Mount Fernow North Face not even Attempt - September 4-5, 2004


Snow-dusted Mount Fernow.

The north face of Fernow seemed like it might answer the call for elusive Cascades alpine ice, despite beta from someone who said it was pretty much a worthless climb.

Bill and I set off Saturday morning from the Phelps Creek trailhead, hoping to camp near the SW route on Fernow, and circumnavigate the mountain the following day, climb the north face, and continue all the way out.

Bill hiking up some scree to the notch.

We made it up to the 7700ft notch west of 7-Finger Jack in 4 hours, with our too-heavy packs laden with ice climbing gear.

The "fingers" of 7-Fingered Jack from the notch.

Peering over the notch, we saw a disgusting steep gully filled with orange dirt. The descent on this side was supposed to be just some 40 degree snow, so we figured this must not be it - and I recalled something about the right way being just left of the obvious notch. So we scrambled up to various points on the ridge west of here, and finally saw a way down through talus and scree.

Down through loose stuff, we finally encountered a cliff band. Hmm. Below the cliff there was more scree and an ice patch, a remnant from the glacier that used to be here. After some probing around, Bill found an exposed loose ledge that cut through the cliff to where we could get onto the ice.

Bill descends into the valley.

It was exposed, but it went, and once on the other side, Bill scooted across a small ice patch to descend the scree adjacent to the ice. I decided I had had enough scree, and put on my crampons to go down the ice. It was only 35 degrees or so, but very hard. Eventually, after nearly biting it when one foot slipped, I decided the rear points on my crampons weren't sharp enough, and I got off onto the scree.

This next section sucked... we entered a band of orange talus that was some of the loosest piece'o'shit talus I've ever seen. Huge boulders moved. The talus seemed to be piled on smooth slabs, making slippage a certainty. Several times it seems, I narrowly avoided my legs being crushed by the rocks. This was wearing me down.

Down is blue, up is red.

We finally got down to the flat basin where travel was easier. It had taken about 2 hours to descend 1100ft. We decided this was far enough, and set up camp here near a brown pond. The clouds thickened and started to envelop the peaks more and more.

Cool light.

Talk turned to the plan tomorrow... any more terrain like that, and we would be too long on the trip around to the North Face. We guessed on times we needed to be at the car, back at camp, at the summit, at the base of the face, etc... It seemed like we wouldn't really have enough time. On top of that, was the north face still there? The glaciers seemed to have retreated a bunch...

We got in the tent when it started to rain, around 5:30pm. We stayed in the tent until 8am the next morning, when the rain stopped. It didn't rain hard, but it was on and off all night, hard enough to break through the seams of my tent, and amuse us with Chinese water torture all night, and puddles along the edges of the tent floor.

The sun was out quickly after the rain stopped, and we could see the surrounded peaks were dusted with new snow above 8000ft.

Fingers of Jack on Sunday morning.

Hmm... what to do? In the end we decided to go take a look at the approach to the north face, and maybe climb one of two little nearby couloirs shown on the topo map as having ice. We would pass by the top, and then the bottom of these couloirs on the way to the north face, so it was a convenient "backup" plan.

Well, we passed by the top of one of them, and saw it was now dirt-filled, not ice-filled. Well actually there was one small patch of ice in it. We scrambled across a ridge and looked into the other one. Also no ice.

Bill scrambles over to take a look at the second couloir.

The first one looked like it might provide reasonably quick access to the basin below though, instead of hiking down a ridge to the west.

Copper Mountain.

We decided to check out the ridge to the west, to see if we could catch a glimpse of the north face. We couldn't really, but we did find an excellent trundle spot, and spent an hour pushing boulders off into the abyss.

It was definitely the best trundling either of us had ever done. The ridge top was well-endowed with large loose boulders, and there was quite a drop off before they would hit, and tumble into the valley (800ft below). Some of the best trundles were:

We knew we had done some good trundling when there was an almost constant flow of dust rising up one of the couloirs.

Soon it was time to head back. We heard voices. It was the second time I heard them. Someone on Fernow's standard route? We never saw anyone. Weird.

Profile of the north side of Fernow. The route we wanted to do is out of sight beyond the dark ridge. Our planned approach would have brought us down in the valley below the bottom of the picture, up along the treed ridge in the center, then along the moraine/ice patches around the corner into the high valley.

Back at camp, Bill needed to do some engineering work before we packed up. He noticed an abandoned water channel that fed into our dismal brown drying out lake. It was only about four feet from the main water channel. With a few minutes work, he had dug a trench, and diverted part of the flow into the dry channel. I helped him dig a second trench, diverting even more of the flow.

We watched as the water flowed over the gravel, carving new channels, and finally, 10 minutes later, reaching the brown lake. Soon there was a decent flow going into the lake. However, there was also a decent flow going towards the tent and all our gear. We tried to stop the newly formed braids, but it was not possible. We quickly moved our gear to the higher spots of gravel, and moved the tent just in time!

Note: we do not believe we were being environmentally damaging - I'm sure the channels change every year during the spring melt.

Upper section of the Gloomy Glacier.

To return to the trailhead, we decided to travel up the Gloomy Glacier partway, and then traverse right. This would avoid the nasty orange talus.

On the way up the glacier, Bill suggested we might climb the glacier to its head, ending up somewhere on the west ridge of Jack. I said ok, and we started doing this - but when we had a view of the headwall above the glacier, I said I didn't think it was a good idea this late in the day. If the headwall didn't go (its upper portion was well snow-covered, so probably not that steep, but the bottom portion looked questionably steep), we would have to back down a lot of ice to go back the way we had come. It was getting late, almost 3pm.

Bill ascending ice on the Gloomy Glacier.

So, we "cut our losses", and backed down a few hundred feet, and began traversing over to the exposed ledge. More really shitty scree and talus, and finally we were above the ledge, and scrambled easily back to the ridge top.

Bill approaching the shitty ledge on icy scree.

From here, we motored as best we could. Back in Leroy Basin, there were several groups camped. A woman asked us where we'd been. She said "the boys" got up this morning in the rain and headed up Mt Fernow. Ah, this must be the voices we had heard. "They should be back any minute now" she said. We said "Uh-huh", and snicked and left. 2 hours and 20 minutes, 5.5 miles and 4200ft after leaving the notch, we were back at the trailhead

Terraserver photo from September 1998. The blue lines indicate what we saw were the glacier limits currently. We could not see above dotted line, but we couldn't see any continuous ice, so it has retreated somewhere beyond the line.

I think I'd try this climb again if I had 3 days, and if I could find out if the north face ice apron still exists.