Our first view of Forbidden on the approach.
This is one of those climbs I've been wanting to do ever since I first saw the mountain my first time in Boston Basin two years ago. It's nice to get some of those long-time residents of my wish list ticked off!
We left town around 9:30 and drove up to the Boston Basin parking area, to sleep in the parking lot. I figured that since last year there were only a couple of cars there at 8:00 AM, it would be pretty quiet. I was wrong. I forgot that it had been midweek; there were about ten vehicles there when we arrived and so we had to park on the side of the road. We laid out our sleeping bags, under the face of Johannesburg peak, the stars bright but no moon.
I actually slept much better than I’d expected, even without a pillow; maybe as I age I’m sleeping better in sleeping bags. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a quiet night: about every hour a car would come by, or people would get out of their vehicles to start climbing. My vote had been to get an early start, like 5:00 or before, but Lee thought it’d work better to sleep a little longer, so I set my watch alarm for 5:00. But we were awake by 4:30, so I drug the coffee carafe out of the car, and we ate some breakfast. Despite my interest in getting an early start, that sleeping bag felt pretty good, and it was an effort to get myself out and going.
So we hit the trail about 5:45. We made very good time, we did the first 1000 feet of elevation in about 35 minutes, and were in Boston Basin before 8:00. We stopped for a sandwich at the upper camp, next to a high-tech outdoor potty with a spectacular view of Johannesburg Peak. There was a hummingbird buzzing around, but he vanished before I could get a photo.
On the hike through Boston Basin, we passed a lot of marmots well over a dozen. It seems that in the morning, they’re pretty slow moving, and slow reacting. So, on and on we went, following the trail as we could and making our way overland to the base of the couloir.
I was surprised; the couloir is a lot longer than I expected, similar to the SEWS couloir, but steeper and, this time of year, icier. Really cool, in fact for me it's part of what made the climb so rewarding: I love that sort of stuff.
There was a group of four people that had left before us, but whom we passed in the upper basin, and at the base of the couloir there was a couple (man and woman) crossing a snow bridge belayed. So we charged across and headed up the couloir.
At the top, we abandoned our boots, crampons, and ice axes, put on our rock shoes and headed on up. It turned out we were able to solo much of it, until about halfway up. I was leading when I came to a spot that I didn’t feel comfortable doing without pro, so we stopped, roped up, set a belay I led it. (This is the spot where there's an old iron piton just around the left side. But it was a big deal because I placed my first piece of pro, but screwed it up by clipping into it with a caribiner rather than a sling, so the rope drag was instantly impossible. That's how you learn, I guess. So, I only led to the next belay station, about 60 feet or so.
Lee led the next pitch, up to the notch, and then we solo’d the rest of the way (across the notch to the summit.) No summit book. A funny thing: as I was sitting there belaying Lee, a marmot popped out of the rocks! I can’t believe they could find anything to eat up there.
The climbing was really fun, it was great rock, really firm with plenty of holds. I suspect that my evenings at Marymoor have been paying off; I’m a lot more confident, I think, on rock now than I was before. Oddly, it seemed like I was more tentative, more worried about slipping or falling, when I was ON a rope than when I was climbing free. I’m not sure what that was about.
We sat there a while, having lunch and enjoying the view and taking pictures of the view, the Okanogan fire in the east (a water bomber flew overhead while we were still in the basin) and then two people, a man and a woman, came over and joined us. Turns out they were part of the four-person party, and not the two we saw below, who were still bumbling around on the second pitch when we descended. We also got to see a pretty impressive avalanche down into Moraine Lake, down behind Torment.
So, we descended, and rappelled the first two pitches, then gave up and downclimbed the rest. For two people with a 60m rope on a descent as flat as that one, it’s probably quicker to downclimb than rapel, and deal with ropes getting tangled, etc. Actually, on the second rappel, the rope got snagged up above, and I climbed part way up to clear it, before Lee got it loose. That was a problem because I was planning on using a piece of the webbing in my pack to do a rappel, and instead had to downclimb a pretty (for me) dicey section.
The downclimbing went kind of slow, and my toes were getting pretty sore from the downward pressure. And, I was getting pretty thirsty. It was pretty interesting to look at the rock, though, the way it was constructed: there’s a foot-thick layer of quartz in the granite, heading upwards at about a 30-degree angle. I didn’t think quartz formed like that. And it's so odd the way the whole ridge is constructed of these enormous blocks of granite, as though someone built it up with some enormous crane. You see this sort of formation all over, of course, on Pilchuck, Stuart, Schuksan, but it still seems pretty improbable to me.
The hike out was rather slow. I filled up my two water bottles at a drip, but that wasn’t enough to get us through. The corn snow below Forbidden was steep enough that I was able to do a butt-slide for a few hundred feet, and we foot-glissaded for some of the rest of the way, but once we were on the trail, it was slow going. My toes were pretty sore from the rock shoes, and these cloth hiking boots, a size too small, always hurt on the descents. And then the heel of the left one came loose, which meant that it was pretty slow walking, since I had to be careful to step squarely.
Crossing one of the treeslide areas, we lost the trail and spent half an hour screwing around in the trees, with stuff breaking under our feet. Pretty miserable, and lots of foul-mouthed exclaimations from me. Eventually we got back on the trail though, and then it was just tromp, tromp, tromp, back to the car.
