Home Turf: Exploratory climbing on the east side of Mount Logan
The John Lauchlan Award for 2020
The John Lauchlan Award is awarded annually to lightweight Canadian teams pursuing bold, non-commercial climbing objectives. For 2020, but Covid-delayed, two teams were announced as winners, the first of which is profiled here (we’ll profile the second in the coming weeks). See JohnLauchlanAward.com for more information. The ACC has been proud to support the JLA since its inception. - ed
Peter Hoang, Ethan Berman and I are very proud to have been chosen as recipients of the 2020 JLA. Here’s a quick description of our planned trip to the eastern side of Yukon’s Mt. Logan. We feel there are still beautiful unclimbed lines on both Mount Logan and surrounding peaks from this aspect. This expedition will represent the most remote adventure any members of this team have faced. However, we feel confident our past experiences and team work have prepared us well for this trip.
Objectives Overview
Mount Logan has various aspects worthy of further exploration. For this expedition, we’re choosing to focus on the East and Southeast aspects of the mountain. This will be our first visit to the area, and although we have several new route ideas, we are well aware that alpine climbing is condition dependent and we will be flexible with objectives as our trip progresses. However, our focus will be on technical ice and mixed routes, climbing in alpine style while honouring our own risk tolerances. We’ll bring modern alpine touring ski gear, both for increased safety during glacier travel as well as acclimatization options.
Our first inclination was to focus on establishing a new route up the 2500m Southeast Face, establishing our base camp below the face. But through research and personal communications, we gained an understanding of the limited opportunities for acclimatization when based below the Southeast face. In fact, the only successful ascent of the SE Face (Okada Yokoyama, 2010) acclimatized by walking approximately 30km to the base of the East Ridge and climbing over 8 days, subsequently returning to their glacier camp below the SE face. They wrote they “couldn’t find routes safe enough to acclimate on” from the Seward glacier.
For ease of logistics and acclimatization, the expedition will fly into the standard basecamp for the East Ridge on Mount Logan, the Hubbard Glacier camp. Numerous climbing opportunities exist around here, including acclimatization trips up the East Ridge (our proposed descent route), both snow and more technical routes on the south face of Mt. McArthur and first ascent opportunities on the south face of Catenary Peak.
Once fully acclimatized, the expedition will ski traverse approx. 25km via Water Pass to reposition below the southeast aspect of Mount Logan, Seward Glacier camp. Starting our trip below the east ridge will also allow us to cache equipment for a descent off Mt. Logan and the walk back to our base on the Seward Glacier camp. The SSE ridge is one of the remaining large ridge climbs to be completed on Mt. Logan. The southeast face has only one established route, I-TO (2500m, ED+ M6 WI5).
We’re fully aware of the scale of these world-class objectives. These will require multiple days of stable weather, an acclimatized, synergetic team and good conditions. Even still, we are keen to venture onto the largest non-polar ice cap for our formative experiences in the Greater Ranges.
Specific Objectives
Although we plan to have an open-minded approach to our objectives, several striking features have caught our attention.
Objective #1: The unclimbed south face of Catenary Peak
We will attempt this feature (shown in pink on photo) from our base camp below the East Ridge of Mount Logan.
Objective #2. The southeast face of Mt. Logan.
We may establish an advanced camp below the SSE ridge/SE Face of Logan to attempt this face, shown in pink on the photo.
Our Team
Peter Hoang, Ethan Berman, and myself all live in Canmore and have honed our skills climbing alpine, mixed, and ice routes in the Canadian Rockies. We are all at an exciting point in our climbing careers, having built confidence and expertise locally, and we are beginning to venture out to the greater ranges to put our experience to the test. That being said, our team does have experience at altitude and on long expeditions that will prove vital to our success on the wildly remote icefields of the Yukon. Ethan and myself have both been on successful expeditions to Denali, which present a similar challenge in terms of the logistics of living on a glacier for weeks on end while staying mentally and physically prepared for attempts at difficult routes. Ethan and Peter have also both climbed at altitude in Bolivia and Peru respectively, on remote and difficult routes. Most importantly, we are good friends and trust each other’s judgement and risk tolerance in the mountains.
From the entire team: Thank you to the John Lauchlan Award for selecting our application for the JLA 2020.