The Yentna Report (Hardwear Sessions)

By Fredrick Wilkinson

Spindrift is a funny thing — it can be soft and cuddly, but at the same time extremely persistent.

Imagine getting slowly strangled to death by a very big and very wet stuffed teddy bear. That's what it's like being caught in spindrift at an alpine bivy.

It was 2 PM on the afternoon of May 3rd. I was sharing my EV2 with two six foot giants: Ben Gilmore and Peter Doucette. We were bivied at the base of the Fin Wall, above the Yentna Glacier south of Mount Foraker. The wall had never before been attempted, a fact that probably had something to do with the six miles of convoluted crevasse fields, seracs and icefall that lay below. We had just spent seven hours running the gauntlet through this maze to reach this spot, a narrow ledge dug out of a 50 degree snow slope.

I poked my head outside. Strange. It was barely snowing. Yet the 4,000 feet of concave mixed ground above conspired to create a raging torrent that slammed down on the tent every several minutes. Most alarmingly, snow was getting packed between the wall of the ledge we had dug and us: we were slowly, yet forcefully, getting pushed off the mountain. As if to accent our the merits of this chosen bivy site, a small rock dropped from somewhere above, creating a neat little two inch rip in the tent fabric above Ben's head... Hmmmm...

When the proverbial s@#t hits the fan — an alpinist grabs a shovel and starts digging. I put myself on a 30 foot tether, waded a little ways down the snow slope, and started going for China. A couple hours later we had a excavated a sort of long culvert tube, about 5 feet in diameter and ten feet in length. It was bounded on one side by a seventy degree rock wall, and on the other by sugar snow. Definitely a step down in the accommodations; the evacuated tent served admirably as a makeshift door.

4 am came surprisingly fast. Three guys, eating breakfast (oatmeal and earl grey), putting on their boots, and going to the bathroom is a bit like a nightmare game of twister. By 6, though, we were out the door and climbing. The climbing was spectacular — a handful of serious mixed leads with lots of snow climbing mixed in between to allow us to make timely progress. After 15 hours of climbing, at 9 PM, we were standing on the summit ridge looking off the other side at tundra beyond. Though the summit of the Fin beckoned, maybe another two hours away, a thick soup of cloud simmered over the rest of the range.

We started a brew and considered our options.

Was the weather getting better or getting worse? Who knew? We had no forecast or way to communicate with the outside world. Come to think of it, in two weeks we hadn't seen a single plane. I thought about the 20 odd rappels we needed to establish back to the cave, and then the winding ski past all those seracs and over all those crevasses, and then carrying my skis up and over the icefall and down climbing that snow couloir ..... Most of all, I thought about being stuck back in that cave if the weather did shut down, running out of food and fuel as we were slowly asphyxiated and buried by a giant wet panda bear.

We decided to head home. It was the best decision we made the entire trip.

Freddie Wilkinson, Ben Gilmore, and Peter Doucette were awarded a Mugs Stump Grant for this expedition.

You can read more about the climb at www.alpinist.com