Skywalker Coulior
I have never done a “real” coulior climb and an opportunity came up to give Skywalker a shot with a meetup group. Skywalker gets up to 70 degrees at the top and I was very nervous the night before to a point of almost not sleeping. I am afraid of heights and exposure so I kept telling myself that I’d go as high as I’m comfortable and then turn back.
When we got to the base and I looked up, it didn’t look too bad. Putting on crampons, helmet and grabbing the ice axe gave me some additional confidence and we set off. From the bottom, we saw one person about 2/3rd of the way up starting on the steep part. Skywalker has a steeper (50%) part about a quarter of the way up, mellows out a bit to 40 or so at the half way point and then progresses all the way to 70 at the top. I got past the first steep part with no problems. Snow conditions were great, there were kicked steps in some places and I was feeling great physically and, most importantly, mentally.
We sat down to rest about half way up and then my brain started kicking in. I looked down at the slope and was fairly comfortable about being able to self arrest in case of a fall. Then I looked up: the person we saw starting on the steep section only got about at most 50ft higher than when we first saw him half an hour ago. This began to worry me and I started thinking about why he could be taking such a long time. When the snow is that steep, it’s almost impossible to go down safely and getting stuck on the way up could be even worse if weather rolls in, and there were some nasty looking clouds on the horizon. I tried to put any fears aside, got out my second ice axe and started climbing again. This time, something felt different. The crampons weren’t as sticky, the ice axes weren’t biting as much, the legs weren’t as stable. Although the snow was now much more noticeably softer than when we started, my head started getting in the way of the climbing. My legs were beginning to feel shaky, I was starting to lose some balance and kept looking down, then up. After standing still for about 10 minutes, I decided to go back down.
Of course going down a 50 degree slope isn’t a very trivial thing either. After carefully making my way down with the two axes ahead of me for a few steps, I got a lot more comfortable with the decent and just enjoyed my way down. One more member of our party joined shortly. The clouds got worse and it started hailing, I looked up and it looked like some of the people in our group made it to the top while some were on the steepest part of the mountain. At that point, there is little we could do and we just headed back slowly back to the car while taking pictures and wondering if we should have kept going or not and reflecting on the climb.
As it turns out, we made the right decision to turn around. The 7 people that made it to the top got caught in an electrical storm to a point where axes and poles were buzzing with electricity. One person took a dangerous fall that could have ended in disaster at the top. Everyone ended up literally running down the mountain to save themselves, that is not a position I would have wanted to be caught in.
Unfortunately I don’t have any pictures of the climb, but the following are from the meetup: http://www.meetup.com/fierceplanet/photos/632524/