August 26, 2015. The spoiler is that we didn’t complete the climb partly because I took a whipper and bruised my ankle. Read on if you are interested in why it was a great day anyway. Admittedly, bashing my ankle was not the best moment of the day. The Solva Buttress is a great introduction to a big wall. It’s tall and almost all of it is fifth class climbing. The rock is clean and the scenery is stunning to the point tht the beauty adds a level of risk because you can’t take your eyes off it. The Buttress has a lot of places to place protection and none of the climbing is extremely difficult. Thus, you get a lot of practice setting pro, working with ropes, and dealing with exposure on pitches that don’t exceed 5.8. It’s also kind of cool that it is the Fourth Tower on the Mendenhall Towers so you climb in the neighborhood of some of some world class wall climbing. there are climbs up there that would turn a Yosemite climber green with desire.
Our buttress was one of the easiest walls on the Towers and it's probably good it wasn't as tough as Half Dome (though tougher than Snake Dike), because I am pretty sure none of us had ever climbed anything near that tall or involved before. Mountain Project has a great description of the Solva Buttress. LINK . Dylan Miller made a great video of his 2014 climb. LINK.
This trip has been in the making for at least two years for me, Pete Boyd, and friend JP Zamarron. The Buttress has been climbed by dozens of climbers by now. Pete had to work so he was out. JP and I met on Sunday at the Rock Dump to talk when the weather looked clear for Tuesday through Thursday. While there we met another friend Alex Botehlo who wanted to play. In order for Alex to go, we needed a fourth so we called some people and didn’t actually get a fourth until 5 hours before our helicopter reservation at 3:30 PM Tuesday, August 26, 2015. Our fourth was Alli Hourigan, who was also on the Split Thumb trip. Everything turned out well though I only made it half way up the mountain. I quit taking pics at the pitch 4.
We met at Coastal Helicopters at 2:30 PM and laid our gear on the parking lot and figured what we should leave behind and what we needed to bring. We each packed two bags, one for gear left at the base like tents etc. and one for climbing a wall. Our pilot was a dude named Jameel and he was quite helpful and a part of the story later. We put our gear in an A Star that holds seven people including the pilot and buzzed up the base of the Solva Buttress. It was a fifteen minute smooth ride to the Mendenhall Glacier at the base. We set up base camp and packed climbing gear and gear to bivvy up high. We divided into two person rope teams; I climbed with JP and Alli climbed with Alex. Above me was a wall that from the base feels the size of the Half Dome. It’s actually 1,900 feet of prominence, about the height. Like the Half Dome, it is solid granite and marvelous to look at. The climbing is noticeably easier than the Half Dome.. Unlike Half Dome you can’t walk off the back side; you must rap back down. Unlike Half Dome, one must take a helicopter to the base which means you can be stranded at the base by a storm and wait until conditions are clear enough to fly. Important to this story is the fact that unlike Half Dome, the Solva Buttress still has a glacier at its base and we had to walk across 200 feet of glacier from camp to the wall, passing a bergschrund on the way. A bergschrund is a deep fissure like a crevasse that forms where a rock wall meets ice or snow.
Base Camp
We got climbing about 5 PM Tuesday with intent to get to a palatial ledge at the top of pitch 5. It’s a ten pitch climb total. Climbing was a lot slower with sleeping bags and other stuff in our packs. We didn’t get to the top of pitch 1 until 7:30 but we weren’t concerned about getting stuck on a cliff in the dark because we knew there was alternative bivvy at the top of pitch 3. Pitches 2 and 3 on the Solva Buttress are relatively easy unless you take a wrong turn. I took a wrong turn and climbed a 5.9 trad climb with a 30 pound pack. It wasn’t bad but it was slow going. The route I took was arguably the toughest climbing we did in the whole trip and we moved slowly. It was basically dark as JP arrived at the belay station at the top of 2. We got back on track for pitch 3 and climbed it by moonlight. The moon Tuesday night was huge and it wasn’t all that dark because surrounding us were 1,500 square miles of icefield and a granite wall, all reflecting moonlight. We arrived at the bivvy at the top of pitch 3 at 10 PM. Because they didn’t take a wrong turn, Alex and Alli arrived at 8:30 in time to watch the sunset Tuesday night.
The start of pitch 1. Me and JP Zamarron. Pic by Alli Hourigan
Our bivvy was a small cave that barely fit two people and an outside ledge that easily fit two. Alex and I slept outside. At this point we were 600 feet off the glacier in a cozy little haven, our little piece of flat ground we called the Ho'tel de Tres because it was our hotel at the top of 3. We had some alpine margaritas and chatted and tried to sleep about midnight. We planned to retire early and start right at dawn but it was too beautiful to close our eyes. I finally drifted off to sleep but woke up to witness trillions of charged particles in simultaneous orgasm in the ionosphere. It was one of the most dazzling displays of the northern lights I have ever seen. I couldn’t look away. The down side is that I didn’t sleep for 2 AM to 4 AM.
The Ho’tel de Tres has outdoor plumbing. There is an easily accessible side ledge out of view where you can shit. I buried my morning treasure under some rocks where I hope it disintegrates before anyone passes by. JP’s plan was to poop on a plate sized rock and toss it off the cliff when done and literally scatter his shit to the wind. It’s a good plan too with one problem. The rock careened down the cliff and landed on Alli’s tent 600 feet below. Considering the distance the odds of that happening must be astronomical. It’s sort of like shooting a gun at the moon and hitting an astronaut. After breakfast Wednesday and after the rock and poo episode, we headed up the cliff and left our sleeping and camping gear the Ho’tel de Tres. Absentmindedly I also left my pack as well which meant I didn’t have water or lunch. Aside from that, pitch 4 went smoothly. JP said he could share water and food.
View from the Ho'tel de Tres at Sunrise
JP on the ledge with toilet paper.
Pitch 4, Alex on the sharp end
Alex Botelho.
Near the top of pitch 5 I took a whipper, the first time in my life I have ever fallen any distance while trad climbing and I pancaked on a ledge. I fell probably 15 feet and hit the ledge feet first. In Boy Scouts I fell a similar distance while climbing a tree on a backpacking trip and ended up in the Springerville, Arizona hospital. I probably had a concussion. I lost all memory of six hours of my life. I know I fell fifteen feet in scouts because my scout master recounted the tale in detail and I would bet he still can. JP did a spectacular job on belay. I was above my highest cam by 8 feet so there was nothing he could do to save me from tanking on the ledge. I checked myself astounded that I didn’t have any noticeable injuries… yet. I finished pitch 5 and sat on the Pitch 5 Palacio, a thousand square foot ledge at the top of pitch 5.
At 10 AM, JP and I sat down on Pitch 5 Palacio to collect ourselves. I stood up and noticed my ankle was feeling sore when I tried to point my toe. I figured it was no big deal because I wasn’t in much pain and I had full mobility but I figured it was a bad idea to continue.
For the next six hours I napped with my ankle elevated. We decided I could wait at the Pitch 5 Palacio while JP and Alex tried to summit. There was no reason to head down immediately but good reason for me to stop, sit, and assess. Alli said she would stay with me because somebody had to. Rope teams are pairs. Also, she said it was sunny, warm, and a great place to take a nap. Indeed it was. I found some snow under a boulder and iced my ankle. I elevated my ankle and napped. About noon another helicopter stopped by our camp below and dropped off two climbers. About 1 PM the wind started to pick up a little but my main concern was sunburn even with sunscreen. The sunshine was intense. At 2 PM Alex radioed us and said they were turning back near the top of pitch 8. The wind was blowing hard up there and the forecast was for rain starting late Wednesday night and we wanted to get back to the glacier in time to get picked up that day. We had planned to fly out Thursday morning but we worried the storm could stop helicopter flights, stranding us at base camp for potentially five days. Alli called Coastal Helicopters and set up a pick up for 7:30. We figured we could get back to camp in time to drink a beer before the pick up. Alex and JP started rappelling toward Alli and me on the Pitch 5 Palacio. Their rope got stuck several times but they got to the Pitch 5 Palacio at 4 PM and the group was back together. We all rapped our way down but each rappel the ropes got stuck. We threw the rope off the cliff and the wind blew it hither and thither and invariably it grabbed a rock. The rock up there has excellent friction which is good for climbing and hell to sticking ropes. Ultimately, we solved the rope in the wind problem by lowering a person on the rope from one rap station to the next. The rest of the team rapped down after that. We got to the Ho’tel de Tres at 6 PM and we started to worry we would miss our pickup.
At 6:30 PM our chopper arrived. We were shitting bricks because we were 300 feet above the glacier and it was taking us 45 minutes to for each 150 foot rap. I found it odd that we were close enough to the pilot to yell back and forth but seemingly a long way away because it was almost straight down. We knew that by law the pilot had to leave before sunset even if he had to leave us behind. We had food for a day. Water would not be a problem. Even as we faced intense sunshine we knew the rain could be equally intense, especially in duration. It might even snow up that high. We had gear to deal with the weather but the thought was not fun. I know in the abstract that you can live for weeks without food but I never want to test that hypothesis. The pilot yelled up to us and said he came up early to beat bad weather and indeed a storm was imminent. He sat and waited for 90 minutes, hopefully enjoying the view. He went the extra mile for us and I would totally recommend Coastal to any climbing team. Jameel in particular was great. Meanwhile, the two climbers that arrived at noon yelled uphill and asked if they wanted us to take our tents down and we gladly agreed.
At 7:40 PM I got to the base of the rock and made my way to the helicopter. I slipped on the glacier and shot downhill gaining speed toward the circular bergschrund I mentioned earlier in the story. My axe wouldn’t dig in and stop my descent so I made a quick decision to barrel roll to my right as fast as I could. I passed ten feet to the right of the bergschrund and continued on down the glacier and stopped near the helicopter. The pilot thought I did it on purpose. Sliding down snow on your ass is common practice; it's called glissading, but you don't glissade above a bergschrund.
This fall was probably the scariest thing I have ever experienced partly because I gained speed slowly but wasn't able to stop. I had time to envision what it would be like to fall in the hole. Since I was the first in our group to get to the chopper I had time to grab a beer out of my bag and down it. I tossed my bags in the chopper, climbed in and sat behind the pilot, and thanked the climbers for picking up our tents and removing the rock from Alli’s tent, but I did NOT tell them about the shit on the rock. Some truths are not very useful.
Soon the rest of our team was at the helicopter having taken the slow way that didn’t involve a brush with death. We headed back to Coastal and I am pretty sure Jameel waited for us right up to, and perhaps beyond, the federal limit on flying at sunset. Some laws are not very useful. Because I left my lunch in my pack on the bivvy ledge and because we were in a hurry to catch the chopper, I hadn’t food or water since breakfast. By 9 PM Wednesday were at the airport and paid our bill. We got a discount because they split the costs with the climbers that picked up our tents. We sorted our gear each to its owner and we went to Squires. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and it tasted great.
The climbing was incredible but that isn’t what really makes it worthwhile for me. The beauty is intense and made more so by struggle and concentration. This sort of climbing isn’t like single pitch because there is always exposure. The fact that you are up high is always in the back of your mind. Nobody in our group ever complained and I didn’t get the impression that any of them wanted to.
By 10:30 PM I was home and drinking water as fast as I could. As I tried to get to sleep I started having cramps in my legs and neck. By the next morning my ankle swelled up and I could barely walk, which I find odd considering I was mostly mobile coming down the cliff. I was on crutches for a few days and I will be limping for weeks. I have had taken time to consider the last few days and I figure I am surprised that I have never had a broken bone, never had a serious illness, never had a serious accident that I can’t blame on the Boy Scouts of America, and so far I seem to find myself on the right side of the bergschrund.
Chilkat Range and Fairweather Range as seen from Ho'tel de Tres
Our buttress was one of the easiest walls on the Towers and it's probably good it wasn't as tough as Half Dome (though tougher than Snake Dike), because I am pretty sure none of us had ever climbed anything near that tall or involved before. Mountain Project has a great description of the Solva Buttress. LINK . Dylan Miller made a great video of his 2014 climb. LINK.
The Mendenhall Towers taken from the helicopter. Pic by Alli Hourigan
This trip has been in the making for at least two years for me, Pete Boyd, and friend JP Zamarron. The Buttress has been climbed by dozens of climbers by now. Pete had to work so he was out. JP and I met on Sunday at the Rock Dump to talk when the weather looked clear for Tuesday through Thursday. While there we met another friend Alex Botehlo who wanted to play. In order for Alex to go, we needed a fourth so we called some people and didn’t actually get a fourth until 5 hours before our helicopter reservation at 3:30 PM Tuesday, August 26, 2015. Our fourth was Alli Hourigan, who was also on the Split Thumb trip. Everything turned out well though I only made it half way up the mountain. I quit taking pics at the pitch 4.
Our route, more or less, pic by Alli Hourigan.
We met at Coastal Helicopters at 2:30 PM and laid our gear on the parking lot and figured what we should leave behind and what we needed to bring. We each packed two bags, one for gear left at the base like tents etc. and one for climbing a wall. Our pilot was a dude named Jameel and he was quite helpful and a part of the story later. We put our gear in an A Star that holds seven people including the pilot and buzzed up the base of the Solva Buttress. It was a fifteen minute smooth ride to the Mendenhall Glacier at the base. We set up base camp and packed climbing gear and gear to bivvy up high. We divided into two person rope teams; I climbed with JP and Alli climbed with Alex. Above me was a wall that from the base feels the size of the Half Dome. It’s actually 1,900 feet of prominence, about the height. Like the Half Dome, it is solid granite and marvelous to look at. The climbing is noticeably easier than the Half Dome.. Unlike Half Dome you can’t walk off the back side; you must rap back down. Unlike Half Dome, one must take a helicopter to the base which means you can be stranded at the base by a storm and wait until conditions are clear enough to fly. Important to this story is the fact that unlike Half Dome, the Solva Buttress still has a glacier at its base and we had to walk across 200 feet of glacier from camp to the wall, passing a bergschrund on the way. A bergschrund is a deep fissure like a crevasse that forms where a rock wall meets ice or snow.
Base Camp
We got climbing about 5 PM Tuesday with intent to get to a palatial ledge at the top of pitch 5. It’s a ten pitch climb total. Climbing was a lot slower with sleeping bags and other stuff in our packs. We didn’t get to the top of pitch 1 until 7:30 but we weren’t concerned about getting stuck on a cliff in the dark because we knew there was alternative bivvy at the top of pitch 3. Pitches 2 and 3 on the Solva Buttress are relatively easy unless you take a wrong turn. I took a wrong turn and climbed a 5.9 trad climb with a 30 pound pack. It wasn’t bad but it was slow going. The route I took was arguably the toughest climbing we did in the whole trip and we moved slowly. It was basically dark as JP arrived at the belay station at the top of 2. We got back on track for pitch 3 and climbed it by moonlight. The moon Tuesday night was huge and it wasn’t all that dark because surrounding us were 1,500 square miles of icefield and a granite wall, all reflecting moonlight. We arrived at the bivvy at the top of pitch 3 at 10 PM. Because they didn’t take a wrong turn, Alex and Alli arrived at 8:30 in time to watch the sunset Tuesday night.The start of pitch 1. Me and JP Zamarron. Pic by Alli Hourigan
Our bivvy was a small cave that barely fit two people and an outside ledge that easily fit two. Alex and I slept outside. At this point we were 600 feet off the glacier in a cozy little haven, our little piece of flat ground we called the Ho'tel de Tres because it was our hotel at the top of 3. We had some alpine margaritas and chatted and tried to sleep about midnight. We planned to retire early and start right at dawn but it was too beautiful to close our eyes. I finally drifted off to sleep but woke up to witness trillions of charged particles in simultaneous orgasm in the ionosphere. It was one of the most dazzling displays of the northern lights I have ever seen. I couldn’t look away. The down side is that I didn’t sleep for 2 AM to 4 AM.
Ho’tel de Tres. Left to right. JP Zamarron, Alex Botelho, Alli Hourigan
The Ho’tel de Tres has outdoor plumbing. There is an easily accessible side ledge out of view where you can shit. I buried my morning treasure under some rocks where I hope it disintegrates before anyone passes by. JP’s plan was to poop on a plate sized rock and toss it off the cliff when done and literally scatter his shit to the wind. It’s a good plan too with one problem. The rock careened down the cliff and landed on Alli’s tent 600 feet below. Considering the distance the odds of that happening must be astronomical. It’s sort of like shooting a gun at the moon and hitting an astronaut. After breakfast Wednesday and after the rock and poo episode, we headed up the cliff and left our sleeping and camping gear the Ho’tel de Tres. Absentmindedly I also left my pack as well which meant I didn’t have water or lunch. Aside from that, pitch 4 went smoothly. JP said he could share water and food.
View from the Ho'tel de Tres at Sunrise
JP on the ledge with toilet paper.Pitch 4, Alex on the sharp end
Alex Botelho.
Near the top of pitch 5 I took a whipper, the first time in my life I have ever fallen any distance while trad climbing and I pancaked on a ledge. I fell probably 15 feet and hit the ledge feet first. In Boy Scouts I fell a similar distance while climbing a tree on a backpacking trip and ended up in the Springerville, Arizona hospital. I probably had a concussion. I lost all memory of six hours of my life. I know I fell fifteen feet in scouts because my scout master recounted the tale in detail and I would bet he still can. JP did a spectacular job on belay. I was above my highest cam by 8 feet so there was nothing he could do to save me from tanking on the ledge. I checked myself astounded that I didn’t have any noticeable injuries… yet. I finished pitch 5 and sat on the Pitch 5 Palacio, a thousand square foot ledge at the top of pitch 5.
View from the Pitch 5 Palacio, pic by Alli Hourigan
At 10 AM, JP and I sat down on Pitch 5 Palacio to collect ourselves. I stood up and noticed my ankle was feeling sore when I tried to point my toe. I figured it was no big deal because I wasn’t in much pain and I had full mobility but I figured it was a bad idea to continue.
Pitch 5 Palacio with my shoes in the foreground. My feet were elevated and resting on a pack. Pic by Alli Hourigan
For the next six hours I napped with my ankle elevated. We decided I could wait at the Pitch 5 Palacio while JP and Alex tried to summit. There was no reason to head down immediately but good reason for me to stop, sit, and assess. Alli said she would stay with me because somebody had to. Rope teams are pairs. Also, she said it was sunny, warm, and a great place to take a nap. Indeed it was. I found some snow under a boulder and iced my ankle. I elevated my ankle and napped. About noon another helicopter stopped by our camp below and dropped off two climbers. About 1 PM the wind started to pick up a little but my main concern was sunburn even with sunscreen. The sunshine was intense. At 2 PM Alex radioed us and said they were turning back near the top of pitch 8. The wind was blowing hard up there and the forecast was for rain starting late Wednesday night and we wanted to get back to the glacier in time to get picked up that day. We had planned to fly out Thursday morning but we worried the storm could stop helicopter flights, stranding us at base camp for potentially five days. Alli called Coastal Helicopters and set up a pick up for 7:30. We figured we could get back to camp in time to drink a beer before the pick up. Alex and JP started rappelling toward Alli and me on the Pitch 5 Palacio. Their rope got stuck several times but they got to the Pitch 5 Palacio at 4 PM and the group was back together. We all rapped our way down but each rappel the ropes got stuck. We threw the rope off the cliff and the wind blew it hither and thither and invariably it grabbed a rock. The rock up there has excellent friction which is good for climbing and hell to sticking ropes. Ultimately, we solved the rope in the wind problem by lowering a person on the rope from one rap station to the next. The rest of the team rapped down after that. We got to the Ho’tel de Tres at 6 PM and we started to worry we would miss our pickup.
At 6:30 PM our chopper arrived. We were shitting bricks because we were 300 feet above the glacier and it was taking us 45 minutes to for each 150 foot rap. I found it odd that we were close enough to the pilot to yell back and forth but seemingly a long way away because it was almost straight down. We knew that by law the pilot had to leave before sunset even if he had to leave us behind. We had food for a day. Water would not be a problem. Even as we faced intense sunshine we knew the rain could be equally intense, especially in duration. It might even snow up that high. We had gear to deal with the weather but the thought was not fun. I know in the abstract that you can live for weeks without food but I never want to test that hypothesis. The pilot yelled up to us and said he came up early to beat bad weather and indeed a storm was imminent. He sat and waited for 90 minutes, hopefully enjoying the view. He went the extra mile for us and I would totally recommend Coastal to any climbing team. Jameel in particular was great. Meanwhile, the two climbers that arrived at noon yelled uphill and asked if they wanted us to take our tents down and we gladly agreed.
At 7:40 PM I got to the base of the rock and made my way to the helicopter. I slipped on the glacier and shot downhill gaining speed toward the circular bergschrund I mentioned earlier in the story. My axe wouldn’t dig in and stop my descent so I made a quick decision to barrel roll to my right as fast as I could. I passed ten feet to the right of the bergschrund and continued on down the glacier and stopped near the helicopter. The pilot thought I did it on purpose. Sliding down snow on your ass is common practice; it's called glissading, but you don't glissade above a bergschrund.
This fall was probably the scariest thing I have ever experienced partly because I gained speed slowly but wasn't able to stop. I had time to envision what it would be like to fall in the hole. Since I was the first in our group to get to the chopper I had time to grab a beer out of my bag and down it. I tossed my bags in the chopper, climbed in and sat behind the pilot, and thanked the climbers for picking up our tents and removing the rock from Alli’s tent, but I did NOT tell them about the shit on the rock. Some truths are not very useful.
Soon the rest of our team was at the helicopter having taken the slow way that didn’t involve a brush with death. We headed back to Coastal and I am pretty sure Jameel waited for us right up to, and perhaps beyond, the federal limit on flying at sunset. Some laws are not very useful. Because I left my lunch in my pack on the bivvy ledge and because we were in a hurry to catch the chopper, I hadn’t food or water since breakfast. By 9 PM Wednesday were at the airport and paid our bill. We got a discount because they split the costs with the climbers that picked up our tents. We sorted our gear each to its owner and we went to Squires. I ordered a bacon cheeseburger and it tasted great.
The climbing was incredible but that isn’t what really makes it worthwhile for me. The beauty is intense and made more so by struggle and concentration. This sort of climbing isn’t like single pitch because there is always exposure. The fact that you are up high is always in the back of your mind. Nobody in our group ever complained and I didn’t get the impression that any of them wanted to.
By 10:30 PM I was home and drinking water as fast as I could. As I tried to get to sleep I started having cramps in my legs and neck. By the next morning my ankle swelled up and I could barely walk, which I find odd considering I was mostly mobile coming down the cliff. I was on crutches for a few days and I will be limping for weeks. I have had taken time to consider the last few days and I figure I am surprised that I have never had a broken bone, never had a serious illness, never had a serious accident that I can’t blame on the Boy Scouts of America, and so far I seem to find myself on the right side of the bergschrund.
Chilkat Range and Fairweather Range as seen from Ho'tel de Tres
2 comments:
A month later I went running for the first time. My ankle isn't completely 100% but I am happy with the recovery.
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