessary miles
Thanks for the read. Looks like some serious and fun business.