This is a part of my Cirque of the Unclimbables climbing trip in 2019.
Please search for “TheCirque2019” in my blog search or look for #cirqueoftheunclimbables in tag cloud for more posts from this trip.
August 13th, we started really early. We checked the approach trail and start of the climb the day before, so we were all ready! How early it was? We woke up as the day started at 00:00 on 13th. Then, left our base camp at 1:00am.
The approach was more difficult in dark, especially the second half of rocky sections where trail was hard to find. It took us about 1 hour and 50 minutes to get to start of the climb. Botch and I started climbing first because I had a camera and wanted to take photos of other party below us. I had never climbed with any camera gears before, and I immediately knew that it was a mistake… Climbing with my camera in my backpack was way harder than I imaged… I had to climb really slow, but I still had to use so much power. In addition, the first 2-3 pitches were wet, and I never climbed in wet condition neither… It seemed like that everything was trying to slow me down…
The day broke and we did not need headlamps anymore while we were still at the first few pitches. I felt so damned. I wished that I could climb better and faster. It was already past 8:00am when we finally entered the long chimney section. Then, we came to the big ledge at 13:30. This was where people bivy if they did it by two days. We planned to climb it in one go, however, we did not have any camping gears or extra food/water.
Because it was already past 13:00, Botch and I decided to bail. Chances were so low that we could summit and safely come back down. Yuki and Asako kept climbing.
We watched Yuki and Asako climbing the first pitch from the ledge, and then started rappelling down. It started raining soon after we started going down. We were not so sure of rappelling route and went back into the chimney. It was a wrong decision… All the rappel stations were climber’s right of the chimney, and it did not go back into the chimney. When we went to the chimney, our rope got stuck and had really a hard time going down. At the end, Yuki and Asako came down and helped us. They also bailed due to time and poor weather.
When we came back to the bottom, it was already 20:00. It was still bright, but it was too late for us and we were so tired. We soon slept in as we came back to the camp.
The next day, we woke up around 9:00am. It was rest day for us. 3 other members, Marubo, Yabu, and Suguru went to LFT from the morning. I was waiting for them to show up on the wall, but I did not.
The weather forecast was saying that a storm was coming in one or two days, so we decided to carry up the rest of our food at the float plane landing.
We enjoyed our breakfast and watched the sun and clouds drawing beautiful patterns on the wall. At 10:30am, the three members from our team came back. They did not climb LFT. It was too wet and there was other party before them as well.
I hoped that they could climb. Because I did not finish the whole route. The weather was not good in the morning, so it probably made the route wet. However the sky looked a little better around noon, so Yuki, Asako, Botch and I went down to Glacier lake to bring up more food.
As we had come up to Fairy meadow, we brought more climbing gears than food. Therefore, We had many heavier foods at the bottom. I tried to avoid any heavy stuff in my backpack because it was deadly tough to hike up the trail with heavy load. However, Yuki really pushed her limit and brought many heavy and tasty food, such as salami, cheese and more!
Weather forecast was not looking great, so we were not sure of what to do the next day. We slept in and waited for the sun to raise.
To be continued…
Sea to sky 