Dahlquist Posted September 18, 2015 Posted September 18, 2015 Trip: Bear Mountain - Direct North Buttress Date: 9/12/2015 Trip Report: Taking half a day off of work so I could fly up from Oakland, pack, and get to the trailhead Thursday night turned into a party night in Seattle and a hungover 5 AM border crossing on Friday morning. But the bumpy road along the east shore of Chilliwack Lake woke me right up, and we still were able to start hiking around 9 AM, so things were looking OK. The going was pretty easy along the maintained trails on the Canadian side of the border, but things started to get difficult as soon as we hit the border clear-cut. I also found it quite amusing that we saw zero devil’s club until we crossed the cut, after which it was thick and double overhead in spots. Welcome back home boyz, you are officially In Da Club. We tried to stick as close to the river as we could, walking along the beach on the east shore where possible, and diving into the bushes whenever the beach ran out. This resulted in much bushwhacking. In addition to easier going, we were also rewarded on the beach by the sight of dozens of sockeye spawning. Unfortunately not all of the little guys made it safely to spawning ground; bear prints were everywhere, and the smell of the rotting carcasses strewn across the beach was omnipresent and less than pleasant. After many hours we found the confluence with Bear Creek and were finally able to add the element of elevation gain to our bushwhacking. The undergrowth was nowhere near as thick once we left the Chilliwack valley, but the heavy packs started to take their toll. Wayne's advice to "count every ounce" for the approach kept repeating itself in my mind (we did no counting of anything in our haphazard hungover trailhead packing). After many more hours we broke through into the alpine. There was not a cloud in the sky and the views were fantastic. The going was much easier up high, but as we stared over at Redoubt we noticed something: A near-complete lack of snow. Not wanting to risk being unable to get water, we backtracked down the ridge and then downschwacked to Ruta Lake to camp for the night. The lake water was still and murky, but we were able to find a spring on the east side of the lake up the hillside a little bit. After Happy Hour and dinner, we tucked in for the night knowing we had a long day ahead of us with the low camp. Sunrise greeted us with alpenglow on Baker/Shuksan (awesome!) and over a thousand feet of steep, loose talus to the base of the route (not so awesome). Despite what we had seen across the valley on Redoubt, we were shocked by the lack of the snow on north facing slopes; as it turned out, bringing the ice axes/crampons was a total waste of space and energy, and we were able to scramble up rock to the base of the route. We soloed up a ways into the dihedral before things got interesting under a roof. Daniel styled it and set up a belay below the crux, which I not-so-quickly dispatched. The climbing in the dihedral was reasonably steep and a lot of fun! The exit to the dihedral ended up being much easier than it looked from below, and Daniel made it look good yet again. After a bit of hunting around I found the big traverse right, and we quickly simulclimbed up to the big ledge below the upper buttress. Morale was pretty high with the speed with which we climbed the lower half of the climb. Daniel got to work on the upper half, but things slowed down a bit when he had to garden out gear placements in the grass-choked dihedral above. The pitch lengths were unclear in the topo (Beckey) we had, but it had seemed like we were climbing about two of the topo's pitches on the lower buttress with every rope length. Based on this, and the fact that we topped out on the right side of a tower with what looked from above like an east-facing offwidth dihedral down the left side of it, we thought we had the route in the bag after climbing two 70 meter pitches from the base of the upper buttress (the offwidth is supposedly the 4th pitch). After another pitch though, the sight of Beckey's offwidth with the bolt next to it was unmistakable. Since we had a giant backpack stuffed with unused snow climbing gear, I decided to give it the end run and make it easier on Daniel following up. The climbing out right ended up being thought-provoking on thin gear, and I chalked up for the second of two times that day (the first was at the crux). Above here it was an easy romp up to the pendulum piton. I wanted no part of the runout slab above, and an exciting downward traverse brought us to the rap anchors and down into the chimney. Two pitches up the loose chimney finally brought us back into the sunshine and the summit ridge. We put the rope away and 4th classed to the summit, where we were rewarded by stunning views in every direction: The Pickets to the S, Baker/Shuksan to the SW, Slesse to the NW, Redoubt/Mox Peaks/Spickard to the NE. This really is one of the best-situated mountains in the North Cascades for ogling other peaks! The sun set as we were making our way down, and we made it back to the notch before putting our headlamps on for the trek back to our camp. We were very surprised to see three headlamps coming up the ridge, and Austin and his crew were very dismayed when we told them of the lack of water. They sat down to pow-wow over what to do and we continued on to the lake. After much bushwhacking in the dark and traversing across a slope that was much too steep (I think we started descending to Bear Creek much too far to the east), we finally made it back to where we thought the lake was, only to find Austin stumbling around in the dark trying to find the lake. We stumbled around ourselves (and probably threw him off even further) before finally finding the lake. Austin filled up a few gallons and re-climbed the ridge to find his friends. We quickly went to bed, elated with the climb we had just done. The hike out was relatively uneventful, though we did find a good trail maybe 1/4 mile or so from the river through the forest, higher up than the Devil's Club/thick brush zone at water's edge. Unfortunately, there are a number of slide paths with fallen trees along the east side of the Chilliwack, and we'd lose the trail at each one of these. At maybe the 5th one of these we were unable to regain the trail, so we just schwacked straight for the water and employed the "F**K-it-I-don't-care-if-my-feet-get-wet-it's-much-better-than-bushwhacking" method: Footnote: Austin told me after the fact that they were able to find water up by the notch; we looked, but apparently not hard enough. Sorry for the sandbag Austin! Gear Notes: Cams to 3". A #4 (or a 2nd #3) would have been useful on crux pitch. Carried cramps/axes and didn't need them. Approach Notes: Machete would have been useful (at times I felt like just ending it all). Quote
wayne Posted September 18, 2015 Posted September 18, 2015 Boom! So no problems with connecting flights, or that last pitch at the top? How about the new Jeffrey estate!? Quote
Dahlquist Posted September 18, 2015 Author Posted September 18, 2015 (edited) Connecting flight was another issue altogether---I missed my (non-stop) flight back (despite getting to the airport 75 minutes before departure time) and had to fly through San Diego to get home. I was only 6 hours late to work! Edited September 18, 2015 by Dahlquist Quote
Trent Posted September 19, 2015 Posted September 19, 2015 Wow! All the way from Oakland for the brush-whack up to Bear! You-all are true connoisseurs! Strong effort; thanks for the TR! Quote
Rad Posted September 21, 2015 Posted September 21, 2015 Boom indeed! I've been thinking the river would be a good way to go on a low snow year. Knowing what you know now, would you still walk the river or try to find that trail? Quote
JasonG Posted September 22, 2015 Posted September 22, 2015 I went up Bear the easy way many years ago and remembered the spawning sockeye as especially demoralizing. You know when you start out next to the salmon that you have a long way to go to get to the summit! Impressively quick work on that, the approach is no joke. Quote
Dahlquist Posted September 22, 2015 Author Posted September 22, 2015 I think I'd bring a spare pair of water shoes and ditch them at the confluence with Bear Creek, but it wouldn't take too much more water in the Chilliwack to make this a bad plan. The fording never got to mandatory ballz deep, but it was close in spots. Quote
JBo6 Posted September 23, 2015 Posted September 23, 2015 Is the old trail from the border swath south to Bear creek no longer in existence? It wouldn't surprise me if it was a victim of Homeland Insecurity. Quote
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