| Formidable | ||||||||||||||
|
March 20-21, 2006 
Dave had been talking about Formidable for a while. He had scoped the Formidable Glacier during multiple trips to Spider, and he was itching to ski the glacier. After thrashing up the Middle Fork with Sky and Ben a few weeks prior, he convinced me that the approach was okay. We hoped that the weather window would hold; NWAC was calling for worsening weather by Tuesday. We left Seattle at 4:45 and drove to Darrington, where we sampled the fine culinary delights of the gas station deli. After procuring donuts, Dave gunned his truck up the Cascade River Road, through the snow, up to the gate. The weather was gorgeous, so we cheerfully ate the donuts, loaded the packs, and headed up through the old, overgrown, sun-speckled road. A pleasant hour's trot brought us to the famed South/Middle Fork split, where I did my utmost to duplicate Sky's shot of Ben next to the sign. Dave kept remarking on how easy the approach is when it's not dark.
After correcting my instinct to charge pell-mell up the wrong drainage, we scrumbled up talus and under (and over) logs, past the waterfall. On to the snow! Ross and Sky's footprints from the previous week were intact and well, and the frozen snow made travel over the lightly-snowed-over talus fields quite reasonable. I noted that exiting, with soft snow and the attendant postholing into talus, would be fairly miserable. No matter, we had a valley to skin up! The talus gradually grew more and more snow-covered, and a short three hours after leaving the car we hit the creek. Skin tracks led up the valley, so Dave switched to his boots, and we both switched to skins. Some entertaining travel along the banks of Cleve Creek, and the hardman skintrack took off to the right. We continued up the Middle Fork valley. There was enough snow for skinning, but not enough snow to smooth out the forest floor; while our general path was fairly flat, the local maxima and minima ate away at my patience, and Dave stoically listened to my whining. Once we hit the open flats and recieved views of Johannesberg, the Triplets, Magic Mountain, Hurry-Up, and the like, my tone changed remarkably, and Dave stoically listened to my frenzied and giddy exclaimations following every new line spied. I was impatient to see our line, but as we skinned up the creekbed, the Formidable remained hidden. Upon arriving at the base of the gully leading up the Middle Cascade Glacier, Dave suggested camping. I figured that the crux the next day wouldn't be the climb or the ski, but rather the rather reversing the long-ish approach. I pushed for a bivy right below the route, and Dave acquiesced. We dumped the packs at the base of the Middle Cascade Glacier, just seven hours from the car. We dug out a hole, and pitched my Beta-Light. Clouds rolled in, but remained high. Very, very slight snow flurries periodically showered us as we melted snow inside the 'tent'. I love floor-less shelters. After eating and melting water for the next day, we climbed into our sleeping bags, set the alarm for 5am, and began the long wait for morning. The wind never grew too stong, and I finally fell asleep sometime around midnight.
I awoke to the alarm with cold feet. A cursory check showed clearing skies and a sucker hole right over Formidable. YEAH. After struggling into our boots and reclaiming the poles, skis, and ice tools that staked down the tent, Dave set a skin track to below the seracs on the Formidable Glacier. He continued breaking trail as I lagged behind. We took a break once above the threatening seracs, and laughed that we were only one hour out of camp, and were already halfway up the route. The weather was getting better and better, and the route was quite moderate. We skinned to within 50 feet of the col, where the slope hit 45 degrees. This was a bit too steep to skin, so we removed our skis, loaded them onto our packs, and started postholing. Dave swam up to the col, where he was rewarded for his efforts with a brief plunge into a moat next to some rocks. I followed, and we soaked in the views. Mountains lined the horizon in every direction, and we had 3000 feet of (mostly) powder below our feet.
Dave dropped in from the col while I took photos with his (film!) SLR. He returned the favor from below. We leapfrogged down the rolling glacier, finding a field of powder, then crust, then powder, then crust. Many fine turns were found. We zoomed across the debris field below the seracs, and found more powder below the striking couloir climber's left of the glacier. Some barely supportable crust skiing brought us back to our bivy.
After packing up, we skied down the gully, tried to traverse high, and failed. We took a break right before heading into the woods. We continued. After a while we succumbed to the inevitable and applied skins for the flat woods. We finally took the skis off just past where we had originally switched to skins on the approach. Very tedious log-hopping and talus thrashing convinced me that if there is a hell, this terrain will be saved for us there. I was pleased to finally stumbled out onto the trail. After eating a few more jellybeans, we headed up the trail, which has numerous annoying uphill sections, and a lot of downed trees that I hadn't remembered from the walk in.
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)