For the love of frozen waterfalls

Climbing frozen waterfalls is a ridiculous thing to do. They're cold, they break sometimes, there are always falling objects. You're covered in spikes. You're rarely comfortable. At some level you know that things could go really wrong.

But man, aren't they cool?

There is nothing like the fractal chaos of ice to remind me of how alien our presence can be in some landscapes. Here the climber is a bizarre visitor in an even more bizarre land.

Too often we try to make sense of our world. As a student of science, it seems this is all we do. Sometimes it's best to behold these wild things that don't make sense, and just accept them. For the wise, this is enough. For some of us, we need to feel it for ourselves.

[photo David Fay]

Golden Hour in the Wind River Range

Sometimes, the balm of the day is Happy Hour, when we can leave the stress and bustle of work and bike over to a friendly watering hole to enjoy a cold tasty brew. This is the time to relax and banter with friends, and enjoy a slower pace.

I enjoy the libations of Happy Hour sometimes, but the real balm to my soul is the Golden Hour, that magic time just before dusk when the sun does something ridiculous and paints the whole world in rich velvet rays. It's as if the sun realizes that it's about to leave and throws a final burst of its purest light over the world, a parting gift.

The Golden Hour is a special time. It's the time of my best efforts, but not my hardest...it's a brief relaxation of the day when gravity and fatigue lose their potency. These are the times when I float down the trail on renewed legs and climb with renewed vigor, buoyed upward by a new lightness before the close of the day. In winter, when I see that golden hue out the office window before I leave, I see the chocolate walls of Indian Creek in my mind's eye and recall days upon days of floating up splitters in the light of the fading day, scaling the improbable cliffs with no more effort than breathing.

As JD and I hiked over Jackass Pass into the Cirque of the Towers this weekend I couldn't help continuing to look behind at the splendid silhouette of Lost Temple Spire jutting into the horizon behind us, bathed in the light of sunset. "Man, wouldn't it be sweet to be up there right now", I kept saying. He said something about the annoyances of rappelling in the dark and I had to agree, but maybe it's worth the cost... 

We enjoyed a fun mellow day scrambling to summits in the Cirque and enjoying spacious views of the range, then returned to camp for a meal in the early evening. We'd been talking about the Lost Temple Spire too much to let it lie in the unknown future anymore. Satisfied with some Raman noodles and spicy peanut sauce, we broke camp, packed our bags and hiked south over the pass with the Spire floating before us like a sentinel in the sunset. Golden Hour. "Man, I'd like to be up there at this time tomorrow."

JD scopes the chiseled south face of Wolf's Head, some of the cleanest cracks in the Cirque.

Usually, I hit the Golden Hour at the end of day-long climbs, massive efforts that drain me to the core, and the rich thick sunlight comes as a blessing at the end of the day when I need a final boost of energy. The spire in our view is only six pitches tall, totally feasible to climb and descend in half a day. To be up there near sunset, we’d have to start late…

We were a little haggard from poor rest before the trip so we luxuriated in ten hours of beauty sleep at Big Sandy Lake and enjoyed a casual morning stretching and drinking coffee in the meadow. Buzzing mosquitos were annoying but hey, you forget all the annoyances easily. We set off for our destination with a super-alpine start of 9:30 AM and enjoyed the lovely walk to Black Joe lake (wrong way…oops), crossed the shoulder of Haystack to correct our error, and took an exhilarating dip in the cold clear waters of Deep Lake underneath the majestic prow of Lost Temple Spire.

Lost Temple Spire beckons from Jackass Pass

After a long scramble up from the lake we enjoyed great climbing on the Wind River granite as we inched our way up the Spire via Separation Anxiety. A sparse description in the guidebook kept things exciting, as a 5.6 pitch held a surprise no-fall-zone 5.9 mantle and a “5.0 traverse” involved inching out on sloping blocks over the sheer north face that drops off a thousand feet to the glacier below. The proud skyline of the tower was accordingly strenuous, with a burly “5.9” fist crack followed by the route’s signature pitch, a 65 meter hand crack. As in a 65 meter pitch with 63 meters of hand jams. With four red and three gold camalots on my harness, I gazed up at the immaculate splitter that cut the white granite above us beyond view, and felt my hands tingle with anticipation. The pitch was pure joy, perfect jams with a gulf of air beneath, so little gear it wasn’t even worth thinking about it. At the rope’s end I was huffing and puffing and couldn’t help the huge grin on my face.

We climbed back onto the sunlit west face as the day grew old and the light grew thick with the molten sun. We forgot the fatigue of the day and the bustling wind and worked our way through the final problems to the top of the Spire in a golden world of sky and stone. On the summit, the Wind River Range extended before us in unending waves of peaks and valleys, ridges and cliffs and dizzying vertical walls, each one holding the promise of unwritten trials and discoveries. At these times, in the dying sunlight, the future spreads as far as the mellowing horizon, in all directions, tantalizingly close.

We’d earned our time in the Golden Hour, and had to pay up too. Rapping the south ridge on-sight in the dark involved some uncertain rope-stretching rappels, some manky anchors, and an entertaining half-hour while I crouched in an alcove tied to a small block while JD finagled an anchor somewhere above me. The mountain’s geometry forced us down narrow ledges away from our packs and we had to descend a long way down and scramble the whole way back up, our feet swollen in climbing shoes. It’s easy to get dejected on a long slog back to camp, but the beauty of the place kept our spirits high. We sated our raging thirst with the cold waters of Deep Lake and ambled down the slabs of the valley, glittering in moonlight. We only got four hours sleep before waking to the buzz of mosquitos and a threatening sky but jammed some coffee and oats down the hatch and made the trek back to the car, tired and sore but happy with the memory of the Golden Hour still fresh on our minds and worn into the creases of our hands. 

Inspiring terrain for days

Great exposure and some steep "5.9" jamming

The money pitch: 2.5 inch splitter for days.

The sheer north face of the Spire has fueled my dreams the past few nights. There still be glaciers in these parts!

JD finishes 65 meters of hand jamming

dreamy terrain

alpine mariachi

They don't call them the Wind River mountains for nothing...chilly breezes on the north prow of Lost Temple Spire. Can't wait to get back for more!

Civilized Climbing at Potrero Chico

One more try on the crux of Habanero, 5.12b, in Mexican limestone paradise.

So this makes sense: I flew a thousand miles across the Mexican border to camp in a tent in the rain, and it was the most civilized climbing trip of my life. I must be either homeless, have really bad luck…or I’m a trad climber.

Day 3, I groggily awoke in the soggy tent, slipped on sandals as Andrew kept slumbering, and greeted the morning fog as I strolled leisurely to the kitchen at La Posada campground where a stocked fridge and pantry lay in wait. The night’s rain would take some time to dry from the cliffs, so I enjoyed the homey rituals of making coffee and toast while exchanging pleasantries with other guests. I had a sip and a nibble while reading my book (when’s the last time I read a book?) and when Andrew arrived we cooked up a killer breakfast of tacos with fresh mango and cilantro garnish, then after a stretch grabbed our rope and draws and strolled up to the crag for a lovely afternoon of sport climbing.

As we ambled back to the campground that evening, our arms a bit pumped but still limber and light of foot, it occurred to me that this climbing trip was really unlike any other I’d been on, and not just because I was in Mexico…it was because we were sport climbing! I’m so used to returning to camp sore and weary, it was refreshing to just walk back on a pleasant evening.

Ever since I fell in love with vertical adventure I’ve bent my life around getting out in wild places where we could wake up before dawn, bushwack to some monstrous cliff, spend all day thrutching up it in a perpetual state of moderate terror, then descend in the dark and bumble back through the night to a primitive camp where we’d refuel the tank and crash out for another burn the next day. It was all about the type-2 fun. It was TRAD! It was RAD! And scary, exhausting, and has caused more soul-searching than I may have been looking for some days. Of course, that was usually the point.

It wasn’t until this trip to Potrero Chico that I realized how civilized sport climbing can be. We slept in, enjoyed great meals of fresh local produce, and were always home for supper. We enjoyed high-quality steep limestone every day, and rarely had to worry about a fall.

air time

Of course, we couldn’t resist taking a run up the Time Wave Zero, a unique route of 23 bolted pitches to the top of a 2,200 foot tall fin of limestone. (Much thanks to the people who dragged all those bolts up there.) The route consists of mostly moderate climbing, so linking 60 meter pitches one after another as we climbed higher into the sky left us grinning from ear to ear. We did need to wake up kinda early for that one—dawn in fact, but after enjoying the views from the summit we simul-rapped 23 rappels, chugged the water we’d cached at the base, and strolled back into camp for dinner.

I’ll always be a trad climber at heart—my blessing or curse—but during a hard semester of grad school, I think I’m learning to appreciate the simple pleasure of a sport climbing trip.   

 Farmers market

These gorditas are so good. Fried thick corn tortillas stuffed with spicy shredded pork, what more can you ask for?

Tool, duct tape, and N64 game cartriges. Should I have been surprised?

Community bingo with bottle caps as tokens.

Andrew approaches the Bronco Cave

David Fay rides the Celestial Omnibus 5.12a

And we didn't even need to bring Tecate...turns out they have plenty down there! Until next time, Viva Mexico!

Salvaging success: alpine glissading and impromptu non-rest days

I rarely complete the main objective of a climbing expedition, but it’s often the peripheral events that really tie the room together, as the Dude would say. Last summer in the Bugaboos, Rowan and I experienced several “mission failures”: we had to bail off our attempt at the second ascent of East Columbia Indirect, 5.12A on Snowpatch Spire when I aggravated an old ankle sprain in a fall; we bailed off our attempt at the “easy” side of Snowpatch when we finally admitted, 4 pitches up, that it really was actually raining a lot; and we bailed off the west face of North Howser Tower, which earned us a very long scenic tour or the massif (see the post All Around the Watchtower). Each time, however, any disappointment we felt at failing to reach our particular summit goal was quickly dispelled by the joy of impromptu shenanigans: above all, we realized that while there is certainly a large amount of quality stone in the Bugaboos, the area is a world-class alpine glissading destination!

at the drop-in

Rowan spent his high school years in Switzerland, which makes him basically native Swiss, endowed with the natural talents fostered in the isolated, politically neutral fiefdom: punctuality, rationality, a discerning cheese palate, and sick skills on skis. We discovered that about the time we were getting off the rock most afternoons, the steep snowfields had softened to a perfect consistency for shredding: an inch of softness on top.

 

Rowan demonstrates equal prowess shredding with back-hand and fore-hand axe technique

Gazing up at the spires, we started scoping lines for descent as well as climbing lines. The pursuit of glissading added a fun dimension to each day; on the morning’s approach we’d be pointing out clean ski lines, already psyched for carving turns on the descent. Double stoke! We experimented with techniques such as the running start, the launch-and-slide, and debated the merits of mid-foot vs. heel strike glissading. We will need to confirm the records of the Canadian Alpine Club but I believe Rowan made the first standing-glissade descent of a gulley to skier’s right of the Bugaboo-Snowpatch couloir. 

Extreme glissading. Double-Black terrain.

The other way we managed to salvage non-success on our primary objectives was impromptu sending on rest days. The morning after out Watchtower attempt we woke late to clear skies and lay about the camp in the stunningly beautiful East Creek basin, yawning and stretching our sore legs. After a leisurely breakfast, a game of backgammon and some reading, we found ourselves both staring up at the clean white granite of South Howser Tower looming above our camp. South Howser is the site of the Becky Chounaird, IV 5.10a, which resides on the fabled “50 Classic Climbs of North America” list, and as such is one of the most popular grade IV backcountry rock climbs in the Northwest. For many parties it is the primary objective of a trip to the Bugaboos, and rightfully so, because the position on a ridge and headwall of the South Howser Tower is superb, and the rock is immaculate.

I don’t remember our exact conversation, but it must have included the standard niceties of “you know, it would be nice to do some climbing on such a nice day” and “I bet we could get up that thing pretty fast”…by noon we were strapping on our shoes, grabbing a rack and some bagel sandwiches, and racing off towards the South Howser.

 

We enjoyed the loveliest of days on the Becky Chouinaird, which lived up to its reputation of beauty and all-time classic-ness. The rock was superb, the pitches were fun, and the views were stellar. We simul-climbed most of the ridge pitches and by the time we reached the headwall we were thoroughly stoked. Rowan lead an awesome physical pitch up the headwall, exclaiming his brimming stoke to the wind and celebrating each no-hands stance with booty dances. We topped out the South Howser Tower in the middle of a beautiful sunset, with the whole Selkirk range spread around us, aglow in the warm light of the falling sun. In the middle of the dense Interior Range of British Columbia, I had the feeling that the whole world was an unending range of mountains spreading in every direction. We enjoyed an expedient descent on the modern bolted rap route, a twilight glissade down the Pidgeon-Howser col on perfect snow, and were back in camp in time for dinner.

By this time our friend and fellow cliff-scrambler David Fay had joined our camp in East Creek. In impeccable style, David hitchhiked up from Idaho and hiked in solo, and he had just returned from a solo cruise-around mission, psyched on the beauty of the spires. The next morning we were hit with a hard cold rain in proper Bugaboo fashion, which gave us a great excuse to sleep in again, make pancakes and play backgammon. (Backgammon is a great backcountry game: all you need is the board drawn on a stuff sack, two dice, and a handful each of two different colored rocks). Soon the sky cleared and we were once again lounging amidst gorgeous sunny spires and beginning to wonder what the day would bring. Rowan opted for an R&R day, but David and I had the itch for vertical adventures so we grabbed the rope and rack and scrambled up the base of the Minaret to check out Doubting the Millenium, a really pretty line freed by Sean Villanueva and Nico Favresse. We were, as they say, stoked, however our stoke depleted a bit as we realized that the first pitch was a pretty thin slab and the first gear was 40 ft up, the second piece 80 ft up. That math = don’t fall. We both made tentative forays up the slab but neither of us was willing to lead it. We philosophized about how the snowfield was probably higher back in those days, but in reality Sean and Nico are just super talented and fearless.

We retreated back to camp for more lollygagging and enjoyment of snacks and the great view. However, we began to feel the itch again, and some time around 4:30 David proposed jokingly that we could climb Fingerberry Jam because we still had five hours of daylight left. We quickly both realized that he wasn’t joking. After hastily gathering our kit together we left camp at 5 PM wearing only our shoes and undies, as it was quite hot out, with Rowan laughing at our backsides like an old curmudgeon on his porch.

Fingerberry Jam, IV 5.12a, is one of the most aesthetic rock climbs I’ve ever tasted. The “business section” of the first three pitches follows a slender crack system up a basically blank wall of gorgeous clean granite. We scrambled up to the wall in our skivvies, got dressed on a small ledge, and David launched into a thin, arching crack which turned out to be an unrelenting tips crack. He powered through the tenuous moves in good style and sent the pitch. After struggling up the beautiful first pitch I continued up the second, which involved pulling a physical roof and enjoying a perfect finger-size splitter. After a few body lengths the splitter turned into a rail that tapered off towards a blank section, about one arm-span from another crack system. I obviously had to switch crack systems, but I was spooked by the questionable gear I’d wiggled into some funky pods on the rail. While second-guessing myself before the move I fell and ripped two pieces, falling a good 40 feet or so but it was a clean fall in golden evening light, so I was quite stoked and pulled back up to my last piece, found better gear in the rail, and sent the crack-switch move without too much difficulty. The incident proves the maxim that it’s better to just go for it the first time, because I could clearly do the move. The only damage was to my pants: I ripped a generous flap off one butt-cheek and my undies were flopping out, which David was kind enough to inform me as he climbed to the anchor.

The unrelenting first pitch of Fingerberry Jam. photo from David Fay

David cruised up most of the 3^rd pitch, which involves a 5.12a face-traverse crux. In his frenzy of stoke and haste due to the setting sun he climbed too high and attempted to traverse a completely blank slab of granite. After a few valiant attempts which all turned into stylish whippers, he pendulumed to the next crack system and scurried to the anchor. I was neither able to execute the traverse; we later learned we were about 15 feet too high. Whoops.

We enjoyed a gorgeous sunset on the wall as I ran the rope 70m up fun, cruiser terrain and belayed on a freestanding pinnacle about the size and posture of a standing grizzly bear, then David switched his headlamp to adventure mode (on) and ventured up into the darkness. By some strange literary trick of nature, once the sun went down and darkness descended upon the spires, the rock became physically black, a bit loose, and crusted with lichen. The orb of David’s light skittered around above and a litter of lichen and rubble trickled down the face.

“Dude, I feel like I’m climbing into Haloween!” David exclaimed. I’m sure I said something encouraging and gave a very attentive belay as I hugged the bear-pinnacle and tried to not get hit by any of the debris.

We topped out the tower, high-fived, coiled the rope, and began sauntering off towards the casual walk-off. Our saunter was terminated abruptly by a sheer cliff in front of us, and I informed David that, unfortunately, we would be needing the rope again. I lead out a ridiculously narrow ridge covered in loose blocks, on which there was no gear, and straddled the end aiming my headlamp beam into thick darkness in all directions: clearly not the way down. I had to reverse the ridge, which was terrifying, then we scrambled around for a while and managed to find a rappel anchor. What ensued was a classic descent that made the whole endeavor a true alpine character: lots of tenuous downclimbing on steep snow, searching for anchors, and slinging questionable blocks.

There is something unique that happens when you can’t see any further than the beam of your headlamp; you can’t tell if the couloir you’re kicking steps down is 200 ft long or 2000 ft long, because the light beam just decays into blackness beyond the visible snow. I always tend to imagine the snow disappearing over a bottomless cliff and grip my axe a little tighter. All you can do is keep going down, carefully, which is what we did until we realized we were at the bottom again. Relieved, we whooped at the glorious stars, glissaded down the glacier, and enjoyed a tasty meal and hot cocoa at 2 AM underneath a huge display of the galaxy framed by the dark silhouettes of the Howser Towers.

The next day was supposed to be a rest day too, but instead we packed up everything and schlepped our loads back to Applebee camp, stopping on the way for a quick attempt at the Pidgeon Tower speed record, team free-solo, naked, which is a story best told by David.

Rowan and I atop the South Howser Tower

At the trailhead, with the Brave Little Toaster sufficiently armored against marauding porcupines.

    Bailing in the rain

 

Hard to make out, but our glissading tracks from a prior day, viewed from the Becky

 

Gorgeous rock on the Becky-Chouinaird

Summit Sunset Stoke Dances!

A rare sight in alpine climbing, David getting ready for Fingerberry Jam

cruiser terrain above the difficulties on Fingerberry Jam

 

psyched on a sunny day

 The Alpine Mayonnaise Centrifuge

Desperate for calories, we salvaged the last of our mayonnaise by taping it to a sling and swinging it around our heads, gathering the precious fat in the lid. A game-changer.

sunset in paradise

heading off to go for the speed record on Pidgeon Spire...