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Mount Harrison | 2011-08-07
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Joined CSMC again to attempt Mount Harrison which is most southerly peak of 11,000ers.
To Campsite (Day 1):
Good god, it was a long long drive!! From HWY 93, you have to drive 65 km on a gravel road then another 10 km on rougher an old logging road. You need a high-clearance car for the last 10 km, so if you don’t have one, you might have to backpack.
Approach Trail (Day 2):
The trail starts right at the campsite, but tricky part of this is that there are 2 trailheads. One that is more obvious (our ascent route, pink line) isn’t the trail for SW Face route. If you are doing SW, then follow our descent route, red line. (Except we made one mistake by walking away from the creek and ended up bushwhacking. For this route, stay near the creek all the time.) Trailhead for this route (red line) is quite tricky, so rather than trying to find trailhead, the best way is follow the creek from the logging road and bushwhack for very short distance, then you should find the trail. The trail may not be the best trail, but marked with color ribbons.
Routes:
There are few routes for this peak. 11,000er book covers few routes including SW route (our descent route). But Tom, the organizer of the club, also mentioned someone has done it from east most couloir in north face. Our ascent route was west most couloir route (see page 22). I am not sure if this is the west ridge route described in 11,000er book, but I didn’t want to do this route since I didn’t want to adventurous and ended up not be able to summit Harrison. I don’t want to have attempts on such a long drive, high-clearance required peak. But we ended up taking unknown west couloir route.
West Couloir Route:
There was bergschrund right below north couloir, but there wasn’t or at least we couldn’t see one at the bottom of west couloir. Couloir was around 40 to 60 degrees, despite warmer temperature; freeze was really good or too good that near the end of couloir it was pretty much frozen and very hard to make kick steps.
The Crux:
The crux of this route was after the couloir. In order to get on main summit ridge, we had to go up 80 m of exposed walls. We spent 90 minutes on this 80m. The wall looks quite intimidating but with proper route-finding, climbing can be reduced well within scrambling level. (doesn’t mean easy scrambling. It is series of difficult and climber’s scrambles. You need to be comfortable doing this level of scrambling with exposure.) The most important thing is keep looking for the easiest route up. Go left and right and check every possibility otherwise it will be more than scrambling. There were 2 moves that are almost vertical and vertical but both of them were less than 3 m high. Two things that you can’t get away with. No matter which line you pick, exposure will be there. And looseness of the rock is another, but what’s new with that? This 80 m up is absolutory no slip no mistake zone.
Once this is over terrain became gentle and it was easy walk to the summit ridge. We followed the ridge to the summit!!
Descent Route:
We took SW route described in 11,000er book. There was a cairn at GR279469, I think this cairn was indicating the descent gully, but we took different gully closer to the summit. Gully is steep and loose. Rockfall is a serious concern here. It’s one of these places your party members need to stay within few meters in distance.
After the gully, long sidehill traverse to Harrison-Folk col. Try to stay up higher elevation as you can so that you don’t have to lose too much elevation by going too far down.
Tips:
It’s probably better to do this late summer when creek isn’t so high from melted snow. We didn’t have trouble at all either crossing creek by car or following creek on foot (didn’t even get wet).
Another tip would be rather than being lazy and camp right at the end of the road, you can backpack little bit and bivy somewhere close to Harrison to save some time, especially if you are doing SW route, trimming distance would be a good idea.
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