📍 2008 ICC Grad climb, August 23-24, 2008
🧗♀️ Students: Drew Ettinger, Matt Eggelton
After four hours sleep, I left Tacoma at 4:30 AM to the Eldorado trailhead, meeting Matt and Drew at 7:55 AM. They reported sleeping a comfortable eight and a half hours after obtaining a climbing permit. I chugged a Starbucks double shot. We slogged up the steep trail, only losing it briefly at the start. It was a good thing we found it, as bushwhacking up the first 2500 feet would of been miserable. The next 6 hours, the trail went from rain forest to large boulders, to high alpine meadows, to scree, to granite slabs and then finally to a glacier. Ascending the glacier didn’t require ropes or crampons, because of the soft conditions, and the crevasses were very scarce. 5,500 feet higher, and about 3 miles “as the bird flies”, we arrived at camp. The weather was awesome, and I proved how awesome it was by taking a nap on a rock, wearing only a thin shirt and a wind stopper jacket. We pondered taking advantage of the good weather and going for the route that afternoon. We had 6 hours of light left, and we estimated the route would take about 6 hours to summit from there. I guess I jinxed that idea by falling asleep! We spent the rest of the day resting, and a little exploring of the glacier and our route and eating. A water drip provided us unlimited water to drink. Sometime during the night, the clouds and wind moved in.
We got up about 5:30 and roped up, put on our “pawns” and headed up the firm glacier. Nobody questioned the weather, at least out loud. We hopped a few crevasses to reach the moat in about an hour. Another hour later, we had a picket to belay everybody down 15 feet and across the moat onto the ridge proper. The last guy went without a top belay but used the team’s only ice tool. We started up with a static belay. Because we only had one rope, Matt could only go about 1/2 a rope length. That worked out fine, as the first difficulties were passed by then. Drew took the next lead, which turned into a running belay, with me in the middle, and Matt in the rear. At one point, a real questionable move blocked progress. I had Drew put me on a static belay, and I went around to the left of the 15-foot wall with the slightly overhanging hand crack and opted for the awkward 5.7 corner thing. (Later that night, much discussion went down over just how Drew got threw that part. It’s still unknown.) We swapped leads two more times, with me in the middle the whole time. The rest of the rock was completed with a running belay, even the cool steeper 5.5 pitch that Matt lead.
The top of the rock turned into a flat ridge top, that ended at a 100-foot ice head wall. We gave Matt the ice tool, two screws and he took the lead. He was nice, and took a mellower finish up to the left, which reached to about 60 or 65 degrees in pitch. The conditions were nearly perfect, maybe on the soft side, which made following with just an axe relatively easy. Two ice screws later, and we were on the summit ridge! We reached the summit at 1:00 PM! The wind was blowing, and we were getting some precipitation on and off all morning. The west side of the mountain was getting pretty blown, and luckily the climb was mostly on the east side of the crest, except for a few sections. So we didn’t stay long on the top.
Getting down was really quick. We just followed the east ridge route. I took us 1 hour to get back to camp. We left camp at 2:30, in deteriorating conditions. By the time we were in the high alpine meadows, it was steadily raining. Getting down the boulder fields was the most time consuming, but luckily the path was marked well enough to find our way. Once in the forest, the descent went fast, descending about 2000 feet in one hour! We reached the cars at 6:05 PM! Just under 4 hours to get out of there!
It was a great trip which has a little of everything! I highly recommend this trip for other ICC outings. It’s a great place to put all the skills together and in an awesomely beautiful alpine setting. Everybody was great to climb with! Thanks Guys!
