Serpentine Arete has been on my wish list for a while, and I was really pleased when Oleg said he wanted to do it. He lives in Portland, so we met in Leavenworth, at Uncle Uli's, where I was reminded once again how much better Drop Top Amber ale is on tap than out of the bottle. He'd already had dinner, so I got a brat, and after dinner, we headed up to the trailhead to toss down our sleeping bags (actually, he slept in the back of his truck.)

We had arranged to get up around 5:00, but I didn’t hear my watch alarm go off, over the rush of the creek. And, predictably, I lay there for a while getting up my motivation.

Last night I’d bought a large coffee from the Chevron station and poured it into the coffee carafe, so I had some coffee to start the day out. My pack was annoyingly heavy with the rope in there. It took a bit less than two hours to get up to the lake. Oleg hadn’t been here before, and he enjoyed it as much as I thought he would.

Dragontail over Colchuck Lake.

Backbone Ridge and Serpentine Arete together form the "dragon's tail" that gives the mountain its name. This picture doesn't do it justice, but Backbone is to the left, and Serpentine to the right.

The climb starts off pretty simply and really sucks you in. I was thinking: this is a snap! We started climbing around 8:30, climbing solo until we got to an iffy place where Oleg made a wrong turn and got kind of stuck. I got the rope out for him, and we simulclimbed for a while. He let me lead the 5.6 pitch, which was short and I climbed, I think, pretty clumsily.

Then we got to the first 5.8 pitch beneath the tower, and things got stiff in a hurry. Oleg led it, of course, placing plenty of pro. He said “watch me” half a dozen times, but I’m sure he never fell.The second 5.8 pitch was pretty confusing, since the route description suggested there was two alternate routes. The obvious one, a nearly vertical crack right above us, was the one we took, after doing some poking around looking for the other “corner system.”

Oleg up on the first 5.8 pitch.

Yours truely, working the best 5.8 pitch Oleg ever did. (Oleg's photo.)

The next pitch looked pretty easy, so I offered to lead it. And it went pretty easily, until I got to this really daunting obstacle: a crack that opened out into sort of a vertical bowl, that I just couldn’t figure out how to get up. I thought I might be able to jam my toes into it, but I couldn’t get up there enough to do it, and there didn’t seem to be any purchase for my fingers. There was an alternate route just to the right, a very narrow chimney sort of thing with some tempting holds in it, but it was much to narrow at the bottom to get into. So, I gave up and downclimbed, and gave Oleg the lead. He had a tough time with that as well; he ended up kind of doing a body-jam/chimney sort of thing, getting up there, which I was able to emulate with his stiff pulling on the rope. We were thinking we must have gotten off route, since it was such a tough move, and the route description didn’t say anything about it.

Hummingbirds buzzed us a few times. I feel like they’re a good omen, but I can't say why. There is a lot of vegetation up there growing in the cracks, including pentstamons, which I assume they’re after. Oddly, the sound they make is precisely the sound a small rock makes as it wizzes down from the face above.

I'm a complete sucker for flowers growing out of the rock, especially when they're so tiny and delicate. And that's not even a full-sized caribiner!

I’d brought a pair of two-way radios, which I’d charged up the day before. We didn’t need them that often, but the few times when we were out of earshot, it was a real convenience. I know, they’re not a safe thing to rely on; you should get your rope-tug codes down, but, well, I'll take it.

Mt Rainier above the top of Colchuck Glacier.

Towards the top, the climbing got less technical, but the rock got crummier, with sand and gravel and all sorts of loose rock to make the climbing more complicated, so we stayed roped, simulclimbing some but mostly doing standard belaying.

Oleg up on the 'easier' ground on the upper ridge.

We split a Five Hour Energy, and then I led the last pitch, which turned out to be the easy traverse around the left side of the top pyramid (which also involved a lot of downclimbing due to routefinding errors) and on to the easy ground below the summit.

By now it was about 8:30, a full twelve hours on the route. My toes, and feet generally, were in pretty bad shape, and it felt like a spa treatment to get my boots on for the descent. We didn’t bother to tag the true summit (we were too macho for that!) but we were glad to see the footprints in the snow from the backbone ridge team, and followed them down Aasgard pass. Colchuck glacier seemed like a bad idea; the ice was almost all the way across the glacier and it didn’t seem at all safe to descend it.

We made for Aasgard pass as quickly as we could, but still got to it after sunset. It was awfully pretty up there, though.

Looking from Dragontail over to "The Lost World". The top of Aasgard pass is on the left, lit by the sun. (Oleg's photo.)

The Cascades in the gloaming.

We headed down, picking out a route as best we could, following the trail as it appeared. From the lake, we’d seen a very clear scree slope on the right (climber’s left, or north) but we followed the footprints of the last team, since it seemed like a safer bet. One of them had a distinctive waffle-patterned tread on his shoe, so it was easy to identify.

Down we went, and darker it got, and we were following the descent by headlamp, until we finally ended up getting cliffed out in total darkness (after surprising a mother mountain goat and her kid the trees: I was briefly very afraid of an protective mother!) There were trees to the right, and we couldn’t see what was through there, and a rushing stream to the left. It appeared that we would be able to make it down by the stream, but it the poor visibility, we could have ended up cliffed out there as well, or one of us slip and fall on the wet and slimy rocks. So, reluctantly, we decided to bivvy.

I pumped water from the rushing creek, and Oleg searched around for bivvy spots and gathered wood for a fire.I didn’t expect the fire to be very easy to start, but that dry wood flared up amazingly well. It was quite nice to be able to dry out my socks and boots, and get good and warm. The wood was so dry it hardly smoked, and there were very few embers blowing away. I ate a bagel sandwich and half of the other one, not because I was hungry, but because I figured I needed the calories to help stay warm. I didn’t drink nearly enough water, though, and had some obnoxious cramps in the night.)

Our fire.

Eventually we headed off to sleep, me wearing every piece of clothing I had (Pants and rain pants, wool shirt and my wonderful Marmot wind shell, socks and boots, and with my bandana wrapped around my head over my ears) and my space blanket. Which turned out to be pretty awful: it is as light as a piece of Kleenex, and constantly blew away, or lifted up whenever I moved a bit, and fluttered loud as a freight train when the wind picked up after a while.

I think I did fall asleep for a little bit, but certainly not for very long. Most of the night I lay there on top of my empty pack, trying to find a comfortable position where nothing dug or prodded, and my Space Blanket was wrapped tight enough around me to keep from flapping too noisily. Space Blankets are better than nothing, I guess, as a very compact lightweight ‘last resort’ item, but their light weight makes them almost unmanageable in any sort of wind: even a gentle breeze. They’re mylar, though, so they’re impressively tough.

Finally, around 4:30, it started getting light enough to see the landscape below. Finally, finally, it got light enough that I felt like it was worth getting up – the last thing I wanted to do was get up and stand around, chilled. Gathered up all our gear, repacked the backpacks, poured water in the ashes of the fire, and headed out.

Turned out we were only about halfway down Aasgard pass. We managed to make it down on the left by the stream without getting too wet, and once we were all the way down at the lake, found the proper trail, marked with cairns two feet high, heading off to the climber’s left (our right.)The interesting thing is that I didn’t feel the least bit tired or sleepy heading down the trail. I ate a single Power Bar, again just because I knew I should, and sipped at my Platypus as we walked. I guess the adrenaline was pumping pretty hard.

Back along the lake to the camping areas, back down the trail, and we were at the parking lot by 8:00. I was in a hurry to call Heidi, so we drove straight down to the Chevron station. Near the road, we passed a pickup truck heading the other direction. I saw Chelan County Sheriff across the side of the truck, and watched in the rear view mirror as it stopped and turned around. So I pulled over. Behind me Oleg pulled over, and the sheriff pulled up behind him.

“I bet you’re looking for us,” I greeted him. “I think I probably am,” he said. He was a very pleasant guy, and he said he’d call his dispatcher to call Heidi. It was pretty funny to have an experience so similar to the North Ridge of Stuart fiasco.At the gas station I washed off in the bathroom and got the biggest coffee they had, then went back out and sorted gear with Oleg. Then, off onto the newly resurfaced Highway 2, over Steven's Pass and home.

An odd epiloge: That evening, I was talking to Heidi about things, and she asked me, "was it windy?" I said it was, later in the night, and described my frustration at fighting for control of the space blanket. So, she told me she'd woken up abruptly last night, around 2:00 AM or so, with the conviction that I'd told her I was fine, it was just windy. She said it really calmed her down, and she was able to go to sleep. I'm not much for the Psychic Hotline, and neither is she, but that was kind of odd.

Equipment Notes:Don't rely on a space blanket or any of those variants. From here on out, if I'm doing anything more committing than Vesper Peak, I'll be hauling my bivvy sack. It's not heavy or bulky, but it'd be FAR more satisfactory than that silly sheet of mylar.

Equipment Notes, 2:Five Hour Energy, however, rocks.

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