Total Vert So far: 16,715m
Last July some friend and I attempted to summit Wedge from the North side in July, a mission that ended in failure about 200m from the summit due to a rapidly warming snowpack. At the time several people told me that it was much quicker and easier to climb Wedge during the winter by using the lifts on Blackcomb and climbing the south face. I even had it on good authority that this route was possible in a mere 7 hours round trip, from Blackcomb gate to parking lot (although I also heard that 9 hours was more realistic. After plenty of training the last few weeks Benoit and I were feeling like we were in good condition, and the weather forecast looked promising, so we decided to give it a crack. Unfortunately we made a successive sequence of errors, none of which were disastrous on their own, but all of which added time to an already long day, and we ended up skiing out the Wedgemont summer trail in the dark. So what were these errors, and how can we avoid them next time?
1) I was late to our meeting point. We had agreed to meet at Glacier Creek at 9am, but I didn't arrive until 9.20. We were 20 minutes behind our already ambitious schedule.
Standard view of the South Face of Wedge. A better understanding of this photo would have saved a lot of time later.
2) We attempted to ski down the right hand side of the Spearhead glacier. This isn't a big one, but it probably added about 10 minutes. I knew that we needed to end up in the bottom right hand corner of the Spearhead, but I didn't know how easy it would be to cross the glacier from left to right at the bottom, so we attempted to ski down the right hand side. This side was far flatter, and we had to push and skate across the bottom. It would have been far quicker to ski the left hand side, then cross the glacier at the bottom.
3) We traversed too far in the woods below the Spearhead, all the way into the Trorey creek. We were following some tracks at this point down into Wedge creek, and at one point they split- one group skiing down a pillow field while the others continued traversing right. We took the traverse option, and then skied down the pass into Wedge creek. Heading down the pillow field would have resulted in us getting to the creek sooner, and meant less skinning along the creek at the bottom. Time lost, around 15 minutes.
View of Wedge from the creek at the bottom. 1500 vertical meters to the summit!
After this things went quite well for a while. We found a skin track (probably from last weekend up through the trees, and ascended over 500m to the tree line in the next hour.
Views of Phalanx and the Chisel couloir from a resting spot at the tree line.
We were feeling confident after making such good time through the trees, however our solid pace was not to last. As soon as we got above the tree line the face became heavily wind-scoured, and any trace of an old skin track was lost. The snow conditions here were quite terrible. Extremely variable, switching between polished ice, breakable crust and bare rock seemingly ever few steps. At this point our pace slowed right down, which lead to our next mistake
4) Mistakenly assumed that traversing to the western edge of the face, and climbing some wind scoured rocks would be faster and safer than climbing up one of the snow filled gullies. We attempted boot packing for a short while in the one of the gullies, but the snow was variable and going quite slow, so we traversed further west to where there were still boulders sticking out of the rocks. Climbing on these boulders was not quicker as I had hoped, and we wasted a lot of time slowly clambering over the rocks. After about 200m of ascent we switched back to the snow and found that the climbing was much easier, but by this point we had already lost too much time. Time lost clambering on rocks: 30 minutes.
5) Mistake 4 cost us a lot of time which lead to a controversial mistake 5- abandoning the summit bid. Whether or not this was the correct decision I still haven't decided, and I'd be willing to hear other peoples thoughts on the subject. At about 3.15 we decided that there was only about 2 hours of day light left, and we thought that the summit could take as much as another hour, so we turned around. It wasn't quite all that simple thou, as retracing our steps required some sketchy down climbing over exposure, and then even worse, the exit route left us lower down in Rethel creek, requiring a longer skin up to get back to the Wedge Glacier. Had we continued to the top the skiing would have been quicker (and better) plus it would have been much easier to cross over the col. I guess we'll just never know about that one!
About 200m from the summit we decide to head back, as daylight was at a premium
The sun sets over the Spearhead range.
Traversing underneath the NW couloir. So close but so far!
After crossing over back onto the Wedge Glacier side at the col, we made the costly error of them all.
6) We left our skins on, and attempted to ski down the skiers left hand side of the Wedge Glacier. This is the one that really cost us. We knew that we'd have to skin over the lake to get back to the hut and the summer trail, and in our exhaustion we wanted to save time on transitions. We also didn't make the effort to traverse all the way to the skiers right hand side of the glacier, which I knew from my summer attempt is relatively gentle and crevasse free. Instead we tried to ski the skiers left hand side, which was crammed full of crevasses, ice falls and steep gullies. And by leaving our skins on we turned what should have been a 5 minute ski into an hour long ordeal, and we were both getting extremely nervous as the light quickly faded and we were still on the glacier. More by luck than judgement we made it off the glacier and onto the frozen lake just before it became too dark to see. Once on the lake we were able to relax a little, as we knew all we had to do was cross the lake and follow the we trod summer trail back down. We took a brief rest in the hut and then made our way down. We actually got some off the coolest turns of the season on the steep headwall behind the hut, skiing surprisingly great snow by headlamp. Which leads us to the final error-
7) My headlamp was a totally cheapo piece of crap. It wasn't bright enough, and it refused to stay pointing at the right angle while I was skiing, so we had to take it pretty slow on the way down. It took 2 hours from the hut back to the highway, which I guess isn't so bad. A bit of a shame we had to go so slow as the snow was actually quite acceptable the whole way down. I think in broad day light we could have skied the trail in a little over an hour.
So that was that. Around 8pm we were back at the highway waiting to get a ride home. Another unsuccessful attempt on Wedge due to 7 totally avoidable errors. Some of them are understandable due to my lack of familiarity with the route, others of them are embarrassing rookie mistakes of which I am ashamed.
But hopefully now that I'm aware of them I can avoid them all next time, and fingers crossed it's 3rd time lucky on Wedge for me!
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