Its a rare day that I do everything I set out to. Thats just life though; we do the best we can with what time we have. This April the infamous kiwi Mike Madden and I took to the Alaska Range to try the Harvard Route on Mt. Huntington. It was first climbed in 1965 by David Roberts and others from the Harvard Mountaineering Club. The route was the mountain's second route, and in was a futuristic line for the era, raising the bar of alpine climbing in Alaska. Even today, as Mike and I discovered, actually summitting Mt. Huntington is a tantalizing and difficult task.
There is no easy way to the summit. As my friend Dylan Taylor says, mountaineering is defined as climbing up the easy way, alpine climbing is climbing up the difficult way. Any route up this peak is a true alpine adventure.
Paul Roderick flew us and three British dudes into the Tokositna glacier on April 13th. I've done a fair bit of flying in the mountains between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, and this was an exciting flight to say the least. Mike called it the most hairraising flight he's been on. We barely made it in, banking between patches of mountains barely visible between breaks in the clouds.
The following are some photographs of our attempts on the West Face Couloir and the Harvard route, both spectacular climbs.
West Face couloir
The bottom of the ice in the West Face couloir
The west face of Mt. Huntington
Mike Madden in the icefall leading up the the base of the West Face.
Tokositna Base camp
Its a rare day that I do everything I set out to. Thats just life though; we do the best we can with what time we have. This April the infamous kiwi Mike Madden and I took to the Alaska Range to try the Harvard Route on Mt. Huntington. It was first climbed in 1965 by David Roberts and others from the Harvard Mountaineering Club. The route was the mountain's second route, and in was a futuristic line for the era, raising the bar of alpine climbing in Alaska. Even today, as Mike and I discovered, actually summitting Mt. Huntington is a tantalizing and difficult task.
There is no easy way to the summit. As my friend Dylan Taylor says, mountaineering is defined as climbing up the easy way, alpine climbing is climbing up the difficult way. Any route up this peak is a true alpine adventure.
Paul Roderick flew us and three British dudes into the Tokositna glacier on April 13th. I've done a fair bit of flying in the mountains between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft, and this was an exciting flight to say the least. Mike called it the most hairraising flight he's been on. We barely made it in, banking between patches of mountains barely visible between breaks in the clouds.
The following are some photographs of our attempts on the West Face Couloir and the Harvard route, both spectacular climbs.
Mt. Huntington's West face and on the right skyline, our objective, the Harvard Route.
"Mad" Mike Madden jugging the Spiral Pitch on Mt. Huntington's Harvard route
Tokositna Glacier in April, from the "Nose" bivy.