2007 Mugs Stump Award Trip Report CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE MUGS STUMP AWARD

Once upon a time, in the forties, fifties, and sixties, way back in the dark ages of alpinism before modern ice climbing had even been invented, Alaskan climbing was all about gnarly glacier travel. Go ahead, take a look at Waterman’s High Alaska: those old-timers knew how to get through some heinous looking terrain…. 

These were my thoughts as I orbited high above the Yentna Glacier on a bright spring day in May, 2006. I was staring one of the Alaska Range’s best kept secrets, the 4,000 foot South Face of the Fin, right in the face. The Fin is technically a sub-summit of Mount Foraker; it’s only recorded ascent was part of the epic first ascent of Foraker’s massive Southwest Buttress – an old school route if ever there was one. The South Face had terrain vaguely reminiscent of the ultra-classic North Buttress of Hunter or South Face of Denali, except it was arrayed in a tight, inhospitable concave cirque. But it wasn’t the wall that really worried me, it was the approach: a virtually impenetrable icefall blocked the flow of the Yentna glacier five miles below the wall. Between the icefall and the wall, the valley was threatened by countless hanging seracs and avalanche slopes. The place made other notoriously scary Alaska glaciers I had visited – The N.E. fork of the Kahilta and the East Fork of the Tokositna – seem benign in comparison. Taken altogether, the Fin was a challenge like none I had seen, combining new-school technical terrain with an old school, balls-to-the-wall glacier approach and descent, in a true wilderness setting. I seriously doubted if it was possible to even reach the start of the climbing. But it was precisely that kind of uncertainty that captivated me. I had to give it a try.  

A year later, Ben Gilmore, Peter Doucette, and I arrived on the Yentna Glacier. Thanks in part to the support of the Mugs Stump Award, I was going to have my chance at trying the Fin Wall.  Paul Roderick brilliantly on-sighted the dodgy, wind-cupped snowpack to safely deposit us just outside of the Wilderness Boundary that bisects the glacier.  The next day we ferried loads four miles up glacier and established out basecamp about a mile and half below the infamous ice-fall.  Over the last couple days of travel, Ben had caught a vicious little cold, so he rested at basecamp while Peter and I re-coned the approach to the ice fall.  It looked pretty damn sketchy to us, though it did seem possible to skirt the feature on the lower, avalanche exposed slopes of peak 10,300 to the west.