Chasing Early Season Ice in Canada: Part 2

The stuninningly gorgeous cirque in which the route Rocket Man is located. You can see this classic line on the steep rock face in the right hand side of the picture. It starts in the just at the tip of a tree, that impossibly gorgeous series of hanging daggers that trace a line to the top... yup thats it!

Day 2

I was quite intimidated by the plan for the day. JJ wanted to get on one of the most difficult established routes in the area, named Rocket Man. The route is quite long, featuring 9 pitches in total, many of which are mixed ice and rock, difficult, and in some cases very scary because of limited gear possibilities. To make things worse, Mikel and JJ decided who would lead which pitches while I was taking a shower the night before, and in typical gentleman fashion, they assigned the most notoriously scary pitch to me. An M6+ pitch with no gear to access the ice above it. I was definitely concerned about even being able to climb this pitch at all. Mikel reassured me by explaining we had about a 20% chance of even getting on the route. He had attempted this route a couple times before and had not even managed to start the climb due to avalanche danger, and other hazards. The conditions have to be just right to get this climb. Rocket man is up in a bowl surrounded by steep faces. At the top of the cirque is a massive glacier hanging over the valley. The whole area presents significant avalanche danger as there are steep snow slopes high above where you have to hike in when approaching the route. We started early in the morning because the day was anticipated to be quite long due to the amount of climbing, and length of the approach. Additionally it is a two and a half hour drive from Mikel’s place in Canmore. The three of us crammed into JJ’s Toyata Tundra, I napped in the back with no seats. We arrived at the trailhead just before 7AM. The route can be seen from the road, and it looked amazing! It is one of the most beautiful looking climbs I have ever seen. Multiple ice daggers hanging from the cliff. Of which any individual one would have been an ultra classic climb in its own right.

“Its in really good condition right now!” The Poles say. I’m starting to get simultaneously psyched because it is such an incredible looking route, and terrified because the fact that it is in condition means I might actually have to push my limits for the day and get really scared.

Mikel stands on a frozen lake during our approach. You can view Rocket man in the upper left, just to the right of the glacier.

We begin the hike, cutting through a tightly wooded forrest. The trees claw at our clothes and backpacks as if to rebel against our intrusion to the infrequently travelled area. We had been joking about bear attacks. Apparently some bears might not yet be in hibernation this early in the year. The jokes were just in fun, but in the low light and mist of the early morning, they started to get to me a little, and every noise in the woods makes the hair on my neck stand up a little and adds to my nerves for the day. We break out of the forest and come to a frozen creek. Mikel scampers across it without a second thought. He turns around with a huge grin on his face and says in his classic Polish accent that makes every sentence sound comical to me “ well that was quite lucky!” That was when I realized that he crossed the creek without even the slightest idea if the ice would hold his weight. A day of pushing our luck seems to be already off to a good start!

The rest of the approach goes relatively smoothly. We follow a semi frozen creek that leads to the upper bowl above tree line. As we near the base of the climb, there is an area that looks like it could be avalanche debri from a slide this year. This makes us move forward cautiously at first, but as we get closer we realize it isn't the compacted snow and ice that one would normally find in an avalanche zone, but solid frozen water Ice.

"We are standing on Rocket Man right now! The old one from last year." Mikel announces, and realization dawns on me. It stays cold enough all summer in the Canadian Rockies, that this massive volume of ice fell, and then never melted. So in a sense... you have to hike up last years Rocket Man just to get to the new one! We are forced to put our crampons on at this point as the slope steepens and becomes icier, and slick. We finally reach the base, and begin preparations for the transition between "advanced hiking" as we called it, and climbing.

I lead the first easy WI3 pitch. It was pretty mellow and a good warm up. A couple of short 5 meter ice steps lead to a 10 meter snow slope. I worked my way up to a well bolted belay station, and Mikel and JJ followed me up. The next pitch was a similarly easy pitch, traversing to the right a little bit, and then working up a low angle rock face that had a smear of ice on it. It lead to the base of the column of ice on which the first crux pitch began.

JJ leads out on the hollow column at the beginning of the crux pitch.

JJ was set to lead this gnarly looking pitch. It had what looked to be a pretty good, but steep column, leading to a rock face with minimal features in a right facing corner. Although it was bolted, this bit looked technically difficult. Approximately 10 meters of dry tooling through this would lead to a curtain of ice daggers. I expected JJ to cruise up the first column, but upon reaching it, things appeared to already be more complicated then anticipated. JJ started moving much slower then expected, and he mentions something about the column being “hollow”. As I watch, I hear the gut wrenching sound of ice that is just not quite attached to rock as well as a climber would like. It makes these dull thumping sounds, like the noise a drum might make that is just slightly muted with a single hand lightly pressed on it as the musician plays. He works his way slowly up this precarious pillar, and it splits more and more frequently as he gets to the thinner portion at the top. It appears there won’t be much ice left to climb by the time he is done with it. After a few more exciting moments, he finally clips the first bolt 10 meters from the belay station. We all feel quite a bit more relaxed at this point. But the rock portion appears to be giving him more trouble as well. The route was originally climbed by another Polish climber named Raphael Slawinski, who is infamous for his M7 grade. He never graded any of his routes harder then M7… but the particular pitch that we were on was giving JJ, who I had seen onsight several M9’s, quite a bit of trouble.

After working the moves out for a bit, and resting on several bolts, JJ finally made it to the ice curtain. By this time, it was already 2 PM. At this time in the year, November, the days are quite short in Alberta. We expected it to get dark around 5 PM. With a solid 7 pitches left to climb, we decided it wouldn’t be prudent to continue climbing. “My spreadsheet says the chances of us reaching the top do not look good” said Mikel. We were all loath to bail on this epic line, but it seemed we just didn’t quite have time. Being in avalanche terrain all day can work a climbers nerves as well, and to some extent we were eager to get out of the impending danger. So we lowered off of the third pitch of Rocket Man, our strongest climber having just reached the ice of the first crux pitch.

JJ gives the first pitch of Rocket Man a solid effort

To Be Continued...