Monday June 15th, 1998
We got up, had breakfast, and headed out. Bill, Tom, and I were on snowshoes, Don and Jack on skis. 20-30 minutes after starting, we met Pete, Tony, and Greg coming back. They had climbed what they thought was the peak only to find it was a false peak – and that they couldn’t safely traverse the ridge between false and real peaks. They had to descent about 800’ and them climb back up. They suggested we go round a different way and provided several route suggestions after that.
Headed off again across the open expanse we reached the peak, climbed it, and rested on top. On the way we spread out somewhat - there was a nice simple route I followed, until I reached two gigantic (20-50 meters across, 2-3km long) crevasses. While completely snow covered and very stable looking, prudence got the better of me and I traversed along it for over a km until I got to where the others had crossed. This is when it hit me how vast and big the area was – this was a large bowl on the side of a wide valley – yet was kilometers across. The whole valley was 15-30 km wide. Wild.
We climbed the peak, leaving out packs/skis/snowshoes 100-200 meters below the summit and did the rest of the ridge on foot from there. We used the level I had brought to verify it was the highest point – while all the data we had said it was, it never hurt to be sure. We took a couple of GPS readings, which we provided to various government entities. We found a decade old register hidden in the rocks on the east side of the summit. Register doesn’t sound quite right given that there have been less than a half dozen ascents of the peak. I had my picture take with my stuffed armadillo (with a cowboy hat, or course). Doesn’t everyone have a stuffed armadillo they take with to all the mountains they climb?
There were steep drops offs off the summit ridge. For some reason I was a bit spooked. In reality the ridge was easy and very safe – even if one did fall, it would just have been a kilometer long slide. I’m not quite sure why it was unnerving. Looking back I think it was the fact we were 160+km from other humans.
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