De ja vous on the Solva Buttress

Labor Day weekend turned out to be 25 ways of awesome and maybe 15 ways of hell. Ryland and I tried to climb the Solva Buttress, also called Fifth Mendenhall Tower. This is the same peak I failed to climb last year about this time. LINK.  I didn’t make it this time either. It’s becoming an obsession.  We left Friday afternoon and took a helicopter up.  We set up camp next to another pair of climbers and chatted with Justin and Colin about how we were going to stay apart enough to not knock rocks onto each other.  Rockfall is a safety concern. We got a plan together that worked.

Ryland with sunset behind him Friday evening.

Colin and Justin started Saturday morning at 5AM and we started at 5:30. They took a wrong turn and we caught up with them. Both Colin and Justin are stronger climbers than Ryland or me. They caught us again later in the day.

Ryland rappelling into the bergschrund

Pitch one went well. Actually all pitches went well but they went too slowly for us to make the top.  It was at the top of pitch 8 that we figured it was time to turn back, at about 5PM. The Solva Buttress is 11 pitches and about 1,600 feet of prominence, at least as described by Mountain Project. The exact start/end of pitches varies from climbing team to climbing team on a trad climb. Traditional climbing (called trad) involves placing cams into cracks in the rocks which are used as anchors in the event of a fall.  We climbed about 1,200 feet in our eight pitches.  The last 400 feet are for next year.  Our descent was slow and fraught with problems and we didn’t make it back to camp until 3:30 AM.

Pitch one

It was awesome in its sublime beauty and it wasn’t sublime solely aesthetically.  The nunataks of the Juneau Icefield are remnants of the Pleistocene. The ice age never stopped up there.  A nunatak is and island only the water is glacial. Juneau Icefield nunataks are chuncks of granite jutting into the sky. The  Mendenhall Towers are a single nunatak with seven spires jutting thousands of feet above the Juneau Icefield.  The sheer scale of the peaks and ice is boggling. Further, the struggle of a big wall is both physical and mental, regardless of the setting. This was a big deal, at least for me.  The northern lights pranced around the sky like mad horses while we slept, or tried to sleep, outside Friday night. While the aurora danced, the wind picked up and I damn near froze.

Before we even started pitch one, we had to climb over the bergschrund, a gap between the rock wall and the glacier, like a crevasse only with rock on one side. Ultimately, we decided to dig a hole in the snow on the glacier side and bury an axe with a tether to use as an anchor. This type of anchor is called a dead-man.  We rappelled off the dead-man and into the bergschrund and climbed back up onto the rock. It was likely the shortest rappel I have ever done but this bergstrund scares me.  If you slip in the bergschrund and you are not on belay, you may slide under the glacier and never be seen again. Once on the rock itself I noticed I had forgotten my climbing shoes and had to retrace my steps and get them at camp. By and by we got started. Pitch one is one of the harder pitches of the day but it’s easier because it’s pitch one.  As we reached the top of pitch one, we could hear Colin and Justin off to the side talking to and fro and trying to figure their way back on route. They turned cross mountain too early to get onto pitch two. Ryland led pitch 2 and got a little turned himself but he retraced his steps and made it back on route.  Justin and Colin got back on route by some tricky climbing that combined pitches 2 and 3 and met us at the bottom of pitch 4.

Looking down from Pitch one. The glacier is cracked into a labyrinth of broken glass all the way from the Mendenhall Towers to town, which is why most folks take a helicopter rather than walk.

 Justin and Colin's Camp, Sunrise 

It became clear at this point that even though they made a wrong turn, Justin and Colin were much faster than Ryland and I.  Because I am a little faster at setting trad, I started leading every pitch after pitch 2 and placed all the cams.  Ryland followed and cleaned them. We seemed to be too slow at exchanging the gear and other stuff you do between the end of one pitch and the start of climbing the next.

We continued up the wall all day and did indeed have lunch with Justin and Colin around 1:30 at the top of pitch 5. Ryland and I were slow but we were learning and getting quicker. We ate bagels with smoked salmon.  We ate brownies with coffee in em.  Good stuff.

One of the things that made this trip worth doing for me was the large improvement in my skills at trad. I seriously think I moved up a whole grade in what I am comfortable with while climbing trad. One must be a climber to know how incredible that is. It will take me years to make a jump to another grade. The learning curve is steeper at first and I climbed the learning curve this trip. We didn't make the summit but we learned a lot about climbing, particularly this type of climbing. I smile days later just thinking about that.

View from top of pitch 8 

Note the shadow of Mount Wrather is not only beautiful but an indication that it's getting too late to continue uphill. 

As we headed to the top of pitch seven I started to see concerning signs of exhaustion.  Ryland started falling more often. This wasn’t a safety concern  as he was still getting up the wall and the consequences of a fall while following and cleaning are minor.  Yet, it was clear he was getting tired to the point where fuckups happen and I was tired as well. Ryland joked that he was delirious but his joke sounded just a little delirious.  I was concerned because the consequences of a fall while leading can be larger and I was feeling pretty worked. If you slip while you are ten feet above your last cam, you fall twenty feet before the rope catches you. A whipper is a smaller situation when you aren't high on a wall.  It didn't help that the most painful whipper I have taken was on this very wall. At the top of pitch 8 there is a ledge with a spectacular view and we got there about 5. In early September, it’s dark by 9.

Ryland, near top of pitch seven.

 Fourth Tower as seen from top of pitch 8

We chatted options and Ryland suggested that we keep going and call the helicopter company and see if they could pick us up from the summit.  It sounded great to me except that pitch 9 is the hardest climb on the tower and I felt my skills were stretched at the moment so I told Ryland that pitch 9 was beyond my skill level. Looking back and after talking to Justin and Colin, I think I could do it. Next year we may test that hypothesis.

 If you get stuck on a wall in the dark, you have two reasonable choices. Stop and wait until it’s light or continue on at a snail’s pace. Once it's dark moving quickly isn't an option.We started rappelling down and each rappel we had to fight stuck ropes.  We had both run out of water and it was going to get real cold at that elevation so we opted for the snail’s pace.  We had to move super slow because we had to anchor into the wall at every juncture and we had to check each move three times. We finally got down to the damn bergschrund around 2:30 and it was a fucking struggle to get our gear back up the fifteen-foot drop. It was one of the hardest physical things I have ever done. About that time, it started to rain. Could be worse, it could be raining.  That or we could be in the bottom of a bergschrund in the middle of the night on hour twenty.

At 3:30 AM we climbed into our tent, drank a bunch of water and downed a beer and fell asleep. Even with my wet clothes removed I was clammy in the sleeping bag.  That night both my legs cramped badly. It took me five minutes to put on my boots in the morning because I simply couldn’t lift my legs without cramping. One particular cramp, my right calf muscle moved two inches toward my Achilles tendon and balled up like an egg.  In the aftermath I wish I had taken a photo of my freak show my calf muscle became but I was too busy cursing to think about it at the time. At 8:30AM we got picked up by the heli. It had quit raining and the sun was out like nothing ever happened. 

Mountains are like that; completely indifferent to us. They aren't there to entertain us or kill us or make us feel small or inspire us to understand God. They don't give two shits about us one way or another. If we fall to our deaths, they continue to be rocks standing in icefields. If we get to top, they continue to be rocks in icefields.

We are meaningless to mountains. That's part of their appeal, at least to me.

View of gap between Solva Buttress and Tower 6 looking into the Juneau icefield north.

I feel like I dreamed some of this trip. It was too cool for words. It also had moments that the dream felt like a nightmare.  When I got back to the heliport, I had lost the keys to my truck. I spread out everything I owned on the parking lot of Coastal Helicopters and still didn’t find them. Evonne brought me a spare set and I packed  up my gear from all over the road and went home. By and by I found them in my first aid kit and can only guess how they got there.

Our camp.