Our objective, from the parking lot, the sun just touching the peaks. You can see the top of the main pocket glacier poking above the trees.
Big 4, North Rib attempt
Saturday, Sep 8, 2001. With Alex K.
It’s 1:50 PM, and I’m sitting on a spacious ledge, 200 feet up on the mountain. I know the height because Alex’s 55m rope barely reaches to the ground. We started from the trailhead around 7:00, and after looking at the 1942 ramp (my vote), decided to go way over to the right, and ascend up by the trees. Two hours of miserable bushwhacking ensued.
Wisely wearing shorts, my legs were thoroughly scratched up by berry bushes, wild rose, and even some devil’s club, allegedly a valley plant. Eventually we decided that it was just too miserable going. Alex thought we’d done 1500 feet but we still had to traverse the entire way across the face of the mountain, and up another 2000 feet or more. When Alex said it was time for us to do some raps, I responded with: "We’re two white guys from down in the city/ came to big 4 and it kicked our booty" Which I thought was pretty clever, but he didn’t respond.
So we pulled out his rope and did a couple of rappels off cedar trees. The first rappel we did, it took both of us using all of our strength to pull the rope down – that’s an unanticipated problem with thin ropes: less to hold on to. Eventually we got down onto the wide ledge that goes across the face, the smooth rock that always reminds me for some reason of a Tarzan movie. We made it over to above the second set of ice caves, and found a belay anchor – two rusting bolts, and Alex rigged up a nice belay station which would get us to the obvious next belay station, where we could see some red webbing on the rock. Unfortunately, his rope didn’t reach. It appeared to be 40 ft short. Too bad I didn’t bring my big ol’ rope as well. So, we walked back over to the right, and tried to climb up what we’d rappelled. But it was too steep, too slimy, no holds, & lots of dirt and cedar.
It was a little surreal, being in a dire position within shouting distance of leisurely tourists. First we rigged up a slide alder belay and hung the rope down to see if it would reach, and Alex spent a rather frustrating few minutes shouting to someone down below "does it reach the ground?" "what?" "does the rope reach the ground?"
So Alex send down a note with his girlfriend’s name and phone number, for the guy to call her to have her bring a second rope, so that we could rappel w/o losing this one. At one point, the guy asked us if we had $50. I wonder if it was a joke.
Anyhow, the guy left, and we sat down to eat, and I remarked, as it came into my head "the other idea would be for one of us to do a single rope rap." So Alex did. He spent a good half hour rigging four pieces of webbing, including some we’d found onto an anchor hanging off the roots of some bushes, and headed down. I don’t think I’d have trusted this to lower our Westie, but he was fine with it. And I watched it as he went down, and it didn’t move at all.
Sitting here in the shade and the breeze, it’s surprisingly cool. I put on all my clothes, even my Falklands wool, and found a pile vest in Alex’s pack to wear too. The ground seems so close, if it wasn’t for the people down there who look so oddly small, I’d feel like I could nearly jump down. But when you try to talk, yelling down and them not hearing you, you realize how far it really is. There were milkweed seeds floating in the sun, but now the sun’s gone.
So, Alex returned around 4:15, about an hour earlier than I’d decided to expect him. Turns out he got a rope from the sheriff’s department, at the Verlot ranger station. It turned out that the guy had never left, he gave the note we’d written to a woman who went, and who, after Alex spent half an hour rigging the anchor, rappelling, and driving to the ranger station, walked in 20 minutes after he did, announcing that there were a couple of guys who were in trouble on Big 4 and she was supposed to call someone.
He tied the rope to our rope, and tied in the rope bag, which contained one of his two-way radios. I remembered that he’d had them, and I was hoping he’d send one up. So, I pulled up the rope up to the fisherman’s knot that he’d tired, and got the bag and sent down the two packs, with the end of his rope. Things were a little complicated, since the new rope was shorter than his, and I had to have the knot on the side of the thick rope. So I was going to have to stop and adjust the rope length as I neared the ground (the thick rope stretches less, so it goes through more quickly.)
I was completely terrified about putting my weight on that anchor. It seemed to me like stopping a semi by dragging my foot, completely unreasonable. I prayed and crossed myself before committing myself to the drop. Things were made worse by the fact that there was a slimy drip right below the lip, so there was no footing; I couldn’t even pretend like my feet were holding most of my weight.
Down I went, focusing only on the ATC and the wall, not looking down, not thinking about the anchor. 50 feet above the ground I found a stance, stopped and pulled the ropes to equalize them, wondering what that was doing to the anchor above, but it seemed fine. I managed to get one of my nuts pinched by the seat harness, so after starting up again, I had to find a place to stop and rearrange things. Words can not describe how I felt when I reached the bottom, and at the same time I was conscious that maybe I had been inordinately afraid. Alex related a time that he’d rappelled off a single sagebrush anchored in sand, and compared to that, this was pretty bomber. (earlier)
The drive home was pretty routine. We dropped the rope off at the sheriff’s building in Robe, and headed home.
Reflections on the climb: This has certainly dampened my enthusiasm for bushwhacking climbs, like Index and Garfield. I just don’t like that kind of thing. At all. I don’t need to do it. Chair Peak, as I look back on it, was a very nice climb, nearly perfect in some respects, and I had sort of envisioned this being something like that. My winter climb of Big 4 was a lot of fun as well, but I wouldn’t do it again solo. As we were pulling down the ropes I mentioned fear of death or dismemberment, and Alex said that climbing accidents rarely result in deaths. Ironically, I got home to a TV news report of a guy that had been killed falling from Chair Peak. He was doing the east wall, and unaccountably, untied from his partner just at the most hazardous spot.