Longest Ice Climb

[Don_Serl]

Fishstick: hey old friend, how's it going?

 

what Jo Jo is really on about is trying to compare the route he and Dave Dornian did on the NW face of MacArthur to... (anything else in the world) - some details in the latest Gripped. i wuz in there in 1991 with Mike Down and Jim Haberl to attempt this thing, but the seracs up top looked frightening, and the face kinda over-awed us with its hugeness and unrelenting steepness. so we climbed the W ridge instead/first, to suss out the whole deal. in one portion were forced to traverse out onto the NW-facing icy terrain. similar to Jo Jo's experience, this was BY FAR the hardest alpine ice (in the "impenetrable" sense, not difficulty) i've ever encountered. crampons just barely scratched in, and an ice screw had to be hammered and hammered to get it to rotate in far enough to make it worth clipping - and the head broke off while trying to remove it! we got up in 2 days, then got hammered by a 4-day storm on the summit plateau and were mighty glad to emerge alive, so any thoughts of then cracking off the face disappeared.

 

my maps show it at a full 6000 feet, and while there might be a few Himalayan faces of that height (E face of Dhaulagiri comes to mind???), and maybe a line or two in the Antarctic (Tyree, etc???), this is way bigger and steeper than the largest ice routes in the Alps - the Marinelli couloir on the E face of the Dom is 1600m, but it's mostly 50º, and most usually snowy/neve rather than grey doom.

 

good on ya, Joe - a MIGHTY hard alpine route.

 

cheers,

[JoJo]

Don!

Nice to hear more about your climb. During the 6 days waiting to fly out after our route, we brushed off our grade school geometry and figured the actual length of the climbing to be close to 9,000 feet. Hard to say really. Bottom line, it was somewhere between 45 and 50 sixty meter rope lengths of simu-climbing (25 hours spent on the face itself). We called it "Some Kind of Monster." The steepest parts, the bergshrund and one pitch in the exit gully, were 80 degrees/Grade 4ish and the rest was between 60 and 70 degrees. The most amazing thing was the lack of easier snow or neve that we could actually cruise on. There were four sections, no more than 20 meters each where we could actually kick steps into snow. The rest was shiny blue/black ice or otherwise shielded with two inches of detached surface crust that only got in the way. Crazy stuff. My toes hurt for weeks. I was thinking of you several times during the climb. One point was while I was using my ice tool, like in the old days, to twist in a new BD so-called self drive screw. I recalled your stories of the bullet proof ice. The other time I thought of you guys was postholing across the plateau looking for the north ridge. It was storming, and complete white-out, so my motivation to keep going was the spectre of a similar 4 days storm as you had in 91. We didn't have anything but the clothes on our backs, a half dozen Gu each, half a liter of fuel and a small shovel. I doubt we'd have fared well. As such, once off the summit cone (which included a 200 foot overhanging rappel over a serac) it took four hours of thigh-deep wallowing but we found it which would not have been possible had I not been there in 2003 when I climbed a variation to the North Ridge to the East Peak. For what ever it is worth; we had both Grivel and BD screws and in the future I will take only Grivel screws on a climb like this. The BD screws were by far harder and slower to place. The Grivel screws, despite taking up more room on the rack, were far superior. We had 17 screws total when we started. We dropped two. Also, the seracs on the face are not so bad - as far as seracs go. The approach and the gully near the bottom are the most exposed places (from the upper cliffs off the edge of the plateau). The ones on either side of the exit gully look more dangerous than they are. They showed no signs of recent calving. On June 6 there was some mild seismic event and for 24 hours or so tons of shit fell off in weird places but nothing moved down the North Face Route we did. The most common hazard was spindrift. If there is any snowflakes in the air and a whiff of wind, it heads down that face. The collection zone is massive. We finished the exit gully, some of the best climbing I've done in the St. Elias, in a complete spindrift avalanche. It was quite desperate really. It's a bummer we couldn't enjoy the climbing more. To top it off, the summit pyramid was blue ice right to the top. As a result we angled off to the east to some lower angle snow about a pitch from the top but baled due to the storm. It would have been nice to stand on the summit of my favorite mountain. Although shorter than my route on King Peak and not as technically cruxy (King Peak has a WI 6 pitch at 15,000 feet), "Some Kind of Monster" was by far a harder route overall. King Peak had 4,000 feet of snow and neve at the bottom and was not as consistenly steep. For comparison, it took Steve and I "only" 13 hours to climb the SW face of King with 3 belayed pitches and 10 simu-climbed. There would be no way I'd climb more than a few hundred feet of McArthur's North Face without being attached to the face some how. The ice was just too scratchy. It was the most draining and probabaly the hardest route I've done. Fortunately it was also one of the rare climbs where all our efforts come together well. No dropped pots (like what happened on Catenary a week before), no forgotten gear, making the right decisions at the right time. After about a half dozen of these single push rigs, this was perhaps the first time it all came together perfectly like it should.

Any how, I gotta get back to work.

Cheers,

JoJo

[Don_Serl]

joe,

there's a good en-route photo in Gripped - how about posting a photo of the mtn/face here...

cheers, don

[Don_Serl]

actually, there's a photo on the Climbing magazine site...

http://climbing.com/news/bignewmtlogan/

cheers, don

[JoJo]

Don,

I tried to post a photo but for some reason it didn't take.

I'll try again.

Cheers,

JoJo

[tomtom]

[Don_Serl]

yowzers...

that's it alright...

just COMPLETELY out of scale...

man!!!

[JoJo]

Don,

Here's one for perspective.

JoJo

[Squid]

whoa

[tomtom]

Don,

Here's one for perspective.

JoJo

 

[JoJo]

I forgot to mention... That red circle is our base camp tent. This photo was taken a little more than half way up the face. Not quite as high as the shade/light line in the photo of the face above.

JoJo

[layton]

did you have the most fun?

 

also, way to "leave no trace" with your huge red circle you guys put around your tent. what did you use, baby seal blood? shame on you guys. i'm telling.

 

my god, what has the world of alpinism come to!

[EWolfe]

The longest ice climb is your current pursuit.

[archenemy]

Yeah, but can you do it car-to-car?

 

BTW: fabulous pic--beautiful.