North Early Winter Spire: Early Winter Couloir. 04/21/2024
Text: Brandon Mooney
Pictures: Brandon Mooney, Andreea Gabor, Alexander Gorobets
Alexander, Andreea, and I climbed the Early Winter Couloir this past Sunday, 2 days after the highway opening. I hadn’t heard of this route but Alex invited me and the opportunity looked too good to pass up.
After a great day of skiing Saturday, we got a solid night’s sleep at the Blue Lake Trailhead and then drove to the Hairpin for a 5am start on Sunday. We put crampons on at the roadside, booting conditions were quite good lower down so we decided against bringing any flotation. The approach was a mellow 1200ft snow-walk up to the base of the couloir, steepening slightly before the start of P1.
The route: Alex led P1, a short step of alpine ice smeared on the right wall of the couloir.
After this we simul-soloed a few hundred feet of easy snow (P2) to the base of the third pitch
P3 starts at a fixed gear belay on the left wall, before the chockstone. I started up the pitch, placing a few cams lower down, and one very uninspiring stubby screw in the aerated ice that filled the right side of the chockstone. I read some trip reports that said this pitch was drytooling, but it is definitely mixed at the moment. I topped out onto snow above after making a few insecure, stemmy moves, and climbed snow to the base of a very short ice step. After much excavation, I was able to uncover a crack system on the right wall and built an anchor to belay the followers up.
P4, Alex and Andreea both led up steep snow and ice to the base of the cornice pitch, and built a picket anchor to belay me up. P5, Alex made quick work of this pitch, choosing the left side mixed option and then topping out onto the cornice above. Good torques and plenty of options for small cams, .01-.3, made for very enjoyable climbing. The topout was into sugary snow and felt very insecure. If you do choose the left side option for this pitch, there is a #3 crack just over the cornice and down left, I’d recommend placing a directional here for your follower, otherwise they may face a large swing if they blow the topout. The cornice itself was not very big or overhanging, so we weren’t extremely concerned about the objective hazard from it.
P6, Alex climbed an easy snow slope that led to the final rock pitches. This pitch followed a corner system up, and then went straight up a fairly featured face to a not so inspiring tree stump as a belay.
P7, I led the final easy rock to the summit proper, a few low angle moves until the topout, and then a walk to the summit proper, where I built an anchor and belayed up Andreea and Alex.
The descent: Thankfully, I had climbed the Northwest Corner route this fall, so I had a vague idea of where the first rap station was. I walked back down the climbing route until I got to where I topped out, then continued past this on easy ground until walking around a corner and arriving at the anchor. We made 2 rappels down to the gully, and downclimbed to another anchor that we rapped to the ground from.
The walk back to the car was pretty painless, going up around SEWS and taking a col down until we joined the ascent route.
Gear notes: