Dru Posted July 20, 2003 Posted July 20, 2003 Begin ~200m WEst of the SE ridge, right of the centre of the south face. Look for a bunch of right leaning slab ramps at the bottom. Climb left hand one. 1) 5.9 50m up ramp to hanging belay after turning lip of undercling section. 2)5.10c 25m slab traverse to thin tips to 10' of perfect hands to offwidth finish. belay on small ledge. 3)5.10b 50m climb chimney off belay for a few m then step left to slopey face traverse. up flakes beyond switching cracks a few times as necessary past trundled block scar to final fist crack. ledge belay. 4)5.10a 55m move left up grassy corner then undercling and chimney right facing overhanging dihedral to tricky move (will be trickier when dead shrub breaks) to ledges. up easy flakes & ramps above to stance belay. 5) 5.9/10a 60m rope stretcher climb flakes above belay then move right to avoid grassy section. downclimb and traverse crack then step up & right to sweet diagonal crack with tricky polished feet. belay at tiny ledge in exposed position. 6)5.7 or 5.8 10m move out of crack and up polished edges on face to ledge. slung block belay. walk to summit. RAP Se ridge or downclimb NW ridge then walk off by appropriate valley. we did it by approach & descend up valley from creek on Anderson River south main km 23. 3 hrs up, 2 hrs down hiking. 13 hours car to car. real nice, clean, solid cracks much less vegetation than on SE ridge. Quote
Dru Posted July 21, 2003 Author Posted July 21, 2003 pix in a week or so? when i finish the roll. Quote
Dru Posted July 21, 2003 Author Posted July 21, 2003 the pix will prove it homeboy also i have 2 witnesses but no gps record Quote
Dru Posted July 22, 2003 Author Posted July 22, 2003 Here is the TR. Straight from bivouac.com for those of you who didn't pay the $20 to subscribe. Climbing a new route is usually a multi stage process. First you get the idea. Maybe you are leafing through a guidebook and wonder ?This peak has routes on the south, east and west, why nothing on the north?? or maybe you look at an air photo or a map and see a big north face, or maybe you climb some undistinguished rubble heap of a peak and look south and see a huge rock wall staring back at you. Anyway, something of the sort happened with me and Ibex. I was up on the Old Settler admiring the view and got this glimpse of Ibex showing a steep south face. Then I flew by in a helicopter on my way to work somewhere at my old job and saw the face was steep enough it?s snow free in February. Then I saw it looming over the ridge crest to the east through a break in the fog from the summit of Mt. Lincoln. You can imagine the latter effect by thinking of the little Japanese guy in Tokyo who looks up and sees Godzilla peering over a nearby skyscraper at him. Well, after a couple more glimpses and a quick page through the guidebooks confirming the face had no recorded routes I decided to go check it out. First of all I went in with Jordan Peters in June, one day of poor weather. We scoped out the southern approach to Ibex and climbed Gamuza vias a novel scramble type of hike up the forested south side. In June Ibex was wet but promised to dry soon. Much of the face looked blank but there was this line of cracks and corners...... Well July rolled around and Shaun started calling me almost daily about our big wall #1 hit list project up the Fraser Canyon. If he only had a day he?d declare we should go back up to Nesakwatch to mow the lawn on some of the grassy unclimbed cracks up there. Well I?m not much for 3 hour death marches up the Nesakwatch trail if there are easier options, and I?m saving my helicopter budget for more important objectives, so I decided to decoy him with talk of Ibex. ?He Shaun ya wanna go to Ibex? South face looks like it might go. Let me send you a photo...? Anyways Friday July 19 saw Shaun, myself, and Dwayne Barg head outbound from the Wack for the Needle Peak Pluton and Anderson Range. I had never met Dwayne before although I knew Shaun had climbed with him a bunch. I was soon pretty impressed by this guy who is a full time dairy farmer at 28, with 60 head of cattle, a wife and 4 young kids, only has about 1 day a year to climb, survived a 50 foot ground fall when a rappel anchor failed at age 21, and still climbs 10b off the couch. Dwayne was paying his underemployed dot-com ex-millionaire brother to do the milking so he could come climbing with us. That is dedication eh? Friday night and the road was busy until Hope with drunken cowboy wannabes headed for the ?Merritt Mountain Drink and Fuck Party? as a cowgirl told me in the Triple-O?s lineup at the last burger stop in town. Hmmmm...... We drove up Anderson Mainline and I got us lost by taking the wrong fork. Then we got to the correct road and settled down for a bivi. I had heard rumors Cattermole had re-gated the road but fortunately it was not true. Saturday morning we got up at 4:45 AM and ate pop tarts and such like. The sun came up and we hiked up a recently-torrented creek bed near km post 23. After leaving the creek we hiked up steep granite slabs in and out of forest for a while until realizing we were way, way west of Ibex. We traversed slabs FOREVER, doing a lot of sketchy class 4 death moss runout stuff, until eventually arriving at the base of the south face. ?OOOOOOOOEEEEEE SON!? (That?s a Steve deMaio quote I have always admired from the 1988 CAJ in case you wondered) So the left side of the south face looks awesome but there is a LOT of blankness. On the right side there are these big diagonal cracklines but they look vegetated and/or thin. Well, right up the middle, then.... We racked up. My lead. I climbed up a ramp for about 15 meters, placed a cam and froze up trying to mantle onto this other ramp. About a 10c or d slab mantel move I just couldn?t psych into doing. ?Why don?t you downclimb and try the other ramp?? Ok back on track I led up the thinning left hand ramp until a big block. Past the block the ramp became an undercling for about 10m then I pulled around into a layback and it looked thin and hard. Uh oh. I found a REALLY contorted no hands rest, threw in some cams, yelled Take and.. Hanging belay, just like that! The belay was a mess with all 3 of us mashed at a hanging stance off a couple of small nuts and zero cams so Shaun grabbed the rack and made strange moves right away from the belay over into a thin tips crack. This was later named the ?Pink Flower Crack? in honor of the penstemons gracing it and it became the crux. A couple of 10c moves and ?ooh ahhs? got Shaun up into stonker hand jams and then an offwidth finish to a ledge. Dwayne and I swam (followed) up the same pitch each using a point of aid at different spots. Yeah it was 10c alright! Fortunately the offwidth was not the crux, which is good because I suck at offwidthing and am a bit sacred of the hard ones. Since that pitch had only been about 25 m to the ledge we agreed Shaun would lead the next one too. ?This pitch was not only 5-star but would kick the ass of many other supposed 5 star pitches.? (Perhaps I am biased... ) Shaun was talking to himself the whole way up which he only does when he is really happy, according to Dwayne anyhow. The pitch went up a chimney off the ledge, into this strange polished foot traverse, then up discontinuous cracks like on the 2nd pitch of St Vitus (only backwards) then up excellent hand and finger jamming flakes and finally topped out on another good ledge. About 10b, steep and tricky but with little helpful positive features wherever absolutely essential. This pitch had the only two loose blocks of the climb and Dwayne spectacularly trundled both of them while 3rd ing the pitch. Boom crash. Well since I had followed the last 2 pitches I got to lead the next one. (Dwayne doesn?t lead since his bone breaking ground fall). The pitch started off fun and easy up a grassy groove ramp. At the top of the ramp the corner turned into an overhanging lie back in almost a chimney. I sucked it up and made a few overhang moves to a strange position bridged out in a monster stem. My right hand was holding this small dead shrub which wiggled like a loose tooth. Basically I ?went for it? and made it to the safety of a big lieback hold and grovelled onto the ledge...the option was a big splat so it wasn?t like I had much choice. Maybe 10a ish but will get harder if and when the dead shrub parts company with the rock. Shaun took the lead again for the 5th pitch and took a very peculiar path in order to link together sections of steep and unvegetated rock rather than do the sane thing and weasel off left into a grassy low angle gully. Future parties would be better off splitting our 5th pitch into two halves. Steep flakes above the belay led to a ledge, a long traverse, and off balance downclimb move. Then from a higher ledge, an amazing polished diagonal fingercrack led upwards to an exposed perch of a belay scant meters from the top. This meant I got to tie back into the sharp end and finish things off with a 10m pitch of almost unprotected 5.8 face climbing up small polished jugs to the top. The top? Yup. We took pictures. We gaped and gawked at nearby peaks. Took more pictures. Ate lunch. Then descended via rappel down the SE ridge. Out of water we made it to the nearest snowpatch and guzzled then got to our packs at the base and guzzled more. In fact we were so thirsty, that even now, writing about it 48 hours later, just the memory of how thirsty we were makes me get up and go get a drink. I don?t know why I thought Ibex was a death march free zone. The descent was truly another killer slog from hell with tired feet and heavy packs and soft, non supportive approach shoes. There was minimal bush, but the sidehilling was painful. Along the way Shaun free associated the phrase ?The Proof Is In the Pudding? which became our route name. We got back to the car around 6:30 PM and were home in the Wack by 9. The next day my brother showed up at 8 AM keen to go hiking up Outram. Nuh uh. I slept in for hours then limped through a nice meadow walk. It was all I felt capable of. Ibex had really and truly punched my lights out. Good times, eh? Quote
jordop Posted July 22, 2003 Posted July 22, 2003 You mean I didn't have to pay to read your TRs? Sounds like a real piece of shit Quote
Dru Posted July 22, 2003 Author Posted July 22, 2003 i WILL get the last post on my own thread Jordan!!!! Quote
AlpineK Posted July 24, 2003 Posted July 24, 2003 Dru said: i WILL get the last post on my own thread Jordan!!!! Oh no you won't beotch Quote
Coondog Posted July 24, 2003 Posted July 24, 2003 new route on Ibex... bastard. Hmm, Squamish or Anderson River area today... bastard. so there, last post on your thread... woof- --cd. Quote
Dru Posted July 24, 2003 Author Posted July 24, 2003 Coondog said: new route on Ibex... bastard. Hmm, Squamish or Anderson River area today... bastard. so there, last post on your thread... woof- --cd. u better go to squamish today only thing in the shade in anderson river is steinbok ne buttress everything else will be hotter than a very hot thing! Quote
peas Posted July 24, 2003 Posted July 24, 2003 Anyways Friday July 19 saw Shaun, myself, and Dwayne Barg head outbound from the Wack for the Needle Peak Pluton and Anderson Range. Just being anal, but wasn't July 19 a Saturday? And trying to get the last post. Quote
Dru Posted July 24, 2003 Author Posted July 24, 2003 DAMN you caught me. I made up the whole thing. The south face of Ibex is choss. There are no more climbable lines there. Better stay away until Shaun and I can go back and safetyfy it with shot crete and lots of 1/2" bolts Quote
Dru Posted July 25, 2003 Author Posted July 25, 2003 AlpineK said: Dru said: yes i will Oh no, no, no! yes Quote
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