One of Alaska’s Most Committing Faces Finally Gets a Direct Start

After getting dropped off by plane in a narrow, threatened valley, the “easiest” way back to civilization was up the giant East Face of Mount Hunter.

The post One of Alaska’s Most Committing Faces Finally Gets a Direct Start appeared first on Climbing.

Michael Gardner, Sam Hennessey, and Rob Smith have made an important contribution to Alaskan alpinism with their new route One Way Out (AI 6 M6+ R; 6,500ft) on Mount Hunter’s massive East Face. The name stems from the immense commitment involved—after a small plane dropped them off in a tight glaciated cirque that is “threatened by seracs and avalanche-prone slopes” on all sides, Gardner told Climbing, the easiest and safest way back to civilization was by climbing this highly technical face and descending the North Buttress.

The History

Mount Hunter’s East Face was first climbed by Jack Tackle and Jim Donini in 1985 via the Diamond Arête, a 10-day epic involving huge leader falls, anchor failures, avalanches, and a dropped rope. Tackle and Donini skirted the left edge of the face by climbing a blocky chimney feature, but the proudest line up the headwall was a 1,000-foot left-facing corner: the line that became One Way Out. “This objective seemed like the essence of Alaskan alpinism to me,” Gardner said. “Steep, hard, committing climbing on a remote feature.”

Gardner had wanted to climb that striking corner for an entire decade but struggled to make sense of the face’s ominous approach. The lore went like this: On the first ascent of the Diamond Arête, the pilot told Tackle and Donini he could drop them off on the half-mile-by-half-mile glacier one at a time, but could not leave the narrow, serac-threatened zone with the added weight of a passenger. In other words, they had purchased a one-way ticket.

After speaking with Paul Roderick, the owner of Talkeetna Air Taxi, in 2017, Gardner was surprised to hear his offer of a drop off and pick up in that infamous cirque. “So we flew in during a mediocre window and launched up the original ascent line—but we quickly realized the weather wasn’t going to hold, so we rappelled and asked for a pick up,” Gardner said. “It was terrifying to be honest; we found one little safe-ish spot—as long as it didn’t storm too much—to set up a tent and Paul flew in the next morning.”

The East Face of Mount Hunter (14,573ft/4,442m) made a lasting impression on Gardner. The granite was “incredibly good” and the feature big and inspiring. But it was also a deadly serious zone. “I became adamant that we needed a really stable forecast to justify getting dropped off there again—3-5 days. I didn’t want to ask a pilot to pick us up there again. I realized that, to get dropped off there, I needed to have the utmost confidence that we could get up and over the route.”

That stable forecast took many spring seasons to line up, and in the intervening years Gardner, Hennessey, and Smith continued to make their mark in the Alaska range, including a speed ascent of the Slovak Direct (5.9 X M6+ WI 6 A2; 9,000ft) in just 17 hours and 10 minutes.

This spring in Alaska was exceptionally stormy with no spells of good weather lasting longer than a couple of days. But on May 13 a four-day window appeared to be forming, so the climbers messaged Roderick to ask for a bump from Kahiltna Basecamp on the north side of Mount Hunter, where they were camped, to the base of the East Face. “It’s interesting the different experiences you can have on that mountain,” Gardner said. “Kahiltna Basecamp can feel like a metropolis, but after just a 15-minute flight you might as well be on the moon.”

Climbing’s Interview with Michael Gardner

Climbing: Tell us about the ascent.

Gardner: Paul picked us up on the Kahiltna Glacier at 9 a.m. on May 14 and bumped us over the east ridge and into the threatened cirque. He never even turned the plane off. We got out with our harnesses and helmets on, gave him a thumbs up, and he took off. He was on the glacier for all of five minutes. Immediately after that, a serac broke off and rumbled into the cirque. It was a reminder that this wasn’t a place for us to hang out. On day one we started climbing at 11 a.m., an unfortunate reality of the flight schedule. When a pilot is dropping you off on the day of your climb because you don’t want to camp beneath it, you can’t start climbing at two in the morning. They’re only dropping you there during flying hours.

The initial climbing was really hard—the first lead took three hours. In our flyby, it looked like there could be névé in the back of this corner system—but I quickly realized that it was mainly unconsolidated snow that protected with rock gear, especially bird beaks. That first day had a lot of challenging, burly climbing. Normally we climb in blocks, where one climber leads multiple pitches in a row. But on this route, when you finished a lead you were gassed, mentally and physically. None of the leads were death pitches, but they were runout, and the gear was hard-fought.

We only did three pitches that first day. We hoped to climb the entire dihedral and reach the second snow band to set up a tent. But when I finished the third pitch, which ended on this steeply slanting snow feature, at 10:30 p.m., I figured we needed to call it there. We hacked out a sitting bivy and called it a night. We called it the Bobsled Bivy, because the only way we could sit there was by facing the same direction and sitting in eachother’s laps with the one sleeping bag draped over us. It was pretty cold!

After three long pitches the next day we got to the second snow band on the wall. We were psyched, we had climbed the dihedral we came there to do and it was every bit as challenging as we’d hoped. But at this point we could see the upper snow slopes and they were ripping with wind, which concerned us since we were only on day two of a supposed four-day window. The headwall continued above us, but the obvious decision was to traverse the snow band left into what we thought would be cruiser simul-climbing terrain—although this turned out to be pretty heads up too. After six rope lengths we saw a weakness that led to the upper ice arête. It might have actually been the crux of the route: wild, steep torquing, mostly protected with little knifeblades and beaks. But it got us off the wall at about 5 p.m. The storm was howling now. We put on all of our jackets and face masks and started simul climbing up the ice. There was a lot of wind slab to navigate, so we ended up spooling out both the lead line and the tag line and tying them together so we could be on different pieces of terrain. It was proper mountaineering.

At 13,000 feet we found this big ice cave that we pulled into for the night. In the morning we got an updated forecast which confirmed that the weather window was done. We didn’t want to try to ride out the storm in that cave, since we’d actually forgotten a whole day’s worth of food in basecamp. We split one bar for breakfast on the morning of day three, then set out into a full white out. Sam told me, “Gardner, if you get us up this thing I’ll get us off this thing.” Avalanche conditions were really serious. Plus lots of crevasses and zero visibility—I was navigating with my phone’s GPS. We found the summit only because I walked in circles until the elevation on my GPS went down. Sam followed on his end of the bargain, and led us off the summit in a full whiteout, deploying all the tricks of the trade: he had his ice axe tied to a piece of cord, “fishing” it in front of him trying to get some depth perception. It was crazy how the four-day weather window had essentially deteriorated into a day and a half of good weather.

Climbing: What was it like to finally climb this decade-long dream route?

Gardner: The climb ended up being quite hard in all aspects. From the minute we got dropped off on the glacier we felt like we were being hunted. I enjoyed the heck out of the climbing, but there was a severity to the situation the entire time. It was obvious that this feature was never a place humans were meant to be. And we just had to accept that feeling, that we were being hunted, that we had cross hairs on our back, until we got off the thing. That feeling stood out to me. I don’t want to promote the idea that a climb has to have an immense amount of commitment for me to enjoy it, but after 10 years of dreaming of this thing, and lining up everything, it was nice to know that we were ready.

I want to emphasize that I don’t want to come away from this experience thinking: “Oh, I got away with this, let’s do more routes like this.” Each time you do a route like this you are pulling from a luck jar. And having luck isn’t a game plan—but, as you know, big alpine routes sometimes involve an immense amount of luck. It’s not a place one should put themselves too often over the course of a long career, though.

Climbing: Do you think you would have pushed so hard on lead, during those scary three-hour pitches, had you not been on such a committing feature?

Gardner: That’s a good question. Maybe on a different feature I would have thought about each lead differently. And I was trying to remind myself of all the incentive I had to put this route down—this dihedral had been on my mind for 10 years. There were a few times I would try a section, realize it was runout and hard, and downclimb a few body lengths to regroup. And it was funny, that the encouragement from the boys was the inverse of what you typically get—on these runout pitches they were saying “Hey man, come on back down. If you don’t like it, don’t do anything reckless. A major fall here and we’re fucked.” Whereas normally there’s a lot more “You got it! You got it!”

We trust each other so much. If one of us had bailed off a lead, and said “I don’t have it,” we would have just headed down. In that environment, bailing off of a lead would have meant bailing all the way down the mountain. There wasn’t enough time for us to be messing around.

This is an aside, but on the very first pitch, while placing a small stopper, I dropped the entire rack of them—except for the little purple stopper still in my hand. That added to the feeling of commitment: heading up this giant face with a bit more than a single rack of cams, three beaks, one nut, and some ice screws. It was part of the reason to name the route One Way Out.

This interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

The post One of Alaska’s Most Committing Faces Finally Gets a Direct Start appeared first on Climbing.