Big New Mixed Route on Mount Foraker

We crossed the bergshrund at 22:40 and began climbing up the Japanese Couloir. Above Cassin Ledge, we made a route-finding error and accidently climbed a mixed chimney that was more difficult than necessary. While climbing the first rock band, the weather took a turn for the worse, and the mostly cloudy skies turned completely cloudy and started snowing. We had decent snow conditions until the top of the third rock band, at 17,000 feet (although much more hard ice on the icefields than most years), but then began to wallow considerably in deep, fresh snow. We had made excellent time up to 17,000 feet (about 11 hours) and were confident that we would break the speed record, but that hope began to disintegrate as we worked through snow sometimes waist-deep on the left (west) side of the ridge. The snow worsened closer to the summit ridge, and the final 1,000 feet to the summit took us more than three hours. We finally reached the summit at 15:43 for a time of 17 hours from the base. We took our time down the West Buttress route, and when we arrived back at the 14,200-foot camp, 28 hours had elapsed. We brought a 20-meter rope for the approach, but simul-soloed all of the route.

After our climb of the Cassin, we packed up our camp at 14,200 feet on the West Buttress and descended down to Kahiltna basecamp. Ever since our first week on the glacier, we had not experienced consecutive days with good weather, and still the forecast was not optimistic, so it seemed unlikely that we would attempt the main objective of our expedition: a new route on the Southeast Face of Mt. Foraker. After a few days in basecamp, the weather forecast called for one day of high pressure, and we thought we might as well pack our backpacks and ski over to the base of the face to check it out. We skied to the base in a whiteout, and never even once that day were able to see the wall that we hoped to climb. We set up our tent in dumping snow, and assumed that in the morning we would simply ski back to basecamp. However, we awoke at 4:00 am the next morning (June 13) to clear skies, and made a hurried decision to launch. We skied from our campsite up the glacier to the base of the face, and then cached our skis below a protected rock buttress at 6,800 feet. The lower portion of the face (before we branched off of the previous route, False Dawn) is serac-threatened, and so as soon as we left our skis, at 6:00 am, we set off simul-soloing as fast as we possibly could. We raced up a narrow snow couloir to the left of the main serac (but still threatened by a serac on the French Ridge) with steps up to AI3, and then made a rightward traverse to above the main serac and out of danger. We spent a total of two hours and ten minutes in what I consider dangerous terrain, although we never saw anything come down from these seracs.

Above the dangerous terrain we climbed up a hanging glacier, and then departed False Dawn, climbing up to the base of the large diamond-shaped wall that we hoped to climb. At the base of the wall, we stopped to rest, eat, melt snow, and bust out the ropes. The wall itself is about 3,000 feet tall, and comprised of first a large left-trending ramp system, and then a large right-trending ramp system. We climbed a lot of ice runnels, and some tricky mixed bits. The rock was mostly good granite, but the technical crux came on a section of crumbly M6R.

At the top of the rock wall, we had hoped to brew up, but there was still not a single ledge big enough to chop a butt-seat, so we kept climbing through the night up interminable 60-degree ice slopes to the junction with the French Ridge. Climbing through the night, combined with severe dehydration, caused me to develop frostbite on my big toes.

At the junction with the French Ridge, we stopped to rest and melt snow in the dawn light. Eventually we got on our way again, and slowly began the long plod traversing under the south summit and on towards the true summit, quite exhausted. We finally reached the true summit at 13:00, 31 hours after leaving our skis. The skies were clouding up however, and we scurried off almost immediately, heading down the Northeast Ridge.