I've been trying to get a shot at Kaleetan for at least the past month. With the passing of St. Helens as a project, I dawdled about for a week or two before becoming transfixed with the idea of climbing a route that had looked impossibly hard to me, particularly in winter, a couple of years ago. Thursday, the weather, avy conditions, and my personal schedule all combined to make it possible to give it a go.
After a Wednesday conversation with the forest service, it seemed as though I had a reasonable shot at not getting towed from the snowbound end of the Denny Creek road. I'd planned to do the route from Denny Creek largely because I knew the route from a summer hike and I knew that there were no appreciable challenges involved in getting to Melakwa Lake (aside from the exposure to innumerable slide paths). I left the car some time after 4 am old time (my watch, and my internal feel for the sun, was set for Standard time) and snowshoed up the road. The trail was easily followed, but it hadn't seen many feet. Only one pair of prints appeared to have been at all recent, but was filled with the few inches of new we'd gotten Tuesday or Wednesday.
The trail crossed a niftily snowcovered bridge and passed under the otherworldly interstate. A wee bit farther on, the trail crossed back over Denny Creek on another nice Forest Service bridge. Accessing and crossing the bridge required (for me) both tools and boots. I made a mental note that I'd want crampons on the return trip to get back off the bridge. Snowshoes back on, I followed the last of my predecessor's footsteps to a semi-spectacular avalanche debris field. The weekend's rains had spawned a sizeable natural avalanche cycle earlier in the week, and the bowl in front of me was littered with point releases.
It was here that I made the defining choice for the day. I moseyed up the avy debris and cruised up to the last of the trees. When I could see the next bit of my route, I was crestfallen. The easiest line cruises across the bottom of the slope above a beautiful waterfall. The slope ends prematurely where the river's cut it away for the bowl at the base of the waterfall; thus there's nowhere that's lower in angle that that you'd expect in an avalanche starting zone. Moreover, the waterfall's bowl forms an excellent terrain trap; if you're involved in an avalanche, you're probably also going off the cliff down to the river. Thus, I had an interesting conundrum; should I trust in my knowledge of the snow stability (I hadn't seen much in the way of test slopes yet, but the crust was pretty bomber) and the NWAC forecast (things were meant to be pretty darn stable) and cross the slopes, or should I do something else? After a minute's thought, I recognized that with the expected sun and light precipitation in the afternoon, I'd be even more loathe to cross the slope on the way home. So, I opted for "something else".
I don't recall now whether I looked at my map then or not, but it was fairly clear that the only sensible route to take, if I wanted a prayer of continuing my ascent of Kaleetan, was to head straight up the avy debris and then try to work my way across above the slope. In retrospect, and with later intense inspection of the map, that might even have worked, if I'd kept an extremely close eye on the map. Out of curiousity, I flipped my beacon over to search mode to make sure the pile I was standing on didn't contain a beacon. So, I went straight up the debris to where it, to my distinct surprise, ended. I'd been expecting to find a defined crown up near the top of the slope, but this slide had obviously started with a simple natural sluff, or something. With the top of the slope only ~40' away, I decided to move up the rest of the way smoothly on the snow, stopping when I hit the rock at the top.
Perhaps here was where the adventure began: At this stage, I could've bombed back down to the car and made it to work around the time my officemates arrived for work, if not for rush hour traffic. Instead, I decided to work my way up through the minor cliff band/dirtpile that guarded top of the slope. I switched to my second tool quickly, and groveled along through some marginally interesting mixed climbing in snowshoes until reaching a spot where switching to crampons made sense. Crampons made life better, and I reached the top of the cliff/dirtpile with the help of some well placed vegetation. From here, it seemed clear to me that I might have an opportunity to head toward Kaleetan if I moved somewheat higher on the heavily treed slope and then traversed over the avalanche annoyance below. Furthermore, it was clear that I'd be able to make a treed descent by traversing the treed slope over the entire avalanche slope below and rejoining my previous path somewhat farther down the creek.
For the next two and a half hours or more, I kept working my way up the treed slope. It averages somewhere between thirty and forty-five degrees with rolls up to maybe as much as sixty, but everything feels steeper when you're on it. Part way up, I made the critical decision that, if I wanted to have a prayer of continuing my original route, I'd need to traverse rightward, up the valley, and hope to find a way over the rock rib that I knew I'd find guarding easier slopes that would allow me to continue. So, I did, perpetually finding that the easiest way to move was an ascending traverse and knowing that my only guaranteed exit was by downclimbing everything I'd climbed. Along the way, I crossed a couple of fairly high angle (45-50 degree?) avy chutes, as I was implicitly gaining confidence in the snow.
Before I move along in my story, a quick note on the snow conditions: Perhaps two weeks ago, we recieved a big dump of luscious powder on top of the previous rain and sun stabilized snow. This compacted for a while, and then received a sizeable amount of rain a few days before my climb/educational experience. Things cooled off sharply at the end of the rain, and we got a few inches of unconsolidated powder on top of the rain crust. The new snow was badly bonded to the crust, likely because of the sharp temperature change, the NWAC folks suggest. I found the crust to be significanly softer than I'd expected. It was pencil-hard, or perhaps a determined finger - hard) and three or four inches thick. While this meant for relatively reasonable cramponing and tool placements, the badly bonded and unconsolidated upper layer over a slippery crust would have made any fall quite long (and end in a tree trunk or at the base of the aforementioned waterfall). To make matters slightly worse, the crust was easily soft enough to catch a crampon (flips, tumbling, broken things, badness) but not really consolidated enough to grab well if a self arrest came even slightly late. My conclusion: don't fall.
So, I reached the rock rib and, as I feared, I didn't see any way I was willing to move past it. It was getting moderately late (~11ish am) and my physical, emotional, and mental states all suggested that I should commit all my efforts toward getting home. At this stage, I'd done slightly less than a thousand vertical feet of slow, careful, and, for me, quite arduous climbing above the avy slopes. I'd taken perhaps two breaks, and it was already clear to me that my calves were going to hate me in the morning from both the frontpointing and the french technique. As I'd run out of up, it was time to head down. As I was about to have beaten into my being (though I already knew it, I certainly didn't know it as well as I do now), downclimbing sucks way more than climbing. It seemed as though I descended at about half the rate I'd climbed. I reversed my route until I had a chance to climb again, traversing in the opposite direction from my traversing ascent, in hopes of gaining a mellower ridge that would permit me to descend, or if I chose to, ascend the mountain I was on (Low Mountain).
More groveling later, it worked. I chose to keep ascending the ridge, as the 35-45 degree ridge, while better than the steeper slope I'd ascended, wasn't as mellow as a ridge I'd be able to work my way down from one of the summits of Low. I forced myself to take a break on the way up the ridge at a nice comparatively large tree well (some part of me knew that, if I made the summit, there'd definitely be a flat spot there to sit on) and water and fuel up. I could see what looked like a couple of folks on the summit of Granite Mountain, and I envied their easy trip home.
The break turned out to have been well timed. A hundred or so feet higher on the ridge, and the ridge flattened out, ceased climbing, and started running along horizontally. In the summer, this would've been awesome, given that I was tired of traversing steep slopes. In the summer, I also wouldn't have decided that I was sick of mountaineering for this week, and that I wanted to be at the bottom of the hill. In the winter, this meant that the ridge turned into something of a pointed crest. Since I was on the windward side, and the similar ridge on Granite was corniced, I was forced to assume that the ridge was at least slightly corniced, and I couldn't walk its crest. So, I was condemned to even more traversing, this time with the sub-summit of Low in sight, perhaps a quarter of a mile away or less.
I traversed along the crest for more than a hundred meters, but probably less than two hundred, when my body decided that, at least for the moment, it had had enough. It had made noises to that effect for an hour or two, but this time it was emphatic. The ridge was going to get steeper before it mellowed out, and it didn't seem as though I was going to gain a whole lot by ticking the sub-summit, as the exit ridge I had wanted to use looked kinda steep too. So, I opted for a descending traverse to reach some slighly less steep slopes on my way back down into a valley that would lead me to Denny Creek.
After booting down somewhere between twenty and forty vertical feet off the ridgeline, it was clear to me that, if I wanted to make it out by dark (it was about 2:30), I needed to find a better way down than pure downclimbing. The snow had softened and consolidated slightly in the soft, largely cloud filtered, sunlight, and I dragged my picks through the snow, trying to build up confidence that I would, in fact, be able to stop myself if a slide got out of control. I took off my crampons, somewhat unsure if I'd be able to find a good spot to put them back on, if I needed to, stowed my ice tool, and set off on a tentative glissade to the nearest tree. That worked out reasonably well; I could control the glissade, but not quite as well as I'd have liked. So, I went for the next tree. That worked until the slope eased somewhat, and I transitioned to a sliding form of plunge stepping, and then plunge stepping itself. I congratulated myself on having made some progress, though it was evident from all the trees around that I certainly wasn't out of the woods. Somewhere in the upper parts of my descent, it also started snowing.
I plunge stepped merrily for a while, encountering some slide paths, and choosing to trace their edges, perpetually opting to go down-valley whenever I was faced with a choice about which slide path to take. This worked great, until I encountered a roll/cliff band. After a bunch of cursing, I took a break, ate some food, and set to facing in again, and two-tooled booted it down an acceptable part of the roll (fiftyish degrees? sixty?). It was slow, but the step kicking was pretty good as the crust softened (except where it was water ice), and it worked, which was good. As I got to the bottom of that, it became clear to me that not too far below, there was another, very likely more serious cliff band, probably followed up by his baby brother. Careful examination of the geology across the valley, in combination with the map, suggested a new plan: traverse up-valley in hopes of finding a route through the cliff band as the valley floor came up to meet me.
It sounded like an ok plan, and it certainly wasn't worse than whatever I'd need to do to get through the crap below me, so I decided to try it out. It turned out to be a winner. The rock band was, in fact, permeable to a traversing descent. The trickiest bit was that a little creek had already found this out, and had placed itself across my path. It, having the presence of mind to have gotten there before the snow as well, had neatly tunneled under the snow, appearing only where the slope steepened slightly , and then disappearing into another big 'ol hole. Crossing a snowtunnel/bridge over it was moderately terrifying, but necessary. From here on in, the descent improved, though the continued precipitation (big warm wet flakes by this time) continued to stoke my fears of getting hit by a slide from above (I'd been crossing avy chutes frequently, using big glide cracks for footing at the base of anchors, etc.). I worked my way through some interesting, and kind of fun, routefinding at the base of the slope, and then moseyed cautiously down the open slopes toward the valley bottom. Once there, I could finally relax my fear of direct avy danger as none of the previous weeks' big slides had reached that far.
My only worry at this stage was possibly finding a creek-made tunnel by accident, but that turned out to be easily avoidable. The precipitation had made the expected transition to rain as the freezing level rose and I dropped. I found myself secretly hoping that a slope would slide (there were lots of them around), just so I could get to see one from relative safety. I rejoined my tracks at the snowbridge, hopped out of the snowshoes I'd put on at the valley bottom, and cruised across, making use of the second tool again to steady myself as I did the footwork needed to get off the bridge. The route from here on was pure cake. I worried a lot about my car. I hypothesized a lot about how I'd react if it had been towed. Instead of armoring myself against the rain, I just hurried, risking soaking my clothes (well, they already were largely saturated, but I was risking soaking them more) in favor of reaching the car quickly, if it were there.
I burned up the rest of the hike, and happily found my car. I was, indeed, pretty wet, and I loaded everything in. I cruised home at about sixty, feeling like going the speed limit of seventy would've been too much effort. I was about fourteen hours, car to car. I only did perhaps twenty five hundred feet of gain or so, but fifteen hundred feet or so of them were among the most arduous I've encountered.
Lessons: (there are lots of these)
I need to spend more time learning about what conditions make possibly unstable slide paths safe to cross: I might've ticked the summit of Kaleetan if I had opted to cross the slope that kick-started my adventure. If I had, I would've recrossed that slope much later in the day, probably around nightfall or later, after the slope had been lightly rained on for hours. I'll never know what choice would've been better; I do know that what I chose to do worked.
When using climbing as a strategy for circumventing danger, it's ever more clear to me that one must carefully consider what happens when that doesn't work, and you'll need to downclimb.
When climbing long sustained pitches, things above you that look flat probably aren't, unless they look super-awesome-flat, but even then they probably aren't either.
When it's raining, put on your damn raingear. I had enough dry clothing in my pack to have switched to completely dry (and warmer) stuff, but I shouldn't have needed to consider doing so. I didn't realize how hypothermic I was until I was home in Seattle and standing in the shower. It was only then that I really started to warm up (I stayed in some of my wet clothes on the drive home (that was probably dumb too.).).
A second tool is awesome. It's not quite as awesome for getting you down as up though, so one must be careful with the extra confidence it brings.
When plunging an axe for a nice trustworthy self-belay, it's worth being a little careful when you drive it to the head in the snow. More than a day later, I still don't have all the feeling back in my middle fingertip (I'd lost feeling in the middle three fingertips on my right hand, but all are improving), I believe from crunching it under the head and against the shaft a couple thousand times. Corollary: Even if your fingers feel all right, it's worth considering switching from your saturated liner gloves to full-on shell mitts if your gloves are saturated. Counter-corollary: liner gloves are awesome for getting lots of details done and maintaining control of your tools, particularly if you're doing creative things with them, or occasionally grabbing onto shrubbery.
Working in the lab without feeling in the tips of your fingers is really different. Normal little flips of parts and other things requiring dexterity are much harder without tactile feedback. Grabbing a hot part that's just been cut off on the lathe is much more interesting when your fingers don't tell you that it's hot.
Altimeters rock. I used mine to make a critical routefinding decision correctly that I might not have made without mine. It gave up the ghost to water entering its case (not unexpected after I changed the battery and humidity appeared inside) about two hours later.
Unfamiliar work breeds all sorts of interesting cramps and aches. My body cramped up in lots of interesting, painful, and often inconvenient ways while climbing.
Reflections:
It's been a very long time since I'd placed myself in a physical situation that I very much wanted to be out of, but couldn't be unless I completed a number of tasks correctly. I'm happily surprised at how well I can force myself to deal with the problems that need dealing with in the face of distracting fear. I'm also thoroughly impressed by how close I was to flipping out for a while before resigning myself to doing what I needed to do.
I've not been that chronically afraid of something physical in nature in a long time.
It's interesting that at least half of the total fear that I experienced stems only from the adages of others; I've never seen a slide, only the failures of my own Rustchblock tests.
I pretty much swore off any more climbing for a week or more while on the upper parts of the mountain. Interestingly enough, that's changed already, and I definitely plan to make use of the good conditions Sunday, possibly even on Kaleetan, but probably somewhere easier. It depends heavily on how sore I continue to be on Saturday.
On the subject of swearing: I believe that Thursday set a new single day personal record for sheer number of expletives. I suspect I averaged an expletive per minute or two for ten hours.