The upper valley was totally socked in for the next five days, so we convinced ourselves that the chances of doing another route on the Yentna would be a big gamble, and that we would have a better chance if we were at Kahiltna base to get a good day of climbing during Freddie and Ben’s last four free days. On May 3 at 9 p.m., in the most improbable weather, Paul buzzed over the ridges. Our books and iPods went flying in all directions at the same time, and barely half an hour later a big mess of all our stuff was piled full of snow dust left by Paul’s Beaver on the side of the Kahiltna air strip.

The three of us were still half asleep, but our jaws all fell to the ground simultaneously when we turned toward the north buttress of Hunter. It was covered with the most ice any of us had ever seen on it. That’s how the next chapter of my trip began, which I would call ‘‘the perfect alpine week.’

Monday, May 5, at 12:25 a.m. The alarm goes off as the stoves go on. The blend of coffee, fried bagels, eggs, cheese, and bacon aromas finish waking up all of our senses. It’s 4 a.m. when we regroup at the base of the Moonflower Buttress. We pushed it a bit breaking track and we are all sweaty. Ben pulls off his socks, and a chunk of skin is hanging from his foot. Fuck!!!! Getting a half-dollar-size blister is a hard way to start a 4,000-foot route.

The first block was mine. Three rockbands, three climbers, easy to split. I followed Ben and Freddie’s directions, as they had already been on this section of the route. Stellar ice runnels, a steep snow traverse, and we were soon at the Prow. It felt like climbing through a history book. Freddie and Ben screamed encouragement from below as my tools sank and locked in the thin seam of the Prow. Before I realized it I was clipping the anchor of the pendulum. I knew that Marko Prezelj had done it free, and I was already too far committed when I told myself, “This sucks!” I kept matching front points on knobs, and just before I was really going to do in my pants the iced side of the gully was within tool’s reach.

The pace was set, we were making good progress, but the weather was deteriorating fast. By Tamara’s Traverse the spindrift is heavy. When I passed the rack to Freddie I could see in his eyes that he knew what was waiting for him in the Shaft. With our cameras sunk deep in our jackets, we tightened our hoods over our helmets. Freddie disappeared under a white curtain of snow, but the rope keep feeding. Every time it came to the end we joined him as fast as we could, keeping our heads down. By 5 p.m. we had made it to the top of the Shaft and onto the second ice band, but there was no way we could have made it through an open bivy in those conditions. Ben didn’t seem too worry about it too much. He took the rack and pulled us two more rope lengths to the left to a snow mushroom that had formed on a rocky ridge. An hour later we were all hanging inside a six-inch-thick snow shell, about two and a half feet wide by 12 feet long and three feet high. Besides the fact that Ben was super-pissed that he had broken part of one wall while digging, he had created the best shelter you could have imagined.

That night Freddie had his first experience inside the two-man snuggle sac, and almost didn’t want to leave it at 6:30 in the morning when the light started to come in from the window. The bastard snored! At least he is a small guy. We crawled out to a bluebird day. The perseverance of the previous day had paid off. We knew that we were going to the summit that day. Ben cruised through the Vision section, climbing it all free, I took over for the Bibler Come Again exit, and finally we reached the top of the buttress at 5 p.m. I could barely lift my arms, but Freddie was firing. Climbing as a party of three definitely has some advantages. We left everything except our puffball jackets, one rope, and two screws, and he pulled us all the way up the 1,700 feet of elevation gain to the summit in two hours. We could see all the routes each of us had climbed in the range.

The sixth block of the route had come: the descent. Ben was totally up for the task and led the 26 raps down the face, putting in more then 20 V-threads, and by midmorning on Wednesday we were back in B.C.