Now! Climbing

I’ve been lucky to find myself doing a lot of pretty fun climbing lately. I’ll get more up about it in the next few days, but here’s an interesting chapter:

Following our alpine aspirant and a little vacation to BC, I headed back to Mazama to start up on some pre-Rock-Exam Washington Pass Climb-a-Load-of-Rocks-and-Don’t-Put-On-Boots-And-Re-Learn-What-it-Means-To-Be-a-Rockclimber-and-Not-Made-of-Baby-Girls program, and as part of that, my good friend and host Mark Allen and I decided to go climb the lovely Liberty Crack on Washington Pass’s crown jewel, Liberty Bell Mountain. This was day two of our three-day three-spire program, in which this climb was bookeneded by the East Face of Lexington Tower, an old-school IV 5.9+ and The Hitchiker on the east face of South Early Winter Spire, a decidedly new-school IV 5.11 C1, Lexington being wide and thrutchy and a bit scary, the Hitchiker being steep and hard and in your face and pretty modern. Anyway, Liberty Crack was poised to be an interesting outing for both Mark and myself for a few reasons. For Mark it was an interesting climb because he lives an hour from the base (that’s kitchen table with coffee to racking up, which is an intimation of what’s so mindblowingly cool about Washington Pass), and it is one of Washington’s absolute most classic alpine rock climbs, and one you stare at every time you drive the hairpin, one of of the prettiest you’ll see around, and it was also a climb that Mark had only ever climbed once in a former life about ten years ago. For me it was also a vestige of a former life, one when I was even younger and dumber than I am now (if that’s concievable). When I moved out to Bend five years ago I was a pretty good rock climber but not the most savvy alpinist, and when you have that combination of ability and a lack of experience, you can really indulge some bad ideas and get yourself into some adventures, and that’s precisely what we did with the Liberty Bell. My buddy Joey and I decided one March that it would a great idea to go do an ascent of the Liberty Crack, but what we didn’t think about was the fact that it was March in the Cascades, and that meant snow, and ice, and cold, and that the road to the pass was only open that early because it was an unusually low snow year and it was rather a fluke that we were able to go out there anyway and… well you get the idea. But we went for it. First trip to the North Cascades, first climb in Washington, no knowledge of the area at all – eminently sensible, obviously. Fast forward: Here’s Joey on the summit. Note the snowy peaks in the background.

So: We rolled up to Seattle and stayed with a friend, then headed over to the pass the next day. We hiked up and camped in the snow below the face, and in a snowstorm we climbed the first two pitches with the intent of fixing ropes on them. Liberty Crack is a fairly unique climb for the Cascades. For an alpine rock climb in a range noted mostly for long, moderate ridges and such, the Liberty Bell group presents a distinctly big wall appearence, and the climbs, at least on the east side of the spires, live up to that character. Far from being a 5.6 ridge, Liberty Crack starts steep and stays steep for most of its length, all on some really fine granite. Here’s a fine picture of the line I found on SummitPost. The first three pitches are predominantly aid climbing, which is to say you can free parts of them at 5.11 on thin gear if that’s what you’re into (or the whole lot at 5.13, I think), but for the most part it’s going to be relatively slow going as you’re going to be standing in etriers, placing small fiddly gear and standing up on it, pulling on it, placing more and repeating, which takes some time. The first pitch goes up a low angle but thin crack below a large roof known as the  Lithanian Lip. The second pitch aids out the lip on small wires and little offset brassies and isn’t really hard, just kinda full-on and airy with your ass hung out in space. The next pitch is the worst as it climbs a blankish slab system moving up on bolts, thin gear, fixed pitons of questionable character, and a lovely section of manky fixed copperheads right in the middle of it. Copperheading, if you’re not familiar with the term, is an aid climbing technique wherein the climber encounters a potential placement that’s less like a crack and more like a groove, meaning it won’t accept a cam or a nut or a pin, but there’s something there that might hold something. That something is a copper or aluminum swage on the end of a wire, and to place it you take a blunted 1/2″ cold chisel and a hammer and paste the metal on there and hope it sticks. Here’s a more detailed explanation if you’re curious. Anyway, they don’t always stick, and when they’re already there you’re rather forced to just use them and hope they stay stuck, which again, they don’t always do. After the copperheads, you venture out onto a slab which has lots of bolts and is okay in rock shoes when you can smear to make the reaches between the bolts, but which is a little more challenging in boots while it’s snowing and you’re thinking about hook moves. After that, the character of the climbing changes and get into a series of 5.8-5.10 cracks and corners, all of which have some fight in them, and after 13 pitches of climbing one tops out the spire.

Okay, so let’s backtrack. Joey and I, not knowing of the reputation of the face in winter, decide to go ahead and do it. I should note that I can’t for the life of me remember the date, but I’m almost certain it wasn’t actually calendar winter and thus I would not claim to have made a winter ascent. But it was definitely wintery. In any case, the first day we camp in the snow and climb the first two pitches in a snowstorm, leaving our ropes fixed to ascend the next morning. Here’s Joey working the first pitch, I think.

I remember feeling like a proper alpinist working out the roof in my boots and gloves, my Gore-Tex hood up, big slow flakes falling past me.

Next morning we wake up to great weather, totally bluebird, and for some reason I never came to understand, I feel like I’m about to die from dysentary. This is bad as the weather is good, so I debate whether to go or not and just keep looking up at the face, and after wasting only an hour or so, decide it’s time to go regardless of how I feel. The climbing actually goes pretty well as the first four pitches are aid anyway, and so staying in boots isn’t a huge problem. After that, things get interesting. I don’t remember that much about it actually, but I remember it being really cold, really wet, and really not conducive to climbing in rock shoes and so we switched a lot between free-climbing, aid climbing, aid climbing in boots, climbing snow and ice in boots, and generally a lot of groveling. I then remember ecstacticly topping out just as the sun was setting. I remember it being cold. I remember being stoked to get out of there. I remember looking at the topo we had photocopied from the Beckey guide we’d bought on the way up. I wish I could draw a picture of what he showed, which was a picture of a tree, with a circle around it and an arrow pointing down from it. I remember my heart dropping. A tree and and an arrow. Me and Joey and a mountain with a four feet of snow on it, with a few treetops sticking out from the snow. I remember feeling then that we were quite good and fucked. Then I remember Joey rapping off a tree and having to reascend as our ropes didn’t go anywhere. I remember trying a few trees, trying a bunch of stuff. I remember an epic rap into an icy gully. I remember not having ice axes or crampons (We were young and dumb, remember? We figured the second could jug any pitches that needed that stuff…). I remember bashing the bejeezus out of my toes trying to kick, crawl and slide down the gully. I remember stumbling around the back of the peak in waist deep snow. I remember hating the world for putting the northern toe of the peak in my way trying to get back to camp. I remember pooping my brains out. I remember thinking ‘this is alpinism, huh? i’m real tired,’ as we stumbled into camp. I remember it was my first 20-plus hour push (21, to be exact). I remember being wasted the next day hiking out, I remember more pooping my brains out and I remember being really satisfied besides. It wasn’t until some time later that I realized that what we’d done was sort of out of the ordinary, that most people climb the route in August, in shorts, and it’s casual, that most years you can’t get close to it in winter. That sort of thing. I’d always thought since then that it would be fun to have a go at it in normal conditions, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it until now.

So, with that in mind and me in the area, I was pretty into the idea of climbing it this August, in shorts, and to have it be casual. Here’s what the lip looked like this time.

It was like visiting an old girlfriend or something; you’d spent time together before, but were also seeing each other anew. And so we went for it. We woke up at 6:30. We had a big breakfast at the house, we drank coffee, we got out late, and we started climbing at 8:30 in splitter weather. We weren’t rushed and the pitches rolled by, us awash in a sea of golden granite and loving it. The lip felt easy, those slabs I’d remembered hating seemed pretty tame, the copperhead section was still terrible, but the whole affair was like seeing that old girlfriend and realizing how awesome she was and just enjoying her company (which I also did on this visit to Washington, incidentally, and which is perhaps where I’m stretching this analogy from, but that’s another story).

Anyway, it was great and I was already forming this fine narrative in my head when the clouds rolled in. And then the thunder started. And then the lightning started. And then it rained. And then both of us went from casual to gripped in .2 seconds and just wanted to get off the thing. It’s amazing how lightning can have that effect, especially when it sounds like it’s right over your head and you know, ‘hey – this is bad,’ but also we can’t really do anything about it except go fast, which you were already doing anyway.

So our casual day took on a different tone as Mark aided desperately in the rain, and I sat taking pictures and thinking what an interesting dramatic turn this was, and then it let up and we started to relax, and I took some pictures of a rainbow, and then we were running the 4th class to the rap descent (which someone mercifully bolted about a year ago), and things were going well and then BOOM!!! right above our heads and the panic struck again and we gunned it, down down down and we hit the trail and we started running, and we ran full clip all the way out as the thunder boomed over our heads and the rain soaked us and neither of us really cared, we just kept looking down at the dirt pounding under our feet and the rocks and roots as they flew by, legs dodging, stretching, bounding down and wiping rain from our eyes and shouting raven noises KA-KAW! KA-KAW! KA-KAW! all the while and thinking – man, this is fun – back there, that was hairy, but this, this is really pretty fun. A lot of fun actually, and as we popped out of the woods and onto highway 20, it still raining, us as wet as if we’d stepped out of the shower, we pounded fists and looked at the watch – 9 1/2 hours car to car.

Not a speed record by any means, but then again we weren’t going for one. It was only 5:30. Perfect. We had cold beers in the car, and we’d be back in time for dinner. Perfect! Better than 21 hours. Better than a pre-dawn start and an icy gully, better than a lot of things. Maybe even better than if it had stayed sunny all day, somehow. We did that the day previous, and we hoped to do it again the next. And driving down the road who should we see at the pullout with a beer, a camera and a pair of binoculars but tomorrow’s partner Tom Smith, just coming out to check in on us, seeing the clouds and wondering if we’re still up there. And so we have a beer, and we watch the lightning on the peaks, and we take some pictures, and then we head home and we make dinner, and we rack up for tomorrow, for The Hitchiker, which is also another story.

A complete photoset is up on Zenfolio. More Washington Pass coming soon.