At 1am, I woke up to the clearest and darkest sky I had ever seen!
Looking towards Shuksan’s summit pyramid, there was a faint glow of an aurora, and the tail end of the Milky Way!
My rope team departed camp at 3am, a little later than the first two. We moved quickly and caught up to them. Actually, there others were probably held up by traffic. Here we are, waiting in line… The headlamps on the mountain belong to Chris, Pae, Scott, and Jen, another group of BoeAlps instructors doing this climb (since their teams were over party limits on their scheduled grad climbs). Pae is actually an instructor on our team, so it was awesome that she got to climb the same weekend as us!!!
Looking back towards The Hourglass and Baker
Traffic on Shuksan Highway…
Arthur was getting impatient. This was a wonderful lesson on mountain traffic and patience.
Missing the sunrise… womp womp…
Devin brought his rope team to the notch, and told us to meet him there
Alpenglow on Baker
When my rope team got the notch, we belayed each other in. Check out those shadows in the sky!
Sunrise over Crystal Glacier
Photobombed! Also, lookin’ a lil tired…
The plan from here was to wait for the Mountaineers team to start moving up the gully. Once they did, Devin and his rope team departed for the gully. We’d use a running belay for protection up to the summit block
It was pretty steep
Looking back… we had been waiting a while, and the sunrise was long gone…
After an hour or so, we finally started moving up the gully!
Moving past the third picket
I was around 2/3 of the way up when Chris, Pae, and company rappelled off the summit. Chris downclimbed a bit to evaluate setting up a second rappel
Pae showing Ian which camp was theirs (they were higher than us)
Pae’s team congregating at the second rap station
After this, I led my rope up to the summit. It was a fun scramble to the top… and a lesson in rope management. The gal in the front of this image was on the mountaineers, and getting ready to setup their rope for rappels. The other head peeking through the rocks is Alex!
A pano of the view!
More summit views!!!
Even more summit views!
Will’s big surprise was climbing up in a Mr. McGibblets costume…
…
The descent was a hot mess. The Mountaineers took a long time to get their team off the summit. Meanwhile, at least four other parties joined us at the summit. When I had rappelled off the summit, three of the other parties had started theirs as well. Ropes got crossed, folks were stepping over our ropes with crampons (which we weren’t fans of), and the snow was getting soft quickly. David and I had to pull the rappel ropes, and of course they got stuck. Then, we got stuck behind a pair of climbers slowly belaying each other down. We quickly tore down the second rappel station once we descended to that… and were again, stuck behind that pair.
After ~2 hours of work, we finally met up with the rest of the team… Will had actually climbed back up to take the ropes off our backs (thanks Will!) and Mark helped David out when one of the second rappel ropes got stuck on some rocks (we didn’t coil the ropes at the second rappel station… we just tied them to our harnesses and downclimbed with them, to drag them out of the gully…)
Anyways, for David, Mark, and I, it was a slog back to camp. The rest of the team returned ahead of us and started melting snow for water, which was super nice, since I ran out of water right before arriving… We rested a bit at camp, tore down our tents, packed our packs, refueled on all of the snacks we packed, refilled our water bottles, and got out of camp by 3pm. We descended the snowy bits by glissading, and slogged it back to the cars… we got back at 7pm, debriefed, and got outta there by 8pm!
One last view of the summit pyramid!
Team 5 on the summit!!!
Summit portrait with the summit flag!!! This climb was definitely a challenge, but I wouldn’t have climbed it with any other team!
