Liberty Ridge ... Done
None of the other climbs I've done can even be compared. This was both brutal and amazing simultaneously.
Day 1: we met at the RMI base camp in Ashford, WA around 3pm. I met our two guides, Nate and Gary and the two other clients, John and Jeff. We ran through all of our gear, made adjustments as necessary, got everything packed up and weighed in. At 6pm we parted ways with instructions to meet back at base camp at 6am. I then found The Farm, which is where all of the new guides bunk, and found a climber that I met in Alaska a few weeks ago. Finally, I intended to get to sleep early, but instead found a Mythbusters marathon on tv and stayed up past 12:30am.
Day 2: I woke up at 04:42 and didn't feel very tired. After packing up my last few things, I changed into my fancy climbing clothes and headed over to our rendezvous point. We all piled into a big RMI van and set out on a 2 hour drive to the trail head. We stopped at McDonald's on the way, and I got some sort of egg sandwich thing, which actually tasted okay. This counts as my McDonald's visit for this decade.
The start of the hike is several miles of following a well maintained trail - with the exception of a chunk of it that has been wiped out by a land slide. Eventually the maintained trail ends and we start paralleling the Emmons glacier, which will be our means of descent in a few days.
The dirt trail turns into a snow-covered trail and we actually start doing some climbing - topping out at 7,400 feet and finally descending to about 7,000 feet where we make camp on the Curtis Ridge (a 3,000 foot climb today).
Day 3: We wake up a little after 3am, eat breakfast, pack up camp and drop down onto the Carbon glacier and start climbing towards Liberty Ridge. We set out nice and early so that the snow bridge on the Carbon will be frozen. The crevasses we walked around were enormous.
We start climbing up the steep snow slopes of the base of Liberty Ridge. Some hours into the climb we started be accosted by rock fall. Small rocks and very large rocks would come off the upper mountain and whip by us fast enough that we barely had a chance to see them - but we could certainly hear them. Nate took a hit to the head (on his helmet) and I got one in the arm (that still hurts).
I'm no guide, but I couldn't understand the particular route that we took, at times, that required traversing steep, slick, wet rocks on front points. I managed to slip once, which was quite freaky.
The climb lasted about eight hours and we set up camp at Thumb Rock - around 10,700 feet (a 3,700 foot climb today). Thumb Rock only qualifies as a camp relative to the surrounding terrain. It's tiny. We spent a couple hours digging into the hillside and hacking into ice, to expand an existing platform so that it could hold our Trango 3.1 tent.
This day was a ton harder than the previous day.
By the time we settle into the tent, my right arm starts hurting - bad. I can't put any weight on it; I can't stretch it out fully (without enduring a lot of pain); and I can't even begin to elevate my elbow level with my shoulder. A handful of advil eventually takes the edge off, and it hurts bad even when I'm not moving it at all. Gary seems a little concerned, but since there's no substantial discoloration, Nate seems pretty apathetic.
We get to sleep early (I *try* to sleep) because we are supposed to wake up around midnight to start our summit climb. This'll be fun with one arm....
Day 4: Gary wakes us up around midnight, as promised. Nate comes over to talk to us and eventually decides that we can use our "weather day" today, and do the summit climb tomorrow: John and Jeff are indifferent as to which day we climb, and I strongly vote for tomorrow, so that my arm will have more time to improve.
Around 6am Nate lets us know that we're going to start climbing at 11am today. He offers no explanation and lets me know that my arm will probably start feeling better as I start using it more. Great....
A team of French Canadians started climbing around 2am and there's some nice "buckets" kicked into the first couple of pitches, which proves very easy to "climb" up. It all involves using one's right hand with an ice tool, but only lightly, and my arm does eventually start hurting less - plus I doped up on advil.
A few hours into the climb we pass the Canadians, who had a 9 hour head start on us. The day involves about fifteen pitches, and a lot of really annoying front-point climbing on sixty-ish degree ice. It's just the right angle to really burn your calves. It sucks.
The pitches where we climb on belay are painful: its not feasible to take off your pack and get a jacket, so you stand there shivering. Finally you get to climb, and you warm right up, and then repeat - again and again - hot, cold, hot, cold.
Finally, we make it up to the bergschrund. We have to do some real ice climbing now, but only for like twenty feet. While not the most challenging ice climbing I've ever done, it was certainly the most exposed: hanging on this ledge on top of a slope that drops from 13,500 feet down to the Carbon glacier below at 7,000 feet. Not a fun way to go.
After topping the schrund we do a little traversing and then do half a dozen or so more pitches of this sixty-ish degree ice and finally top out on Liberty Cap. It's windy and cold. It's 8:30pm (a nine and a half hour day) and we climbed 3,400 feet.
We descend the other side of the cap and (happily) out of the wind and set up camp in the saddle (the dip between the two summits - Liberty Cap (14,112 feet) and Columbia Crest (14,411 feet)).
I chow down on as much food as I can, but there's no way that today isn't one huge calorie deficit. Still, I can't be sluggish tomorrow on the descent. Its a long way down.
Day 5: The sun hits the tents and we wake up around 6am. Jeff wants to climb some 900 feet up to Columbia Crest. I have no interest in doing that - partly due to the fact that I seriously need to go to the bathroom, and I can control that as long as we're talking downhill. If we start climbing, it's all over. And I'm dreaming of the pit toilet at Camp Sherman.
Nate finally decides to rope up with Jeff and climb to the summit while the rest of us hang out at the base of it. Jeff and Nate pretty much set a speed record (forty minutes up) and then we climb on down to Camp Sherman where I use the most wonderful pit toilet ever.
At this point we drop our crampons and shed a bunch of layers. It's warm, it's sunny, and its all fairly gentle down-hill from here.
There is a few thousand feet of descent that we have to do, down a thirty-ish degree section of the Emmons that apparently can be done on foot, or by sliding on one's butt down a firmly imprinted trail. Jeff and John opt to walk. I slide. It's amazing. I fly past everybody. Then I have to walk some more, but the steepness picks up again and I slide easily another thousand feet in a couple of minutes. It's *awesome*.
Finally, the glacier levels off a bit and we make our way back to the maintained trail and down to the parking lot. We stashed some bottles of beer in a snowbank before starting the climb and are elated to find that they're still there. Of course, I don't drink beer, but everyone else seems to find them heavenly.
A two hour drive later, and we're back in Ashford.
Day 6: My arm hurts, but it's usable. Both of my knees and one wrist have scrapes on them from when I took that short slide on the rock on
Day 7. And my legs are so very stiff. It feels great though.
I have a handful of emails waiting for me from friends wanting to do climbs. Uggh. I just want to rest.