Serpentine Arête and the First Knife Edge

1st June
Press on with a load carry up the ridge. The overnight wind and snow had completely filled in all the tracks so it was new trail breaking again, but the weather was on the improve with calm air and light clouds. The route above Camp 2 became immediately steeper and headed up a snow arête that deviated left and right as it climbed so I called this the “Serpentine Arête”. It was quite steep and covered with fresh soft snow so trail breaking was hard work. It was however not my work since Russell (definitely the strongest guy in our team) took it upon himself to lead out for the whole day. The Serpentine arête got more “edgey” near the top and then it stopped climbing. That didn’t help though because it became a real horizontal “knife edge” of ice that is one of the classic technical cruxes of the East Ridge route. As we each got to the top of the Serpentine arête in turn we gathered at “knife edge” and looked it over with interest and concern! The bad part is only about 20m across but it certainly makes you stop and think :)

There was no way you could walk across the top of it – certain death!
The South side was downright vertical and looked loose and bad for technical tooling as well!
The North side looked like the best option but it was also very steep and was covered in a layer of snow so it was hard to see what the ice underneath was like.

Russell was quick to volunteer to lead the crossing (bless him) so we set about putting in a good solid anchor and giving him our best two technical climbing axes. We suggested he do it without his big pack on but Russell didn’t care and headed off fully loaded. It took him a while and he lost his footing at one point but the axes held and he made it over to the other side. He then put in another good anchor and we tied a fixed line between the two sides. This meant that the rest of us would now be able to clip into this fixed line for added safety and comfort. We still had to make full use of our own crampons and ice axes but it was faster and safer this way.

By this time, the Ukrainian team had caught up to us as well and they were starting to get pushy about us blocking the way! I have to say that we were going slowly at this point but that the terrain was very technical. The Ukrainians were, it seemed, very competent climbers and very strong with it, but we had broken the trail all the way up the ridge here and had done all the work of setting up anchors and ropes etc. It also seemed to me that one of the other climbers in particular was being unpleasantly vocal. It turned out that he was a very senior mountaineer from years before and although significantly older and not nearly as strong as the other climbers in their team, he was bossing everybody around and telling them how it should be done, and would have been done in his day! – I admit though that I was interpreting this since most of his words were in Ukrainian and I was mostly just watching body language and listening to tone.
There was no question though that the other climbers in his team treated him with a great deal of deference. Their whole team seemed to have far less regard for safety than we did but it seemed largely to do with bravado than reality to me. I was quite amused when the old bugger who was giving everybody lip started to topple off the ridge and would surely have plunged to a not-untimely end (he was not tied into a rope or an anchor at all) had not one of his team reached out and grabbed hold of him as he toppled. I don’t actually think the old boy even noticed that his life had just been saved and even if he did notice, he certainly didn’t shut up or acknowledge the fact :)

So, anyway, after due process, the four of us in our team were over to the other side of the knife-edge and we started making a trail along the very steep and windy edge of the ridge. We had left our anchors and fixed line for the other team to use, and we would be returning to Camp 1 again later in the day anyway so we’d need to cross that spot again. But heading further along the ridge, there was so much snow that we broke out the shovels and were digging our way along the edge of the ridge – Again this was making for slow progress. After about a hundred meters of this, the Ukrainians were again on our heels with the usual vocal accompaniment from the old timer.
At this point, we decided that since they were so strong and enthusiastic we should just let them go past and they could break as much trail as they wanted. So we stood aside and let them go. They had not been roped up but the terrain must have been just a bit more intimidating than they were letting on because they stopped and roped up before heading off in front. The fact that they were taking the lead made not a jot of difference to the old boy and he was “lashing” his leader on in a hurry. As their lead climber went past us and stepped off the end of our shoveled path and into deep untracked snow on the steep ridge edge he started going very cautiously and the vocal tirade escalated immediately.
So he boldly stepped out and took three confident steps whereupon his footing slipped and he immediately sank his axe shaft deep into the snow and caught himself and his breath! The old boy kept up the tirade and the lead climber pressed on as fast as he dared but he gave us several backward looks with an expression of “oooh, this isn’t great” and “look what I have to put up with” – Well that was my interpretation but it must have seemed similar to the rest of our team because we were all smiling quietly to our selves for a while.

After a few minutes, the other team had moved around a corner and we started to follow along behind, enjoying the relatively easy task of following in their trail. The weather was deteriorating a bit and the wind and snow were increasing again. So, at the first place where there was a place big enough to drop the gear, we did so and then turned around and headed back down to Camp 1. We crossed back over the knife-edge and then also did two or three rappels down the top of the Serpentine arête till the slope lessened and it was safe enough to move quickly as a rope pair.

We made it back to camp at about 8pm and we were all very tired and hungry and relieved. We all had sunburn from the UV despite the overcast conditions, and we were all starving and dehydrated since we had not stopped for food or drink in the whole day and had at most had a munchie bar and a few gulps of water. But we had made it across the first major technical obstacle on the route. From what we could tell, there was another tricky spot further up the ridge, but we’d get to that later.
Now it was time to eat and drink and rest up.

Climbing Etiquette

In “the good old days” we are led to believe that climbing was a pass-time of wealthy gentlemen and that it was all very sporting and polite and that if one party was ahead of another on a chosen route then they had the priority and could progress at their own rate. The party behind was obliged to wait patiently till the route was free or to find an alternate route that did not interfere with the first party.

These days though, there are far more people climbing on the crags and in the mountains and there are multitudes of stories about “rude” parties who just barge on through over the top of a slower party with no regard for safety or etiquette.
In North America this phenomenon is often related to offensive European climbers and particularly the French. However, the truth is that the golden days are long gone and that the routes on the crags and mountains of the whole world are now crowded. Its also true that there is such a wide range of climbing abilities that there are people who can climb a route in a few hours that other parties will literally take four or five days to climb. (e.g. ElCap in Yosemite has a record ascent time of less than four hours but it took me four days to climb it on a trip ten years ago!)

With these conflicting factors, there is no wonder that etiquette has diminished over time and likewise it is not surprising that the Europeans would appear to be the worst offenders to the spoilt Americans who still have relatively un-crowded climbing routes unlike the Alps where virtually every route is a constant stream of ascending parties. It also has to be said that in general, the types of people who push themselves to climb difficult routes on rock and ice are not the types of people to sit and wait quietly in line-ups of any sort!

For my own part I can say that I climbed in many places around the world on both rock and ice. I have found myself on both sides of this type of interaction and not always deported myself well – we live and learn! So, it seems to me that this sort of conflict is inevitable and the best we can do with it is to try to not be dangerous or abusive whichever side of the interaction we are on. :)

Camp 3

2nd June
We were up and away with the camp fully packed up by 9am. This made for big loads and slow going up the serpentine arête (altitude starting to have an effect on performance here) but it was easier this time with steps already there and not completely filled in by snow over night. The weather was overcast with some light snow but only light winds. We belayed up the top pitch of the serpentine arête and over the knife-edge but the rest was easy enough. There was only about 20cm of snow over our tracks from yesterday, so we didn’t have to do much trail clearing work. It turned out that where we dumped the gear yesterday was only a hundred meters short of the Camp 3 location, so we didn’t have to go too far back along the trail to bring that gear up to Camp 3.

Again we spent a couple of hours digging elaborate snow works for the camp. – 2x tent platforms, kitchens and toilets etc… I stopped digging long before Marcus did because I just don’t see the point. Rus’ and Ian seem to like digging too and have their tent dug in so the peak of the tent is below the surface line of the snow. We had finished all the work of the day by 5pm and settled in to our new Camp 3.

Note: Its very hard to dry out gloves and socks when there is never any sunshine and the more snow work you do, the wetter your clothing gets!

The Second Knife-Edge

3rd June
Load carry from C3 to C4. Up early in the cold – moving by 7am. It was -20deg over night and it was cold getting up. – The increasing altitude means the temperatures are falling at each camp as we move up the ridge. We head up out of camp and the terrain immediately gets steeper (as of course it dose when you are camped on a flat spot J ). Marcus got this lead and did very well. The ground is about 60 degrees and mixed rock ice and snow. Marcus got quite gripped there for a while sine it is steep and difficult to climb and the mixed terrain is not that easy to put in good protection for the rope anchors. Needless to say, the exposure here is huge and if you fall you are going to go a long way before any rope stops you – that is assuming that the anchors hold and that you don’t just continue down the thousands of meters into an anonymous grave in the icy glacier valley below!

After Marcus gets to the top of the pitch and the others of us move up to join him, the terrain gets easier again but only for a short distance...

Then it starts getting steeper again and this time I’m in the lead. Yep, it gets very steep and I stop to put an ice screw in when things are looking sketchy and there are absolutely no anchors between me and Marcus who is down about 40m below me – that would be quite the fall if I slipped! This takes quite a while because the surface of the snow/ice is really crappy and I have to dig away to find good ice for the anchor.
I get the screw in and head up again and am over the top of the steep bulge but I see that the second crux of the route is just ahead. It’s the second knife-edge section… but no time for that now!
The guys below are freezing their buts off while I have been sweating away climbing. The weather is cold, snowing, and windy and they can barely move their fingers by the time I have managed to set up a top anchor with another screw and a snow picket.

I belay them up and we take a look at the next section of the route as a team.
Russell decides to lead off again as I am belaying up the last guy from the pitch below, and as usual he does it without fuss. This one is not as bad as the first one but the consequences of messing it up are just as severe!

We all get across and soon after we reach the next camp area with a large snow structure known as “the mushroom” by about 1pm (C4). We cache the load of food and fuel we were carrying and head back down the route to camp again. This involves rappelling two pitches and lots of down climbing and takes quite a while but we make it back to camp by 6pm. The weather was kinder in the afternoon though and the last couple of hours were even pleasant in the sunshine though we were again all very tired. We just don’t seem to have time during the day to even stop and eat munchie bars – flat out climbing!

4th June
We packed up and moved off with full loads by 8:30am. Again we were familiar with the ground ahead this time and we moved more quickly despite the heavy loads. We did the mixed pitch, the rounded dome, the ice wall, the knife-edge, past the cache and up over the mushroom to our new Camp 4 all by 11am. When we started the climb in the morning, the weather was OK but the sky was dark to the South. By the time we reached the next camp things are deteriorating rapidly. The wind is up, the temperature is down, and cloud base is coming down the ridge rapidly.

One of the challenges with the East Ridge route is that the weather systems come in from the West which is on the other side of the massive mountain we are on. This means that we get very little warning about what the weather is going to do. There are no weather reports or maps and we have to guess at what is happening in the West by the little that we can see to the North and South. – Just part of the game when you are climbing in these sorts of places.

At the new camp site, we again spend two hours digging very deep tent platforms. The weather keeps deteriorating and we are now in the clouds. We then go back down the ridge to the mushroom and retrieve the loads we dropped there yesterday. By the time we get back to camp it is snowing and the day is done. – ahhh rest :)

Its Marcus’s turn to do the cooking again and I’m not envious because the weather has now become something of a blizzard outside… I’m sure Ill get my turn in the snow one of these nights though! While he is in the vestibule of the little tent doing the cooking I’m looking at the maps – We are now at about 4000m of altitude which is still too low down for a “summit dash” from this camp site. We also still have to much gear/food to carry it in a single load, so we will do double carries for at least one more camp. This is a bit of a bummer because we make very slow progress this way and we are using up lots of energy too
– Oh well, it is what it is.

Bit of a Bliz'

5th June
We had blizzard conditions all through the night and they continue all through the next day as well. We have to take it in turns to get up, put on our GoreTex gear and go outside to dig out the tents which are being constantly buried in snow. It takes an hour of effort each time, and we did it at least three times during the day.
This is the other main reason (other than the effort to make them) that I Don’t like the deep tent platform placements that Marcus likes! The wind and snow just love to fill in holes and it seems that the only place that the snow is accumulating is in the holes where the tents are!!!! – but do you think I can convince Marcus of this! – Oh well, again, It is what it is.

We spend all day laying around and digging out the tents. No one even considers heading up the ridge today. Marcus and I barely see Russell and Ian all day. On the flat ground, at least 30cm of snow has accumulated and many times this in the tent hollows.

In the evening, the wind abated and we got out of the tents and had a look around…
Id have to say that our camp site was a VERY bad choice!
Apart from the snow accumulation problem, we are positioned right at the base of a very steep, convex slope that has just been “storm-loaded” with a lot of fresh new snow and is in all of our opinions a significant avalanche risk!
We all agree that its not very clever of us but then we also decide to just leave the camp where it is and go back to bed for another night!!!!
Now, in hindsight, I’m not sure what we were thinking but I guess the altitude and lack of oxygen may have contributed to these choices J

6th June
Well, we survived the night despite our foolish choice not to move camp. The gods smiled on us and the weather was getting better as we slept. We woke to glorious sunshine, mostly blue skies and magnificent views.

The snow was very deep though and after Marcus spent an hour trying to break a trail up out of camp and dint manage to get more than a single rope length away, we decided to wait around for a while and dry out our gear while the sunshine lasted.
At about 3pm in the afternoon, there was movement above us. We all came out of the tents to see what was going on. It was another pair of climbers coming down from above us. We had also met these guys on a previous day and they were doing much the same as us with a load day and then a camp-move day. They were very cautiously coming down to get their stash and move up to their camp.
Our team all got out of our tents and backed away from the foot of the steep slope so we would maybe be a bit safer if they triggered an avalanche – which looked like a very real possibility!

Again the gods smiled and they got down without triggering an avalanche.
Now this changed things! We had dried out our stuff but the steep ground and deep snow meant that we were not going to head up the slope till the next afternoon. However the guys coming down the slope had broken quite a nice trail and they told us how far the next camp site was.

We rapidly decided that we could get there so we very quickly broke camp and packed all our stuff up – We had managed to relocate all our buried gear over the course of the morning in camp. It was still hard work breaking trail since up-tracks and down-tracks are rather different in their step sizes. But we were well rested and we pushed on up the ridge to a height of 4400m. At this point the ridge was still quite steep but very broad and there were some crevasses/’schrunds around to provide a measure of protection from avalanches.This was to be our Camp 5.

The sky was clear and we had magnificent views in the cold evening air. We dug shallower platforms (at last) along side the two other climbers that had made the down-hill trail and had magnificent views of Mt Vancouver as we had dinner and finally made it to bed at about midnight with the definite prospect of making it up onto the plateau at the top of the ridge the next day :)

The Plateau

7th June
We got up early and packed again. We depot ed some gear here at this camp having decided that we would push on in lighter weight fashion from this point – The altitude was making it very hard work, we were now getting close enough for a summit push, and single carries instead of double carries would make us much faster.

Again, Marcus broke trail out of camp and had a very hard time of it. He was up to his groin in fresh snow for a good way. Things did get better though and we all took our turn wading in the new snow at the front of the trail. There were also six of us now that we were with the other two climbers for the day and that helped with the trail breaking too. The slopes stayed very steep at 50 – 55 degrees and it was hard work for many hours.
Then the terrain got a bit more complex again and we had to wind around a bit to find our way past the massive bergschrund formation at the top of the ridge.

A bergschrund is a type of crevasse. It forms at the top of ridges and snow slopes and it marks the point where the snow and ice above it are fixed to the mountain and not moving. The slow below the ‘schrund though is not fixed to the mountain and is essentially working its way ever so slowly down to the base. Bergschrunds are often the crux in climbing routes and are often simply huge impassable crevasses.
On a mountain of the scale of Mt Logan, the ‘schrund is not just a single crevasse but is a huge structure of several large crevasses and it is difficult to find a way through without the benefit of a view from further away – much like crevasse fields on glaciers.

In this case though, there was no insurmountable obstacle and though we wove around a bit, we got through OK. It was not without a bit of very steep and exposed climbing which fell to Ian to lead which he did in good style and again without fuss (I was very happy with the skills of our team I must say).

After that the slope got far less steep and the soft snow almost disappeared. We were up on the top of the mountain now which in this case (is a plateau of quite several kilometers in every direction (Mt Loan is a very big object!).
We kept moving up till we were well and truly on the flat. It was overcast and very cold and the wind was whipping by at 40 –50 Kmh.

There was no shelter anywhere that we could find so we just stopped on the flat and set about pitching the tents in the random spot that became Camp 6. We got them set up with full effort from the whole team and then we set about trying to create some shelter from the wind – This is why Marcus likes the deep tent platforms!

The snow was very firm, so we set about cutting out blocks of snow to make walls around the tents. This took several hours and we did OK. In the end we retired to our tents with the gale blowing outside and felt we had done very well for the day.
However, tonight was my turn to cook and that wind was just getting stronger. I set about cooking the evening meal, huddled down in the little vestibule of the tent, but the wind just blew straight through under the edge of the tent and every time there was a gust, I would get absolutely covered in -20degC spindrift (snow dust). This would leave me cursing very loudly as I was getting very cold and very wet… Marcus on the other hand found it all quite amusing from his warm dry position inside the zipped closed tent – I cant blame him :)

The night passed with the constant howl of the very strong winds. It even managed to blow aver a section of the wall we had built outside and had not let up when morning came. I didn’t manage to get any sleep at all that night – Due mostly to the high altitude of about 5900m.

Summit Day

8th June
It was still cold and very windy in the morning and it took us a while to get organized and on our way.
We left camp intact since we were aiming to be back before we had to sleep again. We were moving by 10am and although the wind didn’t help, the fact that it had blown away all the loose surface snow meant that we were able to cove distance quite quickly. This was good since we were about four kilometers from the East peak that rose up out of the summit plateau like a cone. We moved steadily in toward our objective over and around various undulations, hills and crevasses in the path.

About half way there, we met the Ukrainian team on their way back down. It was hard to figure out what their story was because of the language barrier but I gathered that they had summated the East peak but failed to reach the main peak which was located a further 10Km away. We felt they had done very well and `congratulated them but they seemed a bit disappointed with their result (no doubt not up to the standards of the old boy!). Anyway, they were out of food and fuel and had to head back down the ridge.

We continued on and came to the base of the East peak summit cone. The wind was still strong and the sky was staying mostly overcast with occasional blue hole – to keep us going :)

The summit cone was really hard work for me (last 500m of altitude up to 5910m) and I was the slowest of our team to climb it. It was frustrating for Marcus but I now know with hindsight that I was suffering badly with the altitude and that my body does not acclimatize to these heights (lower than most people can adapt to).

Anyway, with much effort we got to the top and the others waited a few meters from the peak so that when we were all there, we could all take the last few steps to the summit together. There were the obligatory summit photos and hand shakes all round. It was then 4pm and there was not much else to do but head back over the four km to our camp. We had all looked at the option of heading on to the main summit but the weather was not good enough, the distance was far and none of us felt like pushing our luck. We were all very pleased with the East peak as our high point and we had all said way back when the trip was initiated that this was the main goal – So back we went.

There were no issues on the return and we were back in camp by 7pm (much easier going down than up at those altitudes).
It took us six hours to climb up and three hours to get back down.