Basic Alpine Climb - Bonanza & Martin Peaks

Trip Report

After the usual carpool-ferry-bus logistics, our team of six arrived at Holden Village +/- noon on Friday.  Around 1:00 we started out from Holden Village carrying our handbags with changes of clothes, etc and stashed those in the Holden Campground bear box and proceeded on to Holden Lake.  These four miles were largely not in the shade and it was warm!  We filtered water at Holden Lake, cooled down, and took in views of Bonanza before knocking out the steeper climbers trail up to Holden Pass.

We arrived at Holden Pass around 4:30 and set up camp.  The climbers headed for Martin took off shortly after 5:00.

Martin definitely lived up to its reputation for being loose and chossy however it was not as bad as advertised.  Martin has two distinct portions, the lower being the trickier route finding and the upper being steeper but more straight forward.  When in doubt, bear right (south) of the ridge!  Like many parties we carried a rope for rappelling however we found we did not need to use it to get safely down the mountain.

We tagged the summit, took in the views for 10 minutes, and then headed back to camp to catch the last bit of daylight.

Front row seats of Bonanza from the east!

With Martin behind us, we chose a more leisurely departure from camp Saturday morning to climb Bonanza.  Climbing Bonanza is comprised of four primary components - the steep trail up from camp to the waterfall slabs, the wet waterfall slabs themselves, ascending the Mary Green Glacier, and then the 1,000' class 4 scramble to the summit.

There are clearly a few options for the waterfall slabs that will go however the highest traverse closest to the cliff line appears to be the route generally taken and that is what we took.  With the exception of some wet, downward sloping rock it was straight forward.

As of this writing, the glacier is in great shape with easy navigation around crevasses.  The moat was similarly easy to cross however the rock slabs on immediately after the moat were tougher (good opportunities for a terrain belay here and consider removing crampons).

From the moat, 1,000' of largely 4th class scrambling gets you to the north to the right of the summit and access to the short summit ridge.

We enjoyed the summit for an hour and then reversed course to regain the glacier (summit register beta is to ignore the bit of pencil led in the summit register box and instead find the pencil hidden in the spiral binding: )  We used a mix of rappels and downclimbing to get our six person party through the terrain efficiently.  It is loose, rock fall is inevitable, so we spread out or bunched up as appropriate to mitigate that hazard.

We again used a terrain belay to safely belay the downclimb to the moat which we used to put on our crampons and then very quickly descended the glacier.

After stopping to filter water at the base of the glacier/top of the waterfall slabs, we descended back to camp at Holden Pass.

That afternoon we packed up and moved camp down to the Holden Campground which we arrived at around 7:30.  Moving camp on night two set us up for breakfast at Holden Village Sunday morning, which should not be missed, and turned day three into a rest day on the day while we reversed bus-ferry-carpool logistics to get home.

Great group, successful summits, awesome views, and fun adventuring!

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