[TR] Mt Sir Donald and Uto Peak - Northwest Ridge (Sir Donald) and SW Ridge (Uto) 7/3/2015

[ilias]

Trip: Mt Sir Donald and Uto Peak - Northwest Ridge (Sir Donald) and SW Ridge (Uto)

 

Date: 7/3/2015

 

Trip Report:

 

Allie and I did a BC climbing trip from Jul 2-12. I'm breaking it up into a few reports for the individual climbs. Here was our overall trip timeline. Bolded days are those described in this report.

 

Jul 1: Leave Seattle after work, drive to Glacier National Park in Canada

Jul 2: Pick up our permits to camp at Mt Sir Donald at the Rogers Pass visitor center, hike in to the Upper Bivy site, at the col between Mt Sir Donald and Uto Peak. Climb Uto Peak via SW ridge.

Jul 3: Climb Mt Sir Donald, descend most of the way

Jul 4: Return to camp and hike out, drive to Golden and stay in Motel

Jul 5: Get our packs packed for the Bugaboos, have breakfast, drive to the Bugaboos trailhead and hike in to Applebee Dome campground

Jul 6: Climb Bugaboo Spire via NE Ridge

Jul 7: Scramble Eastpost Spire via NE Ridge

Jul 8: Climb Snowpatch Spire via Snowpatch Route

Jul 9: Climb Crescent Towers South (Donkey Ears) via Ears Between

Jul 10: Attempt Snowpatch Spire via Surfs Up, but get weathered off

Jul 11: Hike out, drive to Halcyon Hot Springs for a day of relaxation

Jul 12: Drive back to Seattle

 

Uto Peak SW Ridge (5.1)

 

We picked up our backcountry camping permits at 8am on Thursday and hiked in. The approach to Mt Sir Donald is beautiful, giving views of a gigantic untamed waterfall that comes off the Illecillewaet Glacier.

 

 

You get views of Mt Sir Donald almost the whole way in. The route is the lefthand skyline:

 

 

The upper stream crossing was flowing pretty good but not an issue to step across:

 

The little lake just below the Uto-Sir Donald Col was still partially frozen:

 

 

We arrived at the Col and dropped our camping gear. We brought bivies since we didn't know if there were bivy sites big enough for a tent up there. As it turns out, two of the sites at the col could take a 2 man tent, and the others are smaller.

 

We decided that since we arrived fairly early at the Col, we would do a bonus objective, the SW Ridge of Uto Peak. It's a nice warm up that goes at 5.1 is about half the length of the NW Ridge of Sir Donald.

 

Uto turned out to be a very enjoyable climb. The rock was very unique, the mountain almost seemed like a step pyramid made of individual cubical blocks. You don't hear much about Uto Peak because the route is not particularly challenging, but it's a worthy climb for the scenery and unique blocky rock, and I'd highly recommend also tagging Uto to anyone who heads up to climb Sir Donald.

 

 

We did the whole climb on simul, with me leading most of the way:

 

 

From the summit, you get a great view of the NW Ridge of Sir Donald, our objective for the next day:

 

 

We descended back to the Col by reversing the route unroped, doing a few rappels along the way off fixed slings for the steeper bits.

 

 

Sir Donald NW Ridge (5.4)

 

On Friday, we woke up at 5am and headed up Mt Sir Donald. We knew it was going to be a very long day, so I didn't take too many photos. For those unfamiliar with the NW Ridge of Sir Donald, it is a ridge climb of similar character to the W Ridge of Forbidden, but continuing endlessly on for about 2500' of elevation gain along the ridge to reach the nearly 11,000' summit (as compared to the ~500' of gain along the ridge on Forbidden).

 

The ascent was very enjoyable, and took us about 6 hours from the col to the summit. A few shots of our climb along the ridge, mostly me looking back down the ridge at Allie:

 

 

 

A view of the giant Illecillewaet Glacier from the summit. It's hard to have a sense of scale here, but this single glacier is about 5 miles across.

 

 

Summit shot:

 

 

Descent

 

At the visitor center, they hand you out a pamphlet with the descent options from Mt Sir Donald. The descent can be roughly broken up into an upper, middle, and lower section, as shown in this beta overlay:

 

 

For the upper section, you can either retrace your way back down the NW Ridge, or take the "summit bypass", a series of kitty-littered slabs above cliffs on the SW face. The summit bypass was supposed to be faster and not particularly difficult, so we opted for this option.

 

For the middle section, you downclimb the middle ridge.

 

For the bottom section, you can take their recommended rappel route, or reverse the lower ridge back to the col.

 

As it turned out (and we were later told by the ranger), there are random cairns on the summit bypass that take you in the wrong direction to more difficult terrain. Furthermore, the terrain was wet and seeping from the snow having recently finished melting on this area. This, combined with probable routefinding errors on our part in scrambling down the summit bypass quickly got us fairly sketched out on this descent, which after 1.5 hours still showed no end in sight to getting us back to the middle section of the NW ridge.

 

We decided that at this point our safest option was to regain the ridge and do the descent directly down the upper ridge, since at least that way we'd know we are on route. We headed straight up a snow gully somewhere on the S face, ending up at the shoulder of a minor buttress that heads down the S face. From there, we had to traverse a terrifying loose slope to get back to the NW Ridge, which I did on lead, and it was by far the most terrifying part of the whole trip. This was all a very bad idea in retrospect... we should have simply retraced our steps back to the summit the way we had come, though it would have taken longer it would have been much safer.

 

We finally got back to the upper NW Ridge after having burned nearly 3 hours and a ton of mental energy. I was quite shaken up after leading that loose slope traverse, and where we normally may have downclimbed most of the upper and middle NW ridge unroped, I now needed the mental crutch of rappelling almost everything. This burned more time.

 

We did the chain anchor rappels down the ridge to rappel #5, which is the one that takes you down the lower slabs on the S Face if you follow the bolted anchors. Our original plan was to downclimb the lower ridge back to our bivy at the Col, but with how exhausted we were, we decided that just taking the bolted rappel route down would be best and get us off technical terrain the quickest.

 

The first couple rappels down the slab went quickly, but then I stupidly dropped my belay device. From there on, I had to munter rappel, which twisted the rope and ate more time for me to constantly work out all the kinks and twists from the rope.

 

We finished what is labeled as rappel #10 in the photo around 9pm and proceeded down the scrambling section, where the routefinding is non-obvious. As it got darker, we were unable to find the right path to the last 2 lower bolted rappels and instead got sucked into a dihedral system with some old sling rap anchors, which we used. It finally got completely dark with us still somewhere between the bottom of rap #10 and the top of rap #11. With us mentally exhausted and estimating our chances of finding the last rap anchors in the dark as about zero, we decided to hunker down for the night at about 11pm.

 

At 4am the next day (July 4th), we could see again, and it turned out the next rap anchors were only about a 10 minute scramble from where we had spent the night. We did the last 2 rappels, traversed some easy snowfields back to our camp at the col, took a 2 hour nap, and hiked out.

 

Looking back at this, I think the main mistake we made was trying the summit bypass descent with insufficient beta, which led us to burn a lot of time and mental energy, slowing us for the rest of the descent and making us run out of time. I can't be sure since we didn't find the right route through it, but the summit bypass option seems sketchy as heck in all cases, and I would not recommend it. Descending back down the upper ridge from the summit, where there are plentiful old sling rap anchors to use if needed, seems like a simpler option that is guaranteed to keep you on route.

 

After epicing on Sir Donald, we had some discussion about not continuing onto the next leg of our trip (into the Bugaboos), or scaling back our objectives. But after a rest day in Golden and much discussion about what we learned, we decided to continue with the trip as planned. Fortunately, the rest of the trip went much more smoothly.

Edited July 13, 2015 by ilias

[JasonG]

Impressive trip! Thanks for the beta on the Sir Donald descent, it is on my list for sure. May as well add Uto as well.

[Off_White]

This TR from 2009 convinced me that descent route was not such a great idea. Odd that it's the official party line for the best descent.

[ilias]

Yeah I don't get it. Downclimbing/rappelling the upper section of the ridge seemed much more reasonable. I can understand them wanting to reduce/eliminate two-way traffic on the ridge which could be an issue on days with many parties on route. But personally, after trying the summit bypass I'd definitely rather deal with trying to get by a couple parties on the ridge.

 

In regards to the bolted rappels down the slab (#5-10), I'd say they have probably cleaned up somewhat relative to the report you linked. Loose rock seemed fairly minimal on these 6 rappels, with us only dislodging one small rock with a rope pull once. But they could definitely clarify the scramble path from the bottom of rap #10 to the rap #11 anchor, cause there are trails and cairns there leading every which way, most of them towards mossy/wet/exposed class 4. Also, I found this page online that notes that the last 2 rappels were repositioned at some point:

 

http://acmgmountainconditionsreport.blogspot.com/2013/07/mcr-mt-sir-donald-info-july-12th-2013.html

 

I think many of the photos/overlays of the rappel descent still show raps #11 and #12 at the original locations. This explains why we were looking for the last 2 rap anchors too far to skier's left in the dark and not finding them.

 

Anyway, there are tons and tons of fixed slings on the lower ridge to be used as rap anchors instead if one wanted to simply rappel the lower ridge instead of the bolted rap route. However, most of these slings don't have rap rings.

Edited July 15, 2015 by ilias

[HHinkkala]

Great write up! I was curious did you need crampons or ice axe at all on this trip for the approach?

[ilias]

We brought both axes and crampons, but didn't need either. There is a bit of snow ( < 100 ft) to cross to get to the Uto - Sir Donald Col, but it's soft if you hit it in the afternoon. Didn't bother taking out the axe or crampons when we crossed in mountaineering boots in the afternoon.

 

Even in the early morning when the snow was harder (returning to camp after our impromptu bivy) we crossed the snow finger in our climbing shoes, with little sharp rocks in our hands.

 

I'd say probably no need to bring up crampons or ice axe for the rest of the season for Sir Donald.