Last week I had the opportunity to climb a route on a mountain in an area that I’ve never been in before. My partner and I made our way into the Cascade backcountry to climb the Northeast Buttress of Mt. Triumph.
The trip had a bit of an inauspicious beginning. As I was racking up at camp, I accidentally dropped five locking carabiners clipped together down the moat between a rock and the snowpack. For a short bit, I thought I might have seriously hindered our ability to climb the mountain. Over the course of an hour-and-a-half we used our stove pot to excavate a large amount of snow from our camp.
Finally, we found the carabiners!
The following morning, we got up at 4:30am and were walking out of camp and across the glacier by 5am. We were climbing by 6:00am and on the summit by 11:30am. The descent took a long time and we were not back on the glacier until 4pm. We didn’t make it back to the car until almost 9:30pm.
It was a long day, but it was great fun. Following is a photo essay from the day:
Looking back at the Col where we camped.
