Respect Your Alders

Sunday, July 13 (Day 17): After a day of rain, it clears. A noon boat launch leaves us beating up a drainage, and then ambling two miles toward Bog Lady Dome. We have 24 hours until Rick picks us up.

After thrashing through more alder and falling in tussock holes, we reach Bog Lady’s major crack system. Then we climb, all together. The four pitches unfold upward, each somehow matching its leader’s personality. The petite, clever Kate leads P1 — a delicate crack in a slight corner that pulls a roof. Next, Madaleine, badass and bold, aids up seams for 15 feet, and then runs out 100 feet of dynamite stemming, laybacking, and hand jamming, with a horrifying mantel finish onto a loose mud hummock.

I score the classic P3, which follows a traversing hand crack through a reachy, bulging corner. I then squeeze-chimney through kitty litter and finish with an exposed move onto a ledge. (It mirrors my fate of “no groveling, no gain.”) On P4, Althea — notorious for diving in over her head and then pulling things out of thin air — starts up the final hand and finger crack. She falls dramatically out of a wide section, pulls back on, and disappears. “This might be a while,” she shouts as dirt and moss rain down. She nails a pin, and then exits the last headwall via a spectacular, save-the-day foot rail.

After 600 vertical feet of fantastic movement, decent rock, good cruxes, and a midnight sunset, we top out Respect Your Alders (5.10+ A1). We’re psyched, but know it’s late, so we run over slabs to a notch, and then glissade 300 feet through steep alpine grasses, tundra, and flowers, laughing. The final butt slide lands us in the alders.

While Althea and Kate fetch our packs, Madaleine and I lie by the water’s edge, wind lapping at our faces. An obvious line up the biggest formation. Duh. We should have climbed it first, and I’m not really sure why we didn’t. Perhaps we wanted to check out all our options before climbing the one right in front of us. Luckily, we managed to squeak it out in the final hours.

Emily Stifler, a Montana-based writer, thanks the American Alpine Club (americanalpineclub.org) for helping fund this trip.