Early Season Ice Hunting

I drove out of Ashford in a snowstorm on September 29th, and the snow didn’t stop until I pulled into Bozeman late that night. I had been looking forward to getting some more time in rock shoes before winter settled into Montana for good, but soon I was hearing whispers of ice in the high country, so Lucas and I sharpened our picks, dug out some ice screws and headed for the Sphinx.

Lucas taking the tools for a walk.

After a few miles in the dark we hit the Sphinx-Helmet col shortly after sunrise. Assuming we’d be safe from grizzlies on an alpine north face, we stashed the bear spray and headed up towards the notch marking the ledge system leading to the ice routes. As we rounded the corner, several long ice smears revealed themselves, guarded by an intimidating series of narrow, exposed ledges coated in variable and unpredictable layers of early October snow.

The North Face of the Sphinx.

Crampons and helmets went on, and I tentatively inched out onto the face with an ice tool in one hand and a shovel in the other so that I could try to punch in a path right up against the rock and theoretically avoid walking in the deep drifts and slabs to my left. As I made my way off the first ledge, down a short step and onto the next terrace, a strong wumph thundered through the snowpack. By now I could clearly hear the mountains telling me to fuck off, so I inched back to Lucas, who had been belaying me off a slung horn at the start of the exposed traversing. We tried some other ledge systems above and below the standard route before eventually conceding that the Sphinx would have to wait for another day and retreating to the car.

Three days later I talked Marika into making another attempt which proved to be even more short lived. When we pulled into the parking lot I was disappointed to see another car already there, but took solace in the idea that another party might help alert the local bear and moose population to our presence. Instead the opposite proved to be true as we soon noticed grizzly tracks on top of the boot tracks ahead of us. A small set of juvenile prints accompanied the giant ones, and in the cold, 4 a.m. darkness our nerves got the better of us. I’ll file this one under the “should have kept going” category.

Wallowing in East Rosebud.

That weekend Tim, Lucas, Dyer, John and myself headed over to East Rosebud to attempt Ice Dragons, another early season classic. We were once again thwarted by deep snow, finding ourselves swimming up a chest deep couloir to access the upper basin below the route. Our “consolation prize” was a 40-foot smear of barely-Grade III ice on the shore of Arch Lake, which despite delaminating rapidly while we climbed it still provided the first sticks of the season. Thus far my season had amounted to 250+ miles of driving, three alpine starts and 30+ miles of walking all for less than half a pitch of ice climbing. Less than satisfactory, but at least I was racking up the training miles.

Oh, the Beartooths...

Somehow I was able to convince Marika to skip class on Monday and take a third swing at the Sphinx. Perhaps the two previous unsuccessful efforts had been for the best, because by now the direct start to the Lowe Route had come in, allowing us to start at the bottom of the face rather than making the dangerous traverse below the upper headwall. This allowed for a 1500+ foot route almost entirely on ice!

The glorious Earl-Trimble!

After climbing the lower pitches of the Lowe Route, we traversed right to the base of Earl-Trimble, which is slightly longer than the upper Lowe and comes in much less commonly. Recently Joe Josephson wrote on Facebook that he believes the Lowe Direct to the Earl-Trimble to be one of the top-10 ice routes in North America right now, and I’ll take his word for it.

We climbed four or five pitches on the Lowe route, and another three pitches on the Earl-Trimble up to WI4+ with the ice getting fatter the higher we went! This brought us to a fork, with a gorgeous headwall curtain leading up and right, while an easier and shorter exit gully went left.

Traversing from the Lowe Route to the Earl-Trimble. The Helmet is illuminated in the sun behind.

With the sun starting to set and several miles of hiking between us and the car, we opted for the left exit, which provided moderate climbing and a beautiful view of the right hand curtain. I’ll have to come back for that one! Two more snow/mixed pitches brought us to the top of the same gully as the upper Lowe Route, and into the sunshine for the first time all day.

View of the headwall pitch we bypassed. Next time!

The snow-covered scree of the west face made for a tedious descent back to the trail. From there four progressively darker miles led back to the car and the culmination of my first truly successful day in the mountains in what felt like far too long.