Wasootch/Joy Link-Up
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It’s been a summer of lessons learned in the mountains. It’s often said that you learn most from failure, but in climbing, failure isn’t really an option; failure is not making it back home. But everything else that happens from start to finish on your trip can be measured on a spectrum of success. So when I look on past experiences to learn from them, I look at smaller hiccups: days that took way too long, route-finding mistakes, causing hazard for a belayer, getting ropes stuck, etc. Plenty of routes I climbed this year took me too long, but I also had very successful days that I finished in good time. The NE Ridge of Bugaboo Spire, for example, is famous for keeping 50% of parties that attempt it on route for the night, but we were able to complete it before darkness fell. That, for me, was a huge sign of personal progress, and an ability to work well with a partner. But the main thing that slowed me down this year was inconsistency with partners. I climbed basically every weekend for four months, and I often brought out many different people, and it was awesome. For me, it was great to work on my personal skills, because my partners were often multi-pitching for the very first time, and so I had to take on all the responsibility of multi-pitch systems and rope-work myself, not to mention leading every pitch. Since partners were constantly changing, we also had the awkward stage of figuring out belay calls and how to work as a team for the first time: a slow process in and of itself.
A few months ago, I was able to climb with Josh again after a long time. He had made other commitments for the entirety of the summer, four months without my main partner. We didn’t have much time in the day and the weather was poor, so we climbed an easy route on Bear’s Hump that both of us had done before. Every time I climb with Josh or Mitch, I’m reminded of how nice it is to have a rapport with a partner. Everything is set up and done the way it needs to be, without discussion. Ropes are tied, organized, rack is set up, and we get climbing. And so we climbed. We had a great day catching up, all whilst taking a burn on an easy and fun Waterton classic. We finished the climb and walked off, and upon returning to the car I realized how quickly we had climbed. We weren’t trying to go particularly fast, but I had blown my previous fastest time on the Hump out of the water. At first this didn’t mean much to me, besides just having a fun day on the rock, but a couple weeks later, I would realize the potential of an effective partnership.
Following our efficient day in Waterton, we had another weekend free, and so we planned a Canmore/Kananaskis day. I had heard a lot about Wasootch Tower, not necessarily great things, but it’s a striking feature on Highway 40 that would continue to bother me until I climbed it. Josh was on board and so we planned for our climb. Wasootch Tower requires a bit of an uphill and strenuous approach, followed by 7 pitches of climbing, and then a long walk-off. A 7-pitch climb is relatively short, and so we originally planned on doing some sport climbing afterwards that we would pass on our way back to the car after completing the tower.
A day before we set out to climb, Josh had a bit of a ridiculous idea. He thought that we should try to climb Wasootch Tower as early as light would allow, then promptly rush back to the car, drive 40 minutes, and then climb the 12 pitch route Joy on Mt. Indefatigable over Upper Kananaskis Lake. It was especially ambitious because we hadn’t climbed either route before, and so there was a good chance we’d encounter route-finding challenges and other issues that would slow us down throughout the day. Reluctantly, I agreed to his idea, but I never really planned on it panning out, mostly clinging onto the plan of sport climbing in the afternoon rather than going for another multi-pitch alpine rock route. But we built our day around finishing both big routes, we’d do Wasootch as quickly as possible, and then see if we had time to head over to Joy.
5am, alarm rings, eyes blurry. I roll over and hear the wind rushing overhead. The night was pretty restful, but mornings that early are never easy. I lie there for a while and eventually muster up the courage to pull the zipper on my sleeping bag and peer outside. It’s still dark, but the moon is bright and the silhouettes of the eastern range mountains loom overhead, freshly snow-capped from the steadily dropping temps as winter approaches. Josh and I moan some complaints about the ridiculous wind throughout the night, the kind of wind more often found in Waterton, not this far north. The tent gets packed and we pile into the car. In the parking lot of Wasootch Creek we pack the rack and make up some oatmeal, a necessary evil to start the day. Reluctantly, we put on the packs and start walking, not entirely sure of our route, just sort of walking in the general direction of the shadow of the tower.
All things considered, Wasootch went very well. We really boogied on the approach, but didn’t really make up any time based on the estimated approach time. We hopped on route, and Josh got thrown into the mess right away. It was loose and steep and not much fun, but we got the crux pitch done immediately, and Josh managed to run the ropes right to their end and connect the first two pitches, an impressive endeavour of improvisation considering I had left the quickdraws in the car, woops. We continued up, thrashing through loose pitch after loose pitch, some much more fun than others, but none were particularly sustained. All in all, the climb is mostly a mess of loose rock up a steep ridge, but it’s a really cool feature and worth doing at least once for the aesthetic alone. We pulled up to the ridge top via a very ‘creative’ anchor that took me some time to make, but safe nonetheless. Of all the places to put bolts, they didn’t put any in one of the most critical places on the ridge, such a nice surprise! But I digress.
And so we traversed the top of the ridge, moving quickly through the exciting exposure, perhaps one of the most fun parts of the day. Thus began our rappel, sometime around 10:45am, we hustled down the descent, putting as back at the car at 12:05pm. Earlier in the day, we had decided that we would have to get to the car around noon in order to make climbing Joy in the afternoon a viable option. So I tossed my gear in the car and began organizing the rack for Joy, without a viable argument to bail on our ridiculous plan for the rest of the day.
Now, the forecast for the day wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad enough to scare us off. There was thick cloud cover, but no chance of rain, with relatively high winds. Despite having this in mind, the clouds did look threatening, and here was the occasional sprinkle, so we made the decision to work through the approach and decide at the bottom of the route whether or not we’d commit to the climb, because bailing off Joy isn’t really a possibility due to the lack of fixed gear and no option for natural rappels.
Joy is a 600 metre(ish) route that follows one large dihedral feature the entire way up the route. It’s relentless slab climbing from bottom to top, essentially no change for the entire climb. Mitch and I had gone to climb the route early in the season, but ended up climbing next to a different dihedral, climbing for a very long day on a route that went around 5.8x, rather than the easy and fun grade of 5.5/6.
Josh and I didn’t really know what to expect, but we decided to start simul-climbing right from the bottom, and we’d see how it went. When simul-climbing, both climbers (leader and follower) tie into the rope and climb at the same time, 30-60 metres apart, keeping the rope nearly taught the whole way. So if one climber falls, both climbers get yanked off the route, but there would be protection between both climbers to keep them attached to the mountain. Simul-climbing is a great way to move quickly, but isn’t necessarily a viable option when the climbing gets difficult.
We hustled through the approach and made up some time, and upon reaching the bottom of the route, we were feeling ready and excited to get climbing. We surveyed the weather and were a bit perplexed by what we saw. The clouds loomed above us, dark and heavy, hanging onto their moisture like a kid who had just scraped his knee, eyes welling up with tears, but not yet releasing that first, large teardrop. Normally it would have scared us off, but the clouds had been like that all day and had yet to stymie our efforts, so we rolled the dice and racked up for the route.
The simul climbing began, and we made great time. Such good time in fact, that I had to stop often to catch my breath as I moved quickly upward. It took a little while to get the feel of what size protection it liked to take so I could save the gear that would be most useful, but after finishing up one long pitch, I was getting into a groove. I led one more very long simul pitch, continuing quickly, and before long we were more than halfway up the route. After taking two long simul pitches, I passed the lead off to Josh, and he did the same. He finished up his first simul pitch at a good anchor, and as I met up with him, so did the rain. It was as if there were no distinct raindrops, but instead just a wall of moisture that came with the strong winds and saturated the rock all around us. If we weren’t in a hurry before, we were now.
The large wall that we followed on our left side was on the same direction that the wind came from. So even though the storm had arrived, it was blowing in so hard that the dihedral sheltered the rock from getting too wet; we had about 6 feet of mostly dry rock to work with, forcing us to follow the dihedral very closely to stay safe and dry. We really climbed fast now, whispering prayers under our breath that we’d make it to the top of the route without really getting into an epic; it was far too long of a day to get ruined by weather.
Despite our stress, we made it up without getting too wet or scared. At the top we met another party who had finished just a few minutes before us. We chatted for a while and found out that they had started on Joy at 8am and were very surprised that we had started at 2pm and caught them at the summit. We checked our watch, only 2 hours and 20 minutes on route. We thought that racing daylight would be our biggest challenge for the day, but we beat sunset by over 4 hours. Instead, weather was really the factor that rushed us through the day.
Slowly and carefully, we made our way down Mt. Indefatigable knowing that we had just completed a huge task, much larger than we really thought possible for us. We probably took the wrong gully back down to the trail, but we didn’t care at this point, our partnership had just proved itself immensely successful, not much could bring us down. Not the annoying descent, the wind, nor the now torrential downpour. We beat the clock and the elements. The only problem is now that Josh has now tasted the glory of link-ups, it seems as though there are some more horribly long days coming up for us this winter.
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Get out there - C.G
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