We left our house at 2:30am and were on skis for the approach just as dawn was breaking at 4:30am. It was a beautiful morning with fog rising over Big Lake and Mt. Washington on the horizon.
We skied the Big Lake road on the approach and into the forest. We soon found the conditions to be too difficult on skis. The snow was deep enough, but there were dangerous tree wells and very inconsistent conditions being this late in the year, so we strapped our skis to our backpacks and began the long and arduous 6.5 mile, 7.5 hour approach on foot.
We stashed our skis at the base of the North Ridge and continued up. The temperature was probably in the 60s along the North Ridge and the snow was still firm. We put on our crampons about half way up the ridge and continued up to the Gendarm spires that shield the summit pinnacle from easy access. We traversed around these spires and up to a notch just below the pinnacle proper.
I led the first pitch up a snow covered ramp where Drew hammered in two snow pickets for protection. I went around to the east and up about 30 meters of rotten rock until I found a good block of rock where I placed protection to belay Drew.
Drew led the second pitch up a small chimney and around to the west to the next belay station about 40 meters above. Once I reached Drew, we switched places again and I led the final pitch to the summit using about 50 meters of rope.
The summit pinnacle was a mixed climb of rock and small snow fields that sloughed-off snow as we ascended. We wore our crampons the whole way up. We reached the summit at 2:00pm and found that we were the first to sign the summit register this year. We rappelled down the summit pinnacle to “The Notch” and began our descent of the ridge.
The rest of the trip went without incident. As we reached our skis, we found bear tracks close by. We had been following our own tracks back down and the bear tracks crossed our track.
We took a compass heading and went directly cross-country to the East side of Big Lake and around to the truck arriving at 8:30pm. Just in time to shoot a couple of photos of the mountain on the drive out. The trip took us 16 hours to cover 13 miles with 3,100 feet of elevation gain.
