Moto Escapism - Sport Touring, Motorcycle Rides, Travelogues and Tech - Journal Entry June 27, 2009

Journal Entry June 27, 2009 - Grand Teton Climb Day 3

Written by Daniel Hienzsch
Tuesday, 28 July 2009
Lower Saddle Sunrise Entry from Daniel Hienzsch's journal... June 27, 2009 Grand Teton National Park Exposure, wicked cold, driving winds and ungodly views; but no summit. I slept until 3:30 AM, then awake immediately and laid in the tent, listening to the wind whipping. At 4 AM, I heard the alarm in the hut, followed by Darrent getting up, followed by a headlamp moving around outside. Then I heard hot water getting started. So, 15 minutes before Darren came to wake me, I knew we were going for it. I kitted up in synthetic wool socks, base layer long johns, a standard wicking gym shirt, hiking pants, fleece vest, rain pants, gaiters, Kayland mountain boots, and a parka. In my bag: 160' rope, extra socks, rain/wind breaker, heavy/light duty gloves, first aid kit, signal mirror, my ice axe and my crampons. I brushed my teeth, drank some water, had a quick bite, grabbed my bag of snacks, donned my beanie and helmet and off we were at 4:45AM. Venus blazed in a dark, dark blue sky. Down the talus field from camp into the moraine, then up the scree field to the base of the lower saddle snow field. By that point, I was entirely drenched in sweat and as we unshipped our ice tools, I stowed my parka. We climbed the snow field steadily, Darren kicking steps the whole way. We worked up from the apex of the scree towards a large ridge of rock to the south, avoiding several moats that Darren was aware of. It was hard work for me at 11,200' but we made it to the top of the lower saddle in due time, reaching the Climbing Ranger's hut just before sunrise. Darren stopped to talk to the Ranger who promptly came out to double check our permits as the wind gusted over the saddle, pressed between The Grand to the north and Middle Teton to the south. We turned toward The Grand and headed north to the Black Dike, about 500' above us on a broken trail of tundra and scree. Hard, hard effort and I could feel my right leg growing weak. I put on my wind breaker to take the sting out of the gusts and we tried to have a snack, huddled against the rocks of the Black Dike, somewhat sheltered in the giant black slabs. My Happy Place Shortly after the break, we fixed crampons to our boots and began the ascent of the Idaho Express Couloir, so called because a failed self arrest buys you a one way express ticket to Idaho. This was steep snow, upwards of 70°, much of it was ice, over snow, over the previous days hail (which I came to learn is called graupel), and all of that on top of the regular snow pack. Even there, sections would dissolve under your footing and you would lose six inches of progress. During one demoralizing stretch, five solid attempts to ascend one step saw me 12" farther DOWN than where I started. That was one of the "upwards of 70°" pitches. After the fifth back slide, I though of saying "To hell with this" and calling it quits, but one look down at Idaho and I knew I had no desire to try a descent right there. I asked Darren for a breather but he was not comfortable with the safety of our position on steep, fresh snow, so I sucked it up and fought my way to the top of the couloir, sometimes finding good snow in Darren's boot pack, sometimes sinking above the knee, while perched over Idaho. To make matters worse, when the snow would give way, my crampons would either drag down the opposing gaiter or just shred my rain pants. Up we climbed, higher and higher, eventually emerging to a point of rock and ice that we had to climb. Darren scrambled right up, then belayed me as I struggled with moving over bare rock while wearing crampons. The sound of the steel points skitching over the surface made my skin crawl. I would jam the pick of my axe in a crack of granite, and then haul my body vertically against it, while pushing up with my legs. My right leg was feeling very weak and when I had to use it to bear weight, the next step it would take saw my toes bouncing off the rock or ice. The stability muscles seemed to be giving up the fight even as I forced the major muscle groups to work. I have told myself over and over in the gym the mantra "You train for the last thousand feet ... you train for the last thousand feet". Here I was, in the last thousand feet, and my leg was starting to shoot craps. I felt very unsteady, but I pushed on to the top of the perch, where I took a breah and continued on over a further 150' pitch of steep snow, constantly short roped by Darren. We came to a stop above the couloir on a ridge and Darren asked me to kick out a ledge for me to stand on while he checked out the way forward. I mashed a platform about two feet square into the snow and drove my axe in to the hilt then gripped it tightly with both hands. Darren asked for the camera and told me to look up for a picture. I said that I would NOT look up... or down... or right... or left. I was going to stare at my axe until we had to move again, the exposure was starting to get to me. Darren chuckled and drew a happy face in the snow in front of me and told me to "find my happy place". Darren didn't know that for a full year, this mountain WAS my happy place! At the Upper Saddle Sure enough, we started a traverse to the right and up, finally bringing the upper saddle into view. I was kicking my crampons into ice, swinging my axe to set the pick, then stepping up and doing it all over again. Transit to the ice over graupel over snow. I would kick, hard, two or three times to crack through the ice and then I would see the hail hiss and spill out of the impact hole like styrofoam. One final kick would then be needed to set your crampons into the firm snow under all that crap. I started to feel the effects of the constant kicking in a new way: my shins. Each time you'd finally break through the crust, your shin would impact above where your boot had entered. As I lie here in my tent, I must have massive bruises from the constant abuse. Up and up to the upper saddle, under both The Enclosure and The Grand. We headed north to The Grand, scrambling up some Class IV stuff for 100' or so and finally taking shelter from the wind behind a granite slab. I was equal parts exhausted and frozen. the moment I stopped moving, I started shivering uncontrollably and the wind felt malevolent, like a force trying to continuously knock me off balance, just when I needed my balance the most. Darren told me to grab a snack and drink some water, so I pulled out the second half of the Clif Bar I had tried eating at the Black Dike, and discovered that it was nearly frozen and took far too much energy to bite through. I tried to take a sip of water to help soften the bar, but my camelbak bite valve, as well as the tube feeding it from the hydration bladder in my backpack, had frozen solid as well, even though I had kept blowing the water back into the system. The Enclosure I asked Darren for an honest assessment of what was left. He said our only option was the "OS", the Owen-Spalding Route; we would head east across a mix of rock and ice, with a "You better not fall" warning, because a slip in those conditions could easily wind up with one or both of us at the bottom of Cascade Canyon, several thousand feet below us. That would be followed by the "belly roll" around a horn of rock and then the belly crawl: a sliding crawl through a horizontal crack system on an iced ledge. That would lead to the Sargeants Chimney, which would normally be a multipitch 5.5 or 5.6 route to the summit, but no classification was really applicable considering the wind and ice. Definately, there would be more of the rock and ice at the very least, but most likely would require swinging two ice tools and front pointing the ice. COnditions were truly Scottish! Regardless of how difficult it would be though, once we started off on the route over Cascade Canyon to the Belly Roll, there would be no turning back; the only way to go would be over the summit and down the standard rappel to the point we were currently standing at. I took it all in: the route, what it would require, the way I'd been favoring my right leg when kicking steps, the way my left leg felt having to compensate for the right, the definite onset of hypothermia that would most likely turn fully hypothermic after laying bodily in the Belly Crawl, and the simple fact that even if I managed to do all of that, we would still have to descend the entire distance to camp, which would not be easy by any means; I called an end to the summit bid. Darren asked if that's really, what I wanted, REALLY. He nodded as I repeated that my goal had always been to get to my truck, safely, period... reaching the summit would be gravy if it happened. I had told Darrent his many times over the previous few days and I feel like he knew where I was comging from. I had no doubts about the decision and even now, several hours after, I still don't. Darren gave me some energy chews, "Sharkies", to suck on and we started down. Resting at the Black Dike We were able to follow our boot steps down off the saddle, but it is an entirely different experience, facing out from the mountain and plunge stepping down those slopes, short-roped or not. I tried hard to keep "nose-over-toes", but as we started back to the couloir system, it was so steep that we had to turn around and work our way down like I had from Paintbrush Divide. The wind NEVER stopped. We moved to the "Standard Descent Couloir" and side stepped our way to a rock system that we worked down until we got to the "Sack of Potatoes Couloir", which was thoroughly glazed with ice. Darren drove his axe to the hilt into the snow pack and set a belay for me. I worked my way to the gully and told Darren about a sling that was set there, partially frozen. He came down after I kicked out a stable point for myself and, inspected it as a possible anchor point, suspecting that Doug had put it there as an anchor earlier in the week. Darren dropped a locking carabiner onto the sling and I tied in with a clove hitch as he set up a new belay station to let me safely down climb that 15' section of icy couloir. I stepped down into the crevasse and drove the front of my poons into solid, clear ice. No haze or crystals in it at all, the whole couloir was completed coated, like someone had poured liquid glass over it. I drove in my pick and settled down on it, using the leash to help grip it, then kicked my right points in, drove the left points firm and lowered myself down into a crouch. Then I grabbed a handful of rock with my left hand and re-whacked my ice axe into the face of the pitch and continued. After five feet or so, I sank down on the ice axe and straddled the choke point in the couloir to further my descent when I looked to my left and saw three large icicles, hanging from the overhang, each growing in size left to right. The right most one, however, wasn't a normal icicle at all; there was a purple climbing sling and a locking carabiner encased in that cylinder of clear ice, like some freakish museum piece of a failed climbing experience. I felt deep apprehension looking at that climbing gear, frozen to the mountain side, a feeling as though if I waited too long, looking, I would become part of the frozen artefacts in the couloir. Darren, noticing that the line wasn't moving anymore, yelled down to remind me that he could just lower me bodily, if I wanted, but I insisted, to myself at least, that I'd be damned if anyone was going to lower me, I was going to down climb this shit, goddamnit! What I actually yelled back was, "Nah, that's OK!" I got to the base of that gully and scrambled down another 15-20'; Darren told me to climb down to the end of the rope, as he held a bomber belay up at that sling. Down I went, about 30 more feet and yelled back that I was stable. I heard the command from above to anchor myself to my own ice axe using an overhand-on-a-bight, so I tied off and called back "Off Belay!". In moments I heard the customary "Belay is off!", and after a few moments of disassembling the anchor and munter hitch he had established, Darren threw himself with obvious glee and gusto at the ice glazed couloir, like a force of nature. His crampons drove firm as he swung dual ice tools and descended that frosty mess with a bodily abandon I will admire as a first hand example of a true mountaineer fully immersed in his chosen element. Darren Together again, Darren asembled his kiwi coil and we returned to a short-rope team, now following an old snow filled boot pack over rock and ice back down to spitting distance of the Black Dike. We finished with a "poon on rock" scramble to the Dike, where we rested and took off our crampons. The day had progressed and with the increased sunlight and lowering of elevation, my camelback thawed sufficiently so I could chew on the bite valve to crush the rind of ice inside, while massaging the ice to a point that it could flow out of the tube. I took a long, long drink of water. We pulled ourselves together and stood up, and hoofed it down to the Exum and Climbing Ranger huts on the Lower Saddle. Finally, familiar, if not easy, terrain. We roped up again to move down the first 200' of pretty steep snow by a big granite slab that was protected by a 20' deep moat around it. Finally, about half way down the face, I slipped: my left heel didn't plant well and I landed on my ass and started to slide. I imediately turned to self arrest and drove that fucking pick halfway to Tibet and felt myself stop. I was laid out, panting, when I hear a voice from ten feet away say "You're welcome". The short rope had drawn tight and Darren had comfortably arrested my slide just before I caught purchase with my ice axe. I thanked him and took a few breathes before righting myself and continuing down, nose-over-toes. Finally, we got to that apex of rock where I had shed my park nearly eight hours earlier and, with dead legs, I struggled back up the 200' of talus back to high camp. Darren set about getting us hot drinks as I cleaned and cleared my gear. Two of the three women were still on the mountain, while the third had needed to turn back at the Black Dike. As it would later turn out, of the remaining two, one had to stop at the base of The Enclosure, the other topping it out with Doug. In the end, I hit the highest elevation of anyone at camp, 13000' We rested in camp for a while, but I began to get restless as my body recovered from the day's work. So about 5PM, I swapped out my mountain boots for my 5-Tennies, grabbed a ubiquitous bagel, and started playing around on one of the boulders around camp. After about a minute of this, with my hands full of granite and my mouth holding the bagel, I heard Darren yell, "You wanna go climbing?" I replied, "I got the time if you do!" and so, I grabbed my harness and ATC and we climbed a nice little hand jam crack on the Fair Share Wall. Darren managed to get a piece of protection, a small nut, caught in a crack that I wasn't able to extract with the cleaning tool on my way up the pitch. So after I had rap'd down, Darren followed, then, with the stuck nut at chest left, wrapped the rope around his thigh about five times and proceeded to pry that little bastard from the wall. I eventually heard him mutter loudly, "I'm just gonna yard that sonofabitch out" and, with the rappeling line holding him secure at the thigh, he attached as ling to the nut with a girth hitch and started yanking with all his strength to pop the nut free. Finally it pinged out and he attached it to his rack. I noted that this was a point of pride for him as later that evening, he told Doug and Sam that he'd "be damned if I was gonna leave that behind for some goddamn mountain guide to pick up". A little later, a guide named Brian arrived with is client, Melissa. Brian had been her guide on Rainier earlier this year, and she had signed up for a three day climb on Teton immediately after that. Her first day had been wiped out by yesterday's hellacious storm so she was left with only today and tomorrow. She has a flight back to Houston tomorrow at 5PM. * * * As it turns out, they departed at 12:30AM for the summit and all indications are that they made it. In no wind. I slept through it all.
Last Updated ( Monday, 21 December 2009 )

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