[TR] Nooksack Tower - Beckey-Schmidtke 07/23/2023

[geosean]

Trip: Nooksack Tower - Beckey-Schmidtke

Trip Date: 07/23/2023

Trip Report:

Hi, I'm going to try to keep this brief as my eyes are still dry from the long sunny dry day yesterday. Me and @thedylan climbed the "easy" route on Nooksack Tower over the weekend of July 22-23. We had a pretty easy time on the tower, especially compared to basically every other report out there. I don't believe we followed Beckey's beta exactly, but we climbed camp to summit in 4.5 hours and never anything harder than about 5.0, and that was the last 30' to the summit. I would recommend our route highly (if you insist on climbing the tower at all). 

We hiked in to camp at 6100' in 5.5 hours without pushing particularly hard. The hike was beautiful and the camp spectacular, if one had to retire from climbing but still wanted a good mouthful of it this would make a spectacular backpacking trip. Our campsite was at 6100' at a minor notch in the ridgel it had close water, immediate access to the glacial snow slopes, no bugs or rats, and perfect flat smooth slabs for sleeping and lounging, even backrests! 

It was weird having time to lounge, eat, drink and etc while on a serious climbing trip. But this route isn't broken up well into approach and climbing day.

We were up at 2:30 am, hiking by 3:30. We found an easy bridge through the bergschrunds and were headed up the gully by first light. I had laughed at Tom Sjolseth's 2009 report that suggested the snow was 60-70° at the top, but it was! If only for about 20'. Fortunately, there was a fantastic moat to change out equipment in. A lot of people seem to get on the rock too early, we went to the top of the summer snow, "where the couloir narrows" per Beckey means really narrows, not just a little narrower.

 

We climbed right up a crappy "slabby" corner, actually a chockstone gulley to access the obvious class 3 right leaning gulley, after 200-300' we worked a bit right out of the bottom of the gulley to keep the terrain moderate as the gulley steepened. We climbed a steepish wall here that might have been 5.0 but it could have been bypassed lower and right. This working right felt like wrapping around a rib at the time but isn't really when seen from above. After "wrapping around the rib" we were on a face and this is where a LOT of people go wrong.

We passed lots of rap stations that apparently lead up and right to the north face route (BAD, insert frightening those emoji). We climbed up class 3 and 4 open terrain for ~250', then started working left and up. Lots of left. In this open class 3-4 area keep looking left, the multiple ribs and gulleys below you and left are steep, once they start to mellow out and the terrain above begins to steepen work left across multiple ribs and gulleys. We found this to be very positive incut hands class 4 ground with some ramps in places leading you up and left.

Once you get into a distinctly bigger gulley you are in the zone, this leads to the ridge crest 200' north of the summit, or, I believe, you could keep traversing one more large gulley over and climb straight up to the summit. This looked easy from above but we didn't go that far over. The big gulley we climbed up was mostly class 3 with some 4th class steps.

We hit the ridge and put on the rope for the first time. Dylan lead out, simuling to the summit in about 150' of rope length. There was massive air on the west (right) and plenty on the left that I'm glad we used the rope even though I think the only 5th class part was 20' or so up a wall to the very summit.

 

There were some familiar names in the summit register. Bizzarely, we signed in right below @Albuquerque Fred from 5 years ago!! Can that be true!? In this case the summit really is only about half way there, so we headed down after some snacks and photos. 

We did 2 raps in a row off the summit back into the large cl 3-4 gulley, then downclimbed it and the traverses back to the NF rap line. We did 3 more raps to the snow moat and our gear.

"We" decided it was OK to downclimb the top scarry steep part, so Dylan went first since it was his idea. It was actually OK, the snow was soft enough for good steps but firm enough for solid high dagger sticks. This was extremely tedious after about 800'! My hands hurt today from stabbing my axes into the snow. When we got back to the compound bergschrund situation we couldn't figure out how we came up, Dylan kept climbing down where I insisted I had lead up, but there was nothing obviously right. I kept insisting it was there and that it had been easy but he kept insisting what he saw below was steep icy climbing into the cracks. Eventually we traversed between some cracks and set up a rap off a bollard on the lip, we then realized the bridge we had come up on had collapsed and was lying in the bottom of the 'schrund!

The hike out was uneventful but didn't take much less time than the ascent did, bizarrely. Once above the moraine, we did different routes up and down and I think this added to the increased exit time. On the way up we followed the boulders at the base of the trees as in the red line below. This was a mostly flat traverse between 4600 and 4700'. Then we turned up to traverse at 5200', below the buttress to the right of Dylan in the photo. The ascent from 4600 to 5200 was lousy climbing pulling on blueberry, if you can find a good way to do this it would be way faster than the ridge crest. There is a perfect goat path through heather and a ledge through the steeper slabs, then easy clean slab walking to camp. The slabs were amazing, beautiful clean rock, easy walking and fantastic pools and streams of water tracing intricate routes along the rock fissures.

On the exit we reversed the slabs and the traverse at 5200' but then gained the ridge and followed it all the way down to the moraine, the last steep part was as bad if not worse than the way we went up but the ridge was also brushy and tedious. I would recommend our ascent route in red below:

 

OK, so not so short, but it was a long trip.

Car to camp: 5.5 hours.

Camp to Summit 4.5 hours.

Summit to camp 6.5 hours.

Camp to car 4.75 hours.

 

Apprach:

 

Moraine and first look:

 

Slabs below camp:

 

At camp:

 

Changing systems: 

 

The sun rises from Redoubt Camp from the snow moat:

 

Shuksan from the summit, the Price looks tough:

 

Dylan on rap:

 

Last look:

Gear Notes:
60m twin rope, 60m tag line, 2 axes, steel crampons, e-bivys, small rack (placed 2 pieces), tat (used none), 2 pickets each (didn't use), approach shoes for the hike and rock, boots for the snow, poles for the river.

Approach Notes:
River was fordable, tough on the way out, crossing is flagged. Trail largely flagged, not bad.

[Bronco]

16 hours ago, geosean said:

we then realized the bridge we had come up on had collapsed and was lying in the bottom of the 'schrund!

Things like this make me never want to climb Nooksack.  It seems like everyone who climbs it has one of these close calls.

[JonParker]

Interesting that it was relatively smooth, I recall hearing almost exclusively bad things about Nooksack. Thanks for the beta!

[geosean]

1 hour ago, Bronco said:

Things like this make me never want to climb Nooksack.  It seems like everyone who climbs it has one of these close calls.

In this case it didn't have anything to do with the specific climb but glacier travel in general, we could have easily swung farther around the crevasses and avoided the bridge entirely but we didn't want to do as much traversing. But it was still a bit unnerving. By then on the descent we were pretty over it and just dealt with it, but still good food for thought.

[thedylan]

Thanks for the fun trip Sean. Such a beautiful setting, relaxing first day at camp, engaging route, and wild summit.

Quote

Things like this make me never want to climb Nooksack.  It seems like everyone who climbs it has one of these close calls.

Yeah snow routes in the cascades are sketchy these days. When do you think was the last time that couloir got a good freeze this year?

But though the snow was sketchy the rock was better than expected. Definitely some looseness but a lot of compact chunky greenschist reminiscent of the Fisher Chimneys. Fun scrambling. We greatly benefited from all the mistakes and mishaps of others over the years--I fully believe there is some terrible rock on this peak and I'm glad we got to avoid it.

Very surprised to be the only names in the register since 2018. Let's see some ascents! The north face/ridge route looks cool too and then you don't have to climb over the bergschrund!

Edited July 25, 2023 by thedylan
pics out of order

[JasonG]

3 hours ago, thedylan said:

We greatly benefited from all the mistakes and mishaps of others over the years--I fully believe there is some terrible rock on this peak and I'm glad we got to avoid it.

So great!  I'm glad that the accumulated pain saved someone from repeating the near death that others have experienced when they didn't go LEFT.  I can still taste and smell the fear from our brush with massive rockfall when we went right.  I do remember thinking that the real route was pretty fine on our descent.  Glad to hear that that is true.  That snow/'schrund is no joke though....

[JasonG]

And way to demystify this and slay the dragon in good style.  You guys made it seem casual!

You may as well go for a cool down lap on Terror's Stoddard buttress.

[robertm]

thanks for the great TR.  brings back lots of memories!  your pictures really show how much that glacier has changed from what I remember over 20 years ago!

[OlympicMtnBoy]

Woot!  Nice work finding the right way!

[bulgert100]

Not a bad place to spend time in my opinion!  The second time I climbed it, Lunger and I were attempting to connect it to Seahpo Peak on a Jagged Ridge Traverse but there was a ton of snow up there and I thought better of it.  Eric would have had no issue continuing on if he had a stronger partner.  Definitely one of the best climbers I've ever climbed with, and a heck of a nice guy.

Thanks for the TR, I enjoyed the read.

[JasonG]

Good to see you back around these parts @bulgert100!  Let @olyclimber know if you need to get access to your classic login.....