New 5,000-foot Route Established on East Face of Alaska’s Mt. Dickey
This article originally appeared on Climbing
American alpinists Alan Rousseau, Matt Cornell, and Jackson Marvell--the same team who set and briefly held a speed record of 21.5 hours on Denali's famous Slovak Direct last year--have established a fresh new line up the East Face of Mt. Dickey (9,545ft) in Alaska's Ruth Gorge. The X-rated, mile-long Aim for the Bushes breaches difficulties up to AI 6 M6 and was taken down by the trio in a three-day effort, from March 31 to April 2.
Not a single pitch came easy, they told Climbing. The whole effort was uncertain, hence the route's name (a reference to a scene in the buddy cop comedy The Other Guys).
"That first day, I was high up on the first pitch," said Rousseau. The climbing was immediately quite dicey, and "I was already looking down at the glacier below and wondering, 'If things go sideways, could I kick off this wall and jump out, and be okay?'"
The line had been on the team's radar since 2019, when Marvell and Rousseau put up another bold line, Ruth Gorge Grinder (VI M7 AI 6+; 5,000ft) on the same face. "We saw [Aim for the Bushes] back then, but thought it looked a little too jeopardized by overhanging snow mushrooms inside of a tight chimney feature. It was still on our minds though, and as we flew in this year we saw it looked pretty good, a consistent white line, so we went for it." The route wasn't entirely virgin, however. Lower portions had been attempted by Jack Tackle in 2007, and by Andy Kirkpatrick and Paul Ramsden the year before, though neither team reached the summit.
Marvell, Cornell, and Rousseau took in about 800 feet of climbing on an exploratory mission a couple of days before launching, and even in those early sections, the climbing was unpredictable. "Alan opened up the first pitch, which looked pretty straightforward," said Cornell, "but once he got into it... it was a lot of overhanging snow that he had to dig through, hard to protect, there was some poor ice, and just a ton of digging that had to happen. That slowed us down and kept us guessing. Each pitch when you'd start up, you never really knew if it was going to shut you down or not."
But the route kept giving and giving. No pitch was ever a surefire sell, but each was eventually solved, and after this initial foray they felt confident enough to give it a go. "We made it basically to [Tackle's team's] highpoint, and it looked like a logical line," said Cornell. "Conditions were good. We thought we could probably get it done."
On March 31 the three set off from their glacier base camp with a dozen ice screws, a double rack of cams up to No. 3, a single 4, five beaks, a Spectre ice piton, and a couple of half-pickets for pro--the latter proved especially useful with the heavy snow in the feature.
Although they woke just after 4:00 a.m., they had a slow, somewhat demoralizing start under heavy katabatic winds hitting the glacier. "I don't think we even left camp until like 6:30," Cornell said. "It was super cold walking across the glacier." Despite their slow start the team made solid progress, firing approximately half of the face (2,500 feet) on the first day, before stomping out a bivy platform at 7:00 p.m..
Although the route gave way, the ice, especially on steeper sections, was very inconsistent, said Rousseau. "It was like eggshell ice, so as belayer you'd have no idea [of the quality] until you saw how the ice reacted to the climber's tool, whether they'd go in all the way to their shoulder when they swung or not. It was very time-consuming climbing."
The team was tricked into a slow start on the second day; they slept in waiting for the sun to hit their tent but cloudy skies prevented it from ever truly rising. "I don't think we got out of the tent until like 8:30," said Cornell, laughing. "We were sitting there bivied on the East Face... all frozen, telling ourselves, 'Okay we'll get up when the sun hits,' just waiting. Finally, I was like, 'Man, it's been kinda light for a while...' I looked at my phone and it was 8:00 a.m. and I was like 'Oh shit, we gotta go!'"
"I think that's probably part of the reason we had to bivy a second time," Cornell admitted.
Luckily, weather conditions held up nicely throughout the climb, although it stayed overcast the entire time. "Not bad weather, but not exactly splitter," said Cornell. "It was pretty cold, but not unreasonable. Kind of ideal honestly... You're not too cold, but also not getting extreme warming from the sun. Not much wind, no spindrift either. Overall, for ice climbing in the Alaska Range that early, I'd say it was good." "Cold, but not real high pressure, not real low pressure," Rousseau added.
Despite the unpredictable, often frustratingly slow nature of the climbing, there were plenty of pitches that proved to be real gems. "There were a handful of very dangerous tunneling pitches," said Rousseau, "but also a high amount of quality ice climbing, on the upper 1,000 feet especially. Matt's block on the first day had some very nice, consistent neve, and a few pitches of really steep, high-quality ice... pitches you'd want to climb even if it was one-pitch."
Rock quality was solid all the way through, Rousseau said, likely because the entire feature was water-polished. "I don't think I broke any holds, and never had to clear through any choss," he said. "I think our main complaint about the rock was there just weren't many options for protection. ... We probably used beaks more than any other piece of gear, other than our screws."
Although the climbing was relatively sketchy and uncertain, the trio didn't have any issues with motivation and feel they're all pretty like-minded, allowing them to move without deliberation on difficult terrain, a key factor in success for teams on a long, committing climb like this. "We're all pretty capable of climbing the same things, we have a lot of trust in each other, in our abilities," said Cornell. "We know the answer before we discuss things."
He and Rousseau said that despite the tenuous nature of the climbing, the team only stopped and really discussed what to do on one occasion. Their route runs parallel to another established climb, Andy Sharpe and Sam Chinnery's Snowpatrol (VI WI 5+; 5,200ft), and at one point the two routes nearly converge in a small snowfield. "So that was one of our options, bailing off our route and using Snowpatrol to get to the summit, if we don't like the climbing, instead of rapping our route." Here they weighed their options for a bit but decided to press on.
"Early on the second day, I also had two long leads that were both pretty dangerous," said Rousseau. "I was super cold--soaked--by the time I finished that. We stopped on top of that, I took in a bit of sun there to warm up, and ultimately we were like 'Okay let's see what the next pitch is like.' The next pitch went pretty fast, and so did the next, and before we knew it we were on top of the feature," he said. "There was never a time when someone wanted to go up and someone else wanted to go down."
Throughout the route, one major obstacle loomed in their minds: a massive, snow-mushroom-covered chockstone jammed into the upper ramparts of the system, approximately 4,000 feet up the wall. "All the way from the ground, we could see this big chockstone at the top of the feature," said Cornell.
"Coming up under it there was so much mental weight," Rousseau continued. "We thought we'd have to pull like a 20-foot off-width roof... but then we got up there and there was a freaking WI 4 behind the chockstone! We were preparing for an epic battle through the night, and then Jackson just popped up behind the chockstone like, 'Hey man, it's chill!' That was the coolest surprise on our route, for sure."
The team ended their second day shortly after this section, approximately 600 feet shy of the summit. No serious obstacles remained, but it was starting to get dark, and they knew the descent would take quite a bit longer without any light, so they decided to stop.
They moved much slower on their second day than their first--in fact, they'd planned to only bivy one night on the route, not two--but no singular pitch stymied them. It was merely the sustained, involved nature of the upper portion of the route. "Just a lot of stacked pitches, where you're doing these two-hour--if not longer--leads, finding your way," said Cornell. "One of these pitches Alan led, he had to tunnel behind [the ice] into a chimney, then climbed up and popped back out behind this overhanging snow mushroom. Very time-intensive stuff."
"So imagine you're in sustained 5.9 climbing, but to make progress you have to chop snow constantly," Rousseau elaborated. "You're in a squeeze chimney, but you have to remove the snow out of it every two feet just to progress. It's hard to find gear, it's insecure, you're worried about getting knocked off while you're chopping snow, sometimes blocks of snow you chop off falls down onto you."
For their bivies, the trio crammed together each night in a small two-man tent, sleeping head-to-toe. While the first night was fairly cozy, the second night was unplanned, and rather haphazard. They'd left the glacier on their first day with around 3,000 calories of food each (sparse nutrition for their eventual three days on-route).
"That second night we just had some hot cereal for dinner, that was all the food we had left," said Cornell. "The night was pretty whack. We didn't think we'd need [a second] bivy, so we'd just packed up our stuff really quickly without caring that first morning [on the wall]... our sleeping bags were totally frozen that second night."
"From all that chopping through the snow, excavating through the mushrooms, we were all pretty wet," said Rousseau. "I mean, we were wet the first day, but we were really soaked that second day."
Although the night was rather grim, the final day of climbing went down handily. "It was pretty chill, we had some mellow ridgeline, some scrambling, a few steps of shale climbing," said Cornell. "We topped out on the summit in the clouds and walked down the West Face to 747 Pass." The team took about three hours to descend from the summit to their base camp, arriving back on the glacier at noon.
A new route was in the bag, but the season is still just beginning for the three. When Climbing spoke with Rousseau and Cornell on Tuesday, a few days after they'd returned to Talkeetna, they were already preparing to head back into the range for more climbing. Marvell had already done so.
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