[TR] Needle Peak- NE Face of SE Buttress 5/28/2005

[Dru]

Climb: Needle Peak-NE Face of SE Buttress

 

Date of Climb: 5/28/2005

 

Trip Report:

The SE buttress of Needle Peak is one I have wanted to climb for a while now. That and the North Face are the two routes I still have to do to completely tick the mountain. If ever there was a stupid reason for alpine climbing, that's it. My only excuse is that I really like Needle, I think I've climbed it nearly 20 times since 1991.

 

I first thought about trying the SE Butt as a solo. I hiked in in June 03 but ended up scrambling up the South Face Ramp instead.

 

I talked to Fred Douglas and Dave Jones about the route. FD was supposedly on the first ascent, according to the guidebooks, and yet claimed to me that he had never climbed that line on the mountain. Dave Jones said he HAD climbed it in ~1990, and that it was more like 5.9 than the 5.7 the guidebooks list it as.

 

Shaun, Dwayne, Barnaby and I went in in Sept. 03, it was soaking wet after a rainstorm. Dwayne and I got 2 pitches up the buttress and bailed while Shaun and Barnaby failed on a Direct South Face attempt. On the buttress, I got up to a slanting, wide, muddy crack, couldn't free it, and couldn't aid it (big cam was too small), so we came down.

 

Traversing over to climb out via the NE Ridge, I saw a ramp leading up the north side, on to the buttress above my bail point. A ha, this is the key to avoiding that wide crack, I thought then.

 

Fast forward to May 2005 and a heatwave, Merran and I come up with the ambitious plan of going up to the pass, knocking off SE Butt as a warm up on Saturday, then climbing Yak on Sunday. Hmmmm.

 

Drove up to pass Saturday AM. Grabbed gear, started hiking near 9:30 AM. Although my previous 2 approaches to the SE Butt had been by the hiking trail and then traversing a ledge across the south face, this time I thought the NE ridge approach via Markhor Peak (the Thimble) would be faster. It wasn't.

 

Hiking in was scenic, though. It took us a couple of hours to get up to Thimble, it was pretty hot, and the remnant snow was soft. Merran rebuffed my attempts to draw a map with a demand that I point out our route to her, which was difficult since until you are on top of Thimble you can't actually see the route.

 

Coming down off Thimble requires a bit of scrambling and can result in rappels if your route finding is not on. The route finding was on, but this wide crack grabbed ahold of Mer's leg and would not let go. Rock shark! Eventually we got her leg out of the crack.

 

Leg eating crack.

 

At least from Thimble we could see all of the east side of Needle:

 

and this is the route we ended up climbing, SE butt proper is left skyline:

 

So anyways after descending Thimble to the Needle-Thimble col we contoured around into the east face basin below Needle and checked out the ramp. It looked much steeper than I remembered; also it was later in the day than it should have been, and there were snowpatches on the route so many cracks were running with water. I kind of felt like bailing but Merran suggested we should "check it out". OK, here we go.

 

The first pitch consisted of face climbing next to a wide, wet chimney with an overhanging start. After making fun face moves I was eventually forced into the chimney, and from its top, went right to a double flake system with good gear, then up to a small ledge, about level with the biggest snowpatch. I dug some nut placements out of a dirty crack and put Merran on. While she was halfway up the chimney a scary noise occurred next to me. It turned out a large chunk of the snowpatch had just detached. Oh shit. I locked off the ropes and just had time to yell "snow avalanche!" The snow missed me but slid down right towards Mer. She wedged herself deep in the chimney, and the mass of snow broke up and mostly went over her. Whew.

 

After she climbed up to me, we didn't really discuss bailing. She grabbed the gear and started climbing a chimney above the belay. After some squeezing she made it out of the chimney and up a long corner with sparse gear above to an eventual belay after running out of rope. This got us up above the snow and out of the path of further avalanches.

 

On the third pitch, we encountered that coarse-grained Coquihalla "rock granola". I got in one cam just above the belay then had to run it out 15-20m up a corner with loose blocks and friable flaky crust. After finding more pro in solider rock, the pitch crossed a tree ledge to a steep corner filled with dirt. It was quite the rope stretcher to get a belay at the top of the corner, tied off to some shrubs, in fact I think it was about a 61m pitch and we had 60m ropes.

 

Wet chimney on p2

 

Looking down dirt corner on p3.

 

Merran's next pitch was much shorter because she got out about half a rope length past a funky off width and mantel, tried 2 corners off a ledge, and didn't like either of them. When I got up to the ledge I really didn't like either corner either. The left corner was steep, leaning and appeared to end with a blank traverse under a roof. The right corner was straight up, thin, dirt filled and ended at the same roof, with what appeared to be a 4 foot horizontal crack and then a brawl with a tree.

 

I traversed to the right crack, up it for a ways, got in gear and tried to go left or straight up. Neither worked so I traversed right again to a third crack. This had a couple of layback moves and then the crack vanished into mud. I resorted to 4 points of aid, hanging on cams while digging out the next cam placement with my nut tool. At the end of the pitch I traversed back to the tree above the roof on a ledge.

 

Merran also to had to aid up the mud crack. It was getting quite late now and shadows were lengthening markedly to the west. She took the gear and headed up ledges and short walls until finally topping out on the lower east shoulder of Needle. We were up, and had only joined the SE Butt for about the last 5 meters. The route consisted of 6 pitches in all, and was about 5.9 A0 in difficulty.

 

We quickly packed the gear and hurried up to the summit. It was nice to be off the route, which had been challenging and really not all that good of a climb. In fact, it had loose rock, vegetation, wetness, snow avalanches, and mud, a combination that makes it unlikely to ever be popular.

 

It was nice to be up on the summit at sunset, too. The colours were great and we saw a couple of ptarmigans

 

 

We ran down the trail pretty rapidly, but still had to use headlamps near the bottom. We got back to the car near 10:30 and back to the Wack near midnight. Yak on Sunday was a writeoff, but we did manage to scrape up enough enthusiasm to go bouldering for a couple of hours.

 

Gear Notes:

Double 60m ropes

One ice axe each

Set of nuts, 6 Tricams, cams from ZeroCam 4 to Camalot 4. #4 Camalot used on every pitch.

12 draws, mostly shoulder length slings.

 

Approach Notes:

West Ridge trail and south face traverse is technically harder scrambling, but is much faster as an approach than crossing over NE ridge via Thimble.

 

The beer sure tasted good when we got home

[Dru]

Yak Conditions FYI. No one was on it

 

[Bill_Simpkins]

Cool! Good job!

I really love Needle Peak. It's really nice up there.

Camping on the top would be fun.

Yeah, the West Ridge trail is pretty fast considering it's about 4 hours car to car.

The north face looks funish.

 

You can even see it from Chillawack!

[tlinn]

Thanks for the TR Dru! Sounds like you made the most of it despite the leg eating shark and avalanches.

[Billygoat]

Sweet