At 2 am on Christmas morning Jeff and I woke up to get ready to climb Mount Avalanche, one of the peaks suggested to us by our instructors as a good objective after Mount French.
The previous day we took a few photos of Avalanche from the summit of Mount French and the Quarterdeck to compare with the snow conditions pictured in the guidebook when we got back to the hut. The grades and route descriptions in mountaineering are normally based on the routes being ‘in condition’, so we were a little concerned to see much of the rock route covered in snow in our photos, but not enough not to give it a shot. We reminded ourselves we could always turn around at any time if it looked like progress wasn’t safe, and the ‘in condition’ grade for the route should have been well within our comfort range.
We took a bit longer than we should have to get ready and were out the door by 3:45 am. As we started up the 850 vertical metres of French Ridge from the hut, the sun wouldn’t be up for a while and thick cloud limited our visibility to just a few metres. The warmish temperatures the night before meant that we didn’t get a good freeze and the snow was still rather slushy. However soon we found the lovely fresh bootprints of the Aspiring crew and they made our progress a bit easier. Following the bootprints, we made it over the Quarterdeck at 6:30 am, stopped for a quick break and began trekking across the Bonar Glacier towards Mount Avalanche.
When crossing the glacier we tried to position the rope between us perpendicular to the direction we thought the crevasses would be running underneath us, to lessen the chance of both of us falling in the same crevasse. Occasionally the cloud would clear in front of Mount Avalanche and we would take some photos of our route ahead in case we got lost later, and took screenshots of our GPS location on our phones in case we had to navigate back through the Flight Deck (the area of steep snow ‘bowls’ in front of the rock face) in a whiteout.
Getting up onto the West Ridge was much less tricky than it looked from a distance, aside from getting over an awkward bergschrund (a large crevasse where the glacier meets the mountain), which we had to us ice axes to climb over. Here we found a flat-ish spot to stop for a feed around 8:45 am, and got all our gear out to prepare for the rock climb.
We turned our heads to the sound of Jeffrey’s helmet bouncing down the rocks beneath us. It was too far gone that we couldn’t chase it, we could only watch and hope it stopped soon enough that we could abseil down to get it. The helmet bounced, and rolled, and slid down a large patch of snow that looked like it might slow the helmet to a stop… before it teetered over another edge, rolled and bounced some more and then fell off a large cliff out of sight .
The whole ordeal could have lasted a solid fifteen seconds.
“What happened there? “
“I don’t know, I put it just there.” **Proceeds to point to the corner of a large rock, sloping gently downhill**
“Ah.”
We started up the ridge roped up for simul-climbing (both of us climbing simultaneously with 30-40 m of rope and a few pieces of trad gear between us at all times), pretty confident the chance of a fall on this scrambling terrain was very low, but it’s nice to have the reassurance of protection. I got three pieces up the climb before Jeffrey called out:
“Stephen, are you feeling comfy there?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I need to take a shit.”
Jeff had mentioned he was having a bit of gastric upset earlier so he’d taken one of my poo bags just in case before I started climbing. He then tied me off and to preserve the pristine alpine environment, did his thing with the poo bag while I chilled partway up the face.
After we were ready to go again we made quick progress up the ridge, climbing 100-150 m before I ran out of gear, constructing an anchor and belaying Jeff up to me to regroup.
From here the climbing looked less easy and we ended up pitching the last few hundred metres to the summit. The terrain wasn’t too steep, but slippery, slabby and full of very loose flakes that would flex when you pulled on them and occasionally come out in large blocks. A lot of the rock was also covered in ~20 cm of snow, which made climbing very slippery if you stepped through to the smooth slab underneath. The combination of this meant there was a reasonable chance we could fall at any time, which was a risk we wouldn’t have been comfortable with if we were simul-climbing. We took our time to find good protection in the chossy rock and so felt pretty safe while we were climbing up. The only nervous parts were where we had to cross between areas of protectable rock via sections of snow, too shallow for us to drive a snow stake in. Luckily for me Jeffery bravely offered to lead all the pitches I would’ve been slower or less comfortable with.
Despite the chossy rock and how long it was taking, we were enjoying the climbing and reached the summit around 2:45 pm, feeling very isolated up in the clouds. We discussed how we hoped the other six on their adventures were going and how to get down. Like most alpine routes, there wasn’t any description of the descent in the guidebook, and not finding any signs of a separate abseil route anywhere around the summit we decided the safest way would be to go back down the way we came.
On the way up we’d made a note of a few slings we’d seen left around spikes and boulders for previous parties to rap off, and tried to link up an abseil route between them to get down. Twice we couldn’t find existing cord to rap off for the next pitch, and had to leave a club sling and some old tape a fellow climber in Fridge Ridge Hut donated to us. It was pretty nerve-wracking trying to find a spike that wasn’t loose and trusting your life to it, but we backed up the anchor whenever we could with a cam or nut for the first abseiler down. When we got back to the section we simul-climbed, we stopped abseiling and simul-climbed the rest of the way down which was a lot more efficient and had the added benefit of keeping us warm.
To be honest the level of risk on the way down was slightly above was we were confident with and we were pretty relieved to be finally off the mountain. It had also been lightly raining/snowing on us the whole way down and we were starting to get mentally fatigued with the long day.
The glacier walk back to the hut was pretty quick, in high spirits and spurred on by the desire to get back while it was still Christmas. We made it back to the hut at 11 pm, and had enough energy left to cook a satisfying Christmas dinner of spag bol with heaps of cheese. We found out from the last other climbers still up that Matt, Brendon, Ash and Jenny were back safe asleep but Maria and Henry had bailed to Colin Todd Hut, so we saved the Baileys we were planning on having that night until we were all together.
We headed off to bed past midnight chatting about how keen we were to finally have a rest day tomorrow (spoiler: we walked out all the way to the car the next day with half our food).
