[TR] North Early Winter Spire - West Face 7/12/2009

[selkirk]

Trip: North Early Winter Spire - West Face

 

Date: 7/12/2009

 

Trip Report:

After climbing the DEB on SEWS on Saturday 7/11 Bartek and I headed up to NEWS on Sunday 7/12/2009 to get the West Face (5.9 A0/5.11a), and again had a stellar day. The climbing was challenging, interesting, and on good rock with good gear (barring the short but exciting unprotectable layback). The climbing was at least as good as the DEB on SEWS and some of the best alpine rock I’ve ever climbed! It definitely deserves it’s status!

 

Pitch 1: Up the slightly rotten cracks towards the chimney, and then up the cracks on the right face of the chimney to the tree-ed platform and grab a handy belay tree. (5.7 or mild 5.8 ish, Bartek’s lead). (20m)

 

Pitch 1a: Bartk kept me on belay and I wandered up through the low 5th/4th class-ish terrain to the base of the big middle dihedral at the top of the ledge to move the belay. After watching Fred on the previous day this seemed like a good pitch for a quick hip belay, so I sat down and braced myself and brough Bartek up to the belay. Where we re-racked and swapped lead.

 

Pitch 2: 5.8 dihedral climbing. Fun, stemmy, good gear, but mostly just short. Following some good advice we stopped at the first ledge with the slung flake which I backed up with a couple of cams and brought up Bartek. (15m) Josh’s Lead. (The reason to stop short on this pitch, is to avoid having unprotectable laybacking right off a marginal belay on the next pitch!) At this point we saw a second party starting up the route behind us, and were starting to see some clouds building to west.

 

Bartek on Pitch 2

 

Pitch 3: Bartek started up this pitch climbing the 5.7ish cracks up to the small ledge. To get off the ledge requires is some mandatory, unprotectable and committing 5.7 or 5.8ish laybacking. (you might be able to protect it with a #3 or #4 big bro, but were talking a good 6” or more.) Starting the move is very heady when the gear is at your feet! Bartek started to make the moves, and backed off, place a couple pieces of gear, and decided he didn’t feel comfortable so he lowered back to the belay and I had a go at it. I convinced myself that I would die if I fell, and managed to get myself started. Once you are committed to the move it’s really not bad, but convincing yourself to get of the ledge is the difficult part. After maybe 6 or 8 feet of climbing you can latch the top of the flake and get in a good nut in cracks on the left hand wall above the flake. From here you continue up and right on the flake with some gear to the slung top of the flake. (could be an optional belay). From the slings you make a slightly heady move (5.8/5.9) to stand on top of the flake and up into an undercling below the small bulge above you. There is a good bolt above the bulge that you can clip while standing on the flake, and a bad bolt below the bulge. From here you make an underclinging traverse (5.9) right towards an old piton. Pretty good hands, pretty marginal feet. I managed to fiddle in one nut between the bolt and the piton. Once you pass the piton you’ll reach a good positive crack system, and climb up and left towards the jug handle and build a gear belay at the base of the 5.11a crack. This pitch is long, heady, and reasonably sustained at 5.9, though you could break it at the slung flake before the traverse if you chose. As one long pitch, it produced some hideous rope drag between the 5.9 undercling traverse and the belay. (40m?) By the time Bartek got to the belay the clouds to the west were starting to roll out a little thunder, there was the occasional spit of rain, and the party below us had disappeared We contemplated bailing but as it would have required at least a piece of gear to be left to back up the jug handle and we were already down a hex we decided to climb like mad and gun for the top!

 

Josh on Pitch 3

 

Pitch 4: Crux pitch up the 5.11a crack! Takes pretty good nuts and would definitely go at A0. I managed to free the moves with 2 falls onto good nuts. There are a couple of good rests/stances with thin flaring finger locks, and little if anything for your left foot. Fun and challenging! After about 20ft you traverse left to join another crack system and build a belay at the base of the long hand crack on the next pitch. Still spitting the occasional rain drop the weather was continuing to threaten so Bartek decided that speed was the better option and flew through the pitch at A0. (josh’s lead) (10 to 15m)

 

Looking up at the Finger Crack

 

 

Pitch 5: This was originally going to be Bartek’s lead, but given the threatening weather we decided that I would be a bit faster on it. We swapped the belay and I felt like I damn near levitated to the top J There was good gear pretty much wherever you wanted it, and reasonable climbing (started with few 5.10-/5.9 + moves, followed by 5.9, and then easing to 5.8). Near the top as the crack peters out I traversed to the right and picked up a second crack system heading for the summit. Build a gear belay just before the angle lays back and the climbing becomes low 5th (after that transition there wasn’t any more gear ). (55m)

 

Pitch 6: We stayed scramble to the summit! Luckily enough he storm had primarily bypassed us to the north, and we actually had some summit sunshine!! We again decided that speed was a good idea, and headed for the descent immediately. We probably summited at about 12:30 or so.

 

Josh on the Summit

 

Descent: Just below and to the west of the summit find a couple of slung trees and start rapping the gully. At the second rap station you’ll see 2 gullys that you could rappel down, and be sure to go down the larger of the two (climbers right, skiers left). A 60m rope was just long enough to reach from the 2nd to the 3rd rappel station. The 3rd Rappel drops you into the NEWS/SEWS gully and you scramble down that and rappel from the enormous chock stone (2 bolts). Again scramble down the gully and rappel from a tree on skiers right. (total 5x single rope rappels with a 60m rope). This puts you at the base of the West face. As we were rappelling the weather again deteriorated and between the time we hit the ground and Bartek retrieved the pack we were in a good rainstorm so we threw on the shells and hi-tailed it out of there. We were both feeling sorry for the two party’s that were still on the West Face and NW Corner respectively. (some poor soul was climbing the Pitch 5 handcrack in the middle of the shower! L And down the trail we went. After 30 minutes it stopped raining and after 60 we were back at the cars by 3:15, for 9 hours car to car. Not a super fast time, but a great day and we were thankful for the Alpine Start!

 

Rapping off the House Sized Chockstone

 

Gear Notes:

 

Gear: Approach shoes, light pack, trekking poles, 2L of water/each, lunch and snacks. Puffy, windshirt, the usual alpine day stuff.

Rack: full set of nuts, double cams from blue TCU to #1 Camalot equivalent, 3x # 2 camalot equivalent (2 link cams, 1 large Metolius Super cam), one 3.5 DMM (~#2.5 camalt). I’m a fan of hexes so we had 3 three largish wild country hexes. Bartek is a fan of tri cams so we also took a pink, brown, blue, and black (0.5 = Pink + 1, 2, 3). The rack was maybe a little fat. Pitch 5 is probably the most gear intensive requiring lots of hand sized pieces (thin hands to large hands) and a few small nuts. Hexes were nice to have and contributed to some good belays.

4 double slings, 3 sport quick draws, 9 single draws.

 

 

Approach Notes:

Approach: We were moving a little more slowly on Sunday and had to break camp as well. So with a 5:00 wake up call, we were leaving camp by about 6:00, and were the first people in the Blue Lake parking lot at 6:15, which thoroughly amazed me! After that it was up the trail for about ~1.5 hrs to the base of the west face of NEWS. Bugs were bad the whole way and were eating my ankles alive as I belayed Bartek on the 1st pitch. If you haven’t been up there, there is some very impressive Avy debris to cross, but it looks like the NFS or the NPS has been doing some great trail maintenance on the blue lake trail. The 2nd time you hit Avy debris on the way up we hung a left and headed up over the small snowfield to pick up the climbers trail to SEWS. Just before the SEWS trail breaks right to start climbing up towards the SEWS Arete we broke left following some faint trails through the heather past the SEWS / NEWS gully, and towards the obvious chimney on the climbers left side of the NEWS west face. The first pitch is common with the NW Corner route on NEWS. We were of course greeted by the obligatory goats, so Bartek hung the pack and I flaked the rope and away we went. We opted to take 1 followers pack and a tag line just in case.

Edited July 23, 2009 by selkirk