AK 2019
- Henry Coppolillo
- May 28, 2019
- 12 min read
Tim and I just got back from our first trip to the Central Alaska Range. Deteriorating conditions around base camp and a looming weather front pushed us out of the range several days early, but I can’t say I’m disappointed as this has allowed me to come back to Bozeman for several days before starting work for the summer, and I’d much rather spend this week at home than in a tent in a storm. The success of our trip can be measured in a number of different ways. On one hand, we totally got our asses kicked. We got on four different routes during our time on the glacier and didn’t send a single one, which helped us coin our team motto, “Gain weight, not vert!” On the other hand, the trip was a smashing success, as we climbed more than any other team at Kahiltna Base Camp during the time we were there and ultimately any trip to the big mountains is successful as long as you have some good laughs in base camp and everyone comes home in one piece.
We arrived in Talkeetna on the afternoon of May 6th and checked in for our flight into the range the next day. A glance at the forecast quickly confirmed that we wouldn’t be flying in on time, and we settled in for what would ultimately be a three day waiting pattern in Talkeetna. The town was still quiet and sleepy as the hordes of tourists and Denali climbers hadn’t arrived yet, and we passed the time sampling the various overpriced restaurants and talking to the few other climbers also waiting to get into the range. We finally loaded our gear and hopped in the plane on the afternoon of the 9th, and blasted off into the range. The flight in was gorgeous, and I craned my neck to see mountains and routes I’d only read and dreamed about in the past. The Ruth Gorge, the Mooses’s Tooth, Mt. Huntington, the Infinite Spur and the South Face of Denali were all visible. After flying through the tight V-slot of One Shot Pass we took a sharp right and dropped out of the sky and onto the Southeast Fork of the Kahiltna glacier. Tim and I jumped out of the plane and stared up in awe at the North Buttress of Begguya (Mt. Hunter). Wanting to get away from the noise and chaos of the landing strip, we dragged our gear several hundred feet up the hill and settled on a campsite on the far eastern side of basecamp.
With another storm coming the following afternoon, we had a little less than 24 hours of good weather remaining. We found out that the Southwest Ridge of Mt. Frances had been climbed up to the fourth tower the night before, so the bootpack was at least partially in. We haphazardly set up camp and took off down Heartbreak Hill at 8 pm.
At the bottom of the hill we took a right and headed up the lower slopes of the Southwest Ridge. By the time we reached the start of the technical climbing it was snowing lightly and our view of Sultana (Mt. Foraker) across the glacier was obscured. We agreed to keep going as long as we could see basecamp below us and the cornice that marked the false summit above. Tim took the first lead block over Tower 1 and 2. We simul-climbed several pitches of steep snow and moderate mixed terrain around Tower 3 and rappelled the gendarme. Another few hundred feet of snow trudging brought us to Tower 4 and the crux pitch. I took the sharp end and started up the snow-filled wide crack, which was the perfect size for foot jamming in double boots! At the top of the crack I cut left onto the slab, ran up the snowfield under a sketchy looking cornice and cranked through a final steep, awkward mixed step to reach the top of the technical difficulties around 5 am.
At this point the bootpack we’d been following ended, and we had been awake for almost 24 hours. As we started breaking trail up the final 1500 vertical feet I felt the fatigue starting to set in. Tim was in the same boat and we decided a break was in order, so we stopped to melt more water and give our legs a short respite. It wasn’t much help though, and I felt like I was in an overworked trance as I kept plodding up the ridge. Sometimes it was steep enough that I could plant the heads of my ice tools in front of me, but usually my arms just hung at my sides like an exhausted, awkward, alpine chimpanzee. I cursed myself for not bringing trekking poles. This was when things started to get scary.
In our haze we had failed to notice the weather closing in around us, as visibility dropped to 500 feet, then 300, then 100, then less than 50 feet. At this point we knew that retracing our steps back down the ridge would be an arduous and complex process, involving some sketchy rappelling on knife-edge ridgelines and climbing up the overhanging gendarme we had rappelled. It seemed our best option was to continue up and over the summit and down the standard East Ridge descent. This plan was still far from ideal as we knew that the East Ridge was heavily crevassed and had far fewer rock features than the Southwest Ridge, making navigation in the whiteout extremely difficult and hazardous if not impossible. We finally traversed under the giant cornice capping the false summit and onto the summit ridge at 10,100 feet. Here the ridgeline flattened out significantly and we expected a quick dash to the summit at 10,450 feet. The mountains had other plans, and in addition to the snow and fog the wind now raged from what seemed like all directions. Things were now, as they say, properly fucked up. We down-climbed into a semi-protected alcove off the right side of the ridge and weighed our options. Tim suggested going back the way we’d come, but the idea of down-climbing and rappelling the entire Southwest Ridge in these conditions was a non-starter for me. I was also starting to worry about sketchy avalanche conditions resulting from all the new snow and wind. But going down the East Ridge seemed like an even worse idea. We were frustrated, scared and cold.
I used the InReach to text Marika back in Bozeman to ask for the hourly weather forecast for Mt. Frances in hopes that the storm might slow down in a few hours and we could get in the bivy sack we’d brought and wait it out. Suddenly the fog parted for a brief moment and revealed that the small chute we’d just climbed down was actually the start of a massive couloir running all the way to the glacier! The wind was erratic but primarily blowing out of the southeast, so we weren’t concerned about wind slabs on this aspect. We downclimbed two short mixed steps and were soon making our way down 3000 feet of 45-60 degree snow and neve. We shuffled back into base camp after 19 hours of climbing and having been awake for 33 hours. It was a thoroughly Alaskan experience on our first route in the range.
After our minor epic on Frances we slept on and off for 18 hours and then waited out the storm for another two days. The next break in the weather looked to be another short, 24-hour window, but we thought we could still get something done. Our friends Chance and Matias showed up the night before, and they pitched their tent next to ours for the night before leaving to head up Denali. As I write this they’re hopefully preparing to head up the Cassin Ridge and try to become the youngest team to ever climb the route. We woke up at 3 am and still couldn’t see the North Buttress, so we went back to sleep and checked outside every hour until 6 am, when the clouds finally dissipated. We said goodbye and good luck to our friends and skied up the valley towards the Mini-Moonflower.
I led across the bergschrund and took the first pitch up the low angle ice apron. I’d heard about the rock-hard, calf-searing Alaskan ice, but you really have to experience it first hand to fully appreciate how strenuous this type of climbing is. Tim and I started out by swinging leads, which we quickly realized was a mistake as we would have to follow a full rope length of tiring climbing and then invariably gas out halfway through leading the next pitch. We switched to block leading just in time to arrive beneath the crux pitch and see spindrift pouring over the steep corner. We bailed, having experienced only the obnoxious approach pitches and none of the cool climbing.
Two days later we got another weather window and after giving the route all day to shed we started up around 9 pm. We applied the knowledge we’d gained on our previous attempt and had a much less painful experience on the lower ice apron.
As Tim led the last pitch below the crux, spindrift started to hit us every few minutes, but I was motivated to at least climb what looked to be a technical and engaging crux pitch, so I took the sharp end and charged up. The pitch probably felt much harder than it actually was due to the firehose of spindrift that only increased in intensity as time passed, but I think that even in perfect conditions it would have been no joke. Half a rope length of 80 degree ice led to an overhanging bulge through a narrow corner into the upper couloir. The saving grace was that I could stem off of the rock on the left, keeping the weight on my feet despite the ice approaching 95 degrees in places. Eventually though the rock stems disappeared and I was forced to swing out onto the ice and commit to a few body lengths of vertical to slightly overhanging ice. “It’s just ice climbing,” I told myself as I committed to the bulge, “just swing and kick, and don’t fucking fall.” Of course I got hit by several more rounds of spindrift, forcing me to hang from my tools for what felt like an eternity as the snow filled every crack and crevice of my clothing, somehow permeating all my layers and chilling me to the bone. I let out a whoop as I pulled over the bulge, psyched to have fired the hardest pitch I’d led in the alpine.
A few days later in base camp I felt a wave of pride as someone mentioned that they thought in current conditions the pitch could be graded AI5+. Maybe I was turning into a real alpinist after all. I built an anchor and put Tim on belay, and he battled up through the torrent, letting out a scream every time the spindrift dumped onto him. We climbed one more low angle pitch up the couloir and were poised for what I thought would be two or three quick pitches to the ridgeline and a glorious top out. 40 minutes into another spindrift-plagued lead, however, it was apparent that the mountains had other plans. I found a V-thread anchor left by our new friends Kelly and Justin and rapped back down to Tim at the belay. From there we made seven or eight more rappels back to our skis and slid into camp around 9 am.
After the Mini-Moonflower, our attention shifted to Bacon and Eggs, another ice route near the Mini, which despite being about 500 feet shorter has steeper, more sustained climbing throughout, a welcome change after the nearly 2000 feet of mostly easy yet calf-destroying ice we had just climbed. But first we took a few days to recover and check out some of the rock routes at the base of Mt. Frances. We couldn’t believe how good they were, with splitter cracks and granite as good as any rock Tim or I had seen.
We headed up to Bacon and Eggs early on May 19th. After two low angle pitches we were psyched to find ourselves in a long, snaking couloir with several pitches of 75-90 degree ice ahead of us.
Unfortunately the spindrift was starting up again as well, but the climbing was so good that we tolerated it and continued for several pitches until I was belaying Tim up and got hit with what might have been enough force to knock me off were I on lead.
Not wanting to risk a serious fall, we bailed. We both agreed it was one of the coolest and most fun routes we’d ever been on, and I can’t wait to get back to the Kahiltna and finish it.
With the halfway point of our trip now past, we agreed that all we really wanted to still do was get some pitches in on the North Buttress of Begguya. It seemed unlikely that we would get a big enough window to attempt to top out the buttress or even summit since we hadn’t had a weather window longer than 36 hours since we landed on the glacier. However the North Buttress is one of the most iconic features in all of alpinism, and we at least wanted to get up there and swing our tools.
A big storm which had been forecast to keep us tent bound for several days ended up missing the range completely, and we awoke to bluebird conditions on May 21st. The Bibler-Klewin (or Moonflower Buttress, depending on who you credit with the FA) is widely agreed to be the best route on the North Buttress, so we decided to crag up that route and see how high we got before the weather got bad or we decided we’d had enough. The climbing was amazing as we linked thin ice smears through a chaotic labyrinth of snow, choss and sections of solid granite.
When we arrived at the start of the Twin Runnels section the ice appeared to be paper thin and delaminating, so I thought that perhaps this wasn’t the Twin Runnels after all and led off up another smear further right. I ended up being wrong, but this off-route pitch was perhaps the most fun and aesthetic climbing we experienced on the whole trip! After realizing our mistake we rapped back down to the start of the actual Twin Runnels and then decided to bail as the wind had picked up and we were both cold and a little flustered from our route finding error. Not long after our crampons touched the glacier we agreed that this had been a bit of wimpy bail and resolved to get higher on the route the next time we got a window.
As we headed towards the final week of the trip I was incessantly reading the long-term forecasts trying to strategize about when we should try to fly off. I couldn’t risk getting stuck on the glacier in bad weather and not making it to work in Washington on time, but I wanted to maximize our remaining days to climb. It looked like a big storm was coming in on the weekend of the 25th with a few nice days before then, so we decided we’d climb one more day on the North Buttress, wait out the storm and then fly out as soon as it was over. Last time we had started climbing around 5 pm and had gotten shelled with falling ice as the entire buttress got blasted with afternoon sun, so this time we left later and Tim led across the bergschrund a little after 7 pm.
It proved to not be late enough as Tim arrived at the first belay and proceeded to get pounded with falling ice the entire time he was belaying me up. After pulling over the bergschrund (which had gotten twice as wide since we were there three days prior) I was horrified to see little rocks lying in the snow which had obviously been raining down with all the ice. I practically ran up to Tim and the belay and immediately fired in two ice screws and clipped one end of my pack to each one to give us a makeshift roof to cower under. We decided to rap down and wait a few hours for the sun to set and the face to refreeze, so we left all our gear clipped to the anchor and fixed one of our ropes so we could quickly ascend back up once the maelstrom had ended. We sat below the bergschrund and watched the sun slowly make its way down over Sultana and Crosson. All the while little bits of Begguya fell down from the North Buttress and landed in the snow around us. Suddenly we heard a roar from above and turned to see a sizable avalanche moving towards us. We grabbed ahold of the dangling fixed rope and scrambled as far as we dared into the bergschrund, which overhung enough that the avalanche cascaded over us and onto the apron below, burying our skis several hundred feet lower. Not wanting to wait around for the next one, we hurried down and luckily managed to retrieve all our buried gear, then scrambled down another few hundred feet to put a good buffer between us and all the hangfire. We sat on our packs, took a deep breath and debated what to do next. Our entire rack and both ropes were still a pitch up the route, so we had to at least go back up to there when the sun went down. I wanted to continue up the route as planned since freezing temperatures would have negated the hazard, but Tim wanted to make the conservative decision and call it a day, and as his partner I couldn’t argue with that.
After I ran up to the anchor and grabbed our gear we returned to camp and I threw out the idea of flying off the next day. I knew I’d be pretty depressed if we ended the trip like that and then sat in the tent in a storm for several days, and the idea of seeing my family and friends in Bozeman for a few days seemed pretty appealing. We switched our focus to finishing the last of the whiskey and preparing to leave. Fossil fuels and modern technology can do some crazy things, and less than 48 hours later I was back in Bozeman. There’s a lot of talk in the alpine climbing world about how hard you get your ass kicked the first time you go to Alaska. This certainly proved true for us on more than one occasion, but for every smackdown that taught us a lesson there was at least one success that built our confidence. The Alaska Range is huge and I’ve only see one little corner of it so far. I can’t wait to keep returning to these mountains for many years to come.
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