[TR] Wedge Mountain- NE Arete 4/25/2004

[JasonG]

Climb: Wedge Mountain-NE Arete

 

Date of Climb: 4/25/2004

 

Trip Report:

Given the perfect forecast, and my fearing the re-instatement of the draft, my wife and I fled to Canada this past weekend to give Wedge a try. We left Mount Vernon about 7am on Saturday and pointed the Civc towards the Great White North. Luckily, we passed across the border without losing our secret stash of dried meat and fruit and sped north towards Whistler. A near diaster was averted in Squamish when we were caught in a mad rush for donuts at Tim Horton's. People were practically running over each other to get into the parking lot. It was truly a crazy, chaotic scene. All we wanted to do was use the bathroom .. . next time I'll just pull off the side of the road.

 

Anyways .. .The road to the TH was hit hard by the October floods and we could only coax the Civic about a km up the road. We left the cars around 11:30 am and began the toil upwards, upwards, upwards. We soon found out that we were out of shape and the trail was steep. All in all it took us a little less than 5 hours to get to the hut . . . we were going slow for sure!

 

The hut was a welcome site and we were greeted by a solo euro named Anton. He promptly packed up his stuff and left the hut to us! There are benefits to being really, really, stinky, I guess. He left to go bivy on the glacier and mentioned he probably wasn't going to climb the next day. Bummer, we would have to break trail all by our lonesomes.

 

The evening was a little on the cloudy side, but the next day dawned clear and calm. We left the hut around 5 am and began the slog upwards. With snowshoes we didn't sink much down low, but gradually the snow got deeper till we were sinking ankle deep or so. Where the glacier steepened, we took off the shoes and started postholing upwards to the low col where we were to gain the NE arete (the full arete looked snowy and time consuming so we opted for just the final steep bit). This took awhile as it was mostly calf to knee deep wind slab.

 

Once we got to the col, the snow firmed a bit on the arete and it was a pretty fast hour up to the summit (around 5 hours from the hut total). The arete was mostly knife edged, but not so much that it made for tough travel. The wind kept pushing us around a bit (and any snow we kicked, goggles would've helped), but not enough to make it scary, only fun. Man, that arete is cool!!!! Worth every bit of slogging to get to it.

 

Due to the cold, and the long walk back, we didn't spend too much time on top. We descended the West ridge gulley, which was straightforward, but steep and wind loaded at the top. It would have been fantastic skiing conditions, but a little questionable on the avy danger side. It is a quick and good way to get down though. From the gulley it was a slow, hot, slog back to the hut, arriving 7.5 hours after we left.

 

We crashed for a few minutes in the sun and tried to get up the motivation to hike down. This took awhile, but eventually we left and arrived at the cars (about 5:30pm) to end a fantastic weekend. The hike down sucked, big time (lots of plunging into tree wells). But the pain was seriously dulled by the fact that we had such beautiful weather and the hut and mountain to ourselves!!!

 

Now we only had one more crux . . . getting past Tim Horton's in one piece.

 

 

Gear Notes:

Two pickets, axes, aluminum crampons, 37m rope. Ski poles and snowshoes were nice on approach and descent.

 

Approach Notes:

Snow starts about 1200m

[pinner]

nice stuff! You should see Timmy's now...

 

all 14 year olds that have never tasted coffee, ruining the brew, and fat old ladies who have never seen a cash register yelling at the 14 year olds for only bringing you one bagel, but really they never rang the 2nd bagel in, and can't subtract $1.15 from the $1.25 you gave her....