The High Lonely: June 2010

My dad, brother, and Bob, Rob and Megan all headed up to Mt Stuart in lieu of heading to Rainier this weekend. Leavenworth promised better weather anyway. So we did the obligatory post-holing up the approach and cut off the Stuart Lake trail to do some cross-country travel that included some nice boulder hopping. We soon were heading up hill and then hit the basin below Stuart. We set up camp and brewed up and ate food and boiled water. There was plenty of running water around so no melting was needed. Anyways, we woke up at 3:30 and weren't hiking until 5 am. My dad decided he had gotten his fill with the approach and stayed in camp. With the late start we hit the ground running. We made it to the top of the first rise in pretty good time and roped up. It was around this time that the sun hit the snow. Postholing ensued, so I took the route into the shady area to the left. Here it was steeper but quite easy. I placed some pro in this section because it was a little steep. We left the pro for Megan, Rob and Bob because they hadn't brought pickets or screws. We finished up the steep section and collected our pro. Megan, Bob and Rob decided it was wise to head down at this point. Murray and I took off up the coulior and made great time. I led through the steep section and felt pretty solid. Snow came off of the rocks on the right but nothing too menacing. The last 200 feet to the notch above the coulior were pretty taxing. At the notch we rehydrated and ate some lunch. From here it was an interesting traverse to a nice headwall of sorts up to the false summit. Once we got to the false summit clouds started forming and obscuring our view. We could see the summit quite close to us, but Murray had some reservations related to the fact that he was dang tired. With a little pushing I managed to get us going. I led out and we got to the final headwall pretty quickly. At this point the visibility was about 40 feet due to thick clouds. We ended up to the right of the summit block. Looking up looked like some tricky mixed climbing that I wouldn't do under those conditions. Murray urged me to turn around. Just as I turned around and took a couple steps the clouds dissipated. We now could see the route traversed left and up the headwall. After finishing the headwall, I had one last tricky section through the rocks and rime ice. I placed a pretty marginal screw to protect the move and we were on the summit. I belayed Murray up, we took a summitshot and grumbled about the lack of views. We found an easier way off to descender's right and made our way back down as two guys came up from the Cascadian Coulior side. They looked like they were cruising up there. We saw one more soloist at the false summit who was skiing down. That looked like a lot of fun. We finished up downclimbing to the notch in pretty good time, protecting when we felt like it with some t-slots. Here we unroped, took off our crampons, and got ready for a glissade. I plunge stepped down the first corridor and did a couple practice glissades. About 2/3 of the way down I glissaded while self-arresting because I didn't want to mangle myself. Murray apparently didn't notice I had self-arrested while glissading and I told him it was fun. He then started glissading and near the bottom started tumbling! I freaked out and yelled up to see if he was ok. He said he thought so. I took pictures as he finished the glissade. When he got to me he seemed fine but then I saw blood on his chin and he turned his face and showed me blood on the side of his face. I got out some kleenex and cleaned him up. I found a quarter length cut on the inside of his ear next to his ear canal. It wasn't bleeding bad but I could pull it and separate the front of his ear from his skull (I think that makes it sound worse than it was but it really was doing that). He was coherent and mostly calm so we resumed our glissade. We finished up and packed up camp and made the slog out. We got McDonalds and went to the ER where Mur was stitched up. We headed back to the cabin and crashed out.