October 7-8, 2000
Phil and I were looking for a good cascade late season ice climb. We decided on the NE Face of Eldorado instead of driving the long hours up to Canada. After self-registering at the ranger station, we pulled into the parking lot far up the road. A great, and somewhat popular bivi spot for people coming up to Eldorado and Boston Basin, meant this parking lot was a little less
than quiet that night. Due to the worsening weather, we had decided to try and climb the NE Face in a day, camping up high.
We started at daylight because neither of us having been on this approach before. Due to stories of hard core strait up trails, we were a little intimidated. Finding the path and log across the river was easy and soon we were
walking along the well beaten climber's path snaking up through the old
forest. We didn't think that it was brutal at all. In fact, we thought it
was a walk in the park compared to the bushwhacking we had been doing lately! So up we went, making good time on the first 2,000 feet to the first boulder field. Pretty obvious boulder hopping from here lead to a much larger and longer boulder field that paralleled a long cliffy ridge. Sometimes following cairns,
mostly not, we worked our way up and along the solid granite boulders until
it ended at small and beautiful waterfalls. At this point, because of the
abundance of water, you could probably do this climb with one water bottle
(2 pounds). From these waterfalls the trail began again and led up into beautiful heather meadows.
We continued up the meadows, eventually climbing some nice granite slabs to
a pass overlooking the massive Eldorado Glacier. At this point, our elevation was around 6,100 feet. Roughly 4,000 above the parking lot, and we weren't nearly there yet! The summit was still almost 3,000 feet above and our face happened to be on the other side of the mountain.
After a quick descent of a 4th class slab, we were hiking up the talus, and
then the toe of the glacier. The glacier at this point is pretty benign so we decided to just hike up with crampons on and no rope. I was a bit disappointed at this because the rope was in my pack. After passing up many nice, flat,
wind-protected campsites around 7,100 feet, we settled in at around 7,400
feet at a very windy and cold glacial pass. (I won't say whose idea it was
to camp so high!) This appeared to be high enough to set up camp for the
night, so we took a rest and emptied our packs into the nearby rocks. It was
12:00 pm. In 5.5 hours we had come up 5,200 feet. Our legs began to cramp as
we rested for the upcoming climb.
After a luxurious hour and a half rest, we were off from the windy-crevasse
camp. It was a bit warm out, but hey, it was a beautiful day and we had the
entire mountain to ourselves. As we contoured onto the Inspiration Glacier,
which Makes up the NE side of Eldorado, we encountered some monstrous
crevasses. One in particular was easily 80 feet wide, and spanned almost the
entire glacier. Going far to the N to detour this one, we were already
spying routes out onto the NE Face looming above. The face its self is
relatively short, maybe only 600 feet from the berschrund at the bottom, to
the summit. However, several impressive crevasses and icefalls scar the face
and make it a worthy challenge.
Somewhat to our dismay, there was about 3 inches of soft snow on top of the
otherwise rock hard glacier ice. That's what you get in October I guess. So
we headed for the most obvious weaknesses in the overhanging walls of the
schrund at the bottom of the face. We climbed into the schrund on sketchy
fallen blocks, and I set in a belay to bring Phil up. We ended up taking a steep rising traverse, and then a short ice mantle leading to a 60 degree slope out onto the NE Face.
Phil followed up quickly and soon we were climbing up frozen snow, only a
handful of ropelengths below the infamous knife edge summit ridge. The face was not very steep, mostly 40 degree snow and ice, with sections to 45 degrees. The face is about 600 feet long. Near the top of the face, we detoured over to check out the NW Coulior mentioned in Nelson's new guide. It looked thin, dirty, but doable! Have to give this one a try someday.
The knife edged ridge up to the true summit was pretty spectacular, as there were no steps and the sun was setting.
The descent, and thus the standard East ridge route was pretty trivial. A
little steep snow, but nothing too bad, and in less than an hour, we found
ourselves back at the windy glacier camp. It was now about 6:30, an hour before sunset, and just shy of 12 hours from the car.
The night was long, about 13 hours, and a little uncomfortable due to the
wind flapping the tent all night, but at least it was warm. Had we brought
our bivi sacs we would have both been freezing, miserable and cold.
As clouds rolled in on Sunday we quickly packed up and headed down. On the
way down through all the steep trails and boulder fields, we learned why people had described this trail as "brutal". It took almost as much
effort to go down as it did up!
Overall a pretty easy climb with spectacular views. Link this one up with the NW Couloir for a full weekend and your thighs will burn all week long.
