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Trip Report    

Intermediate Alpine Climb - Mount Challenger/Challenger Glacier

A wonderful and certainly challenging ascent of Challenger with an approach via Easy Ridge and the Imperfect Impass.

  • Road suitable for all vehicles
  • The Pickets have a way of humbling the little humans, but at least we were not completely humiliated. The climb itself was in fantastic shape, with no moat problems and a fun and clean rock climb/scramble to the top. The approach was a whopper with some consternation navigating the Imperfect Impass. We ended up finding a reasonable route around the bottom that goes when there is no snow.  

With Kevin Steffa and Yosuke Kanii.

We had originally planned to climb Logan for a nice 4-day trip, but due to shrinkage of the group and wildfire smoke in the Logan  area, we changed our destination to Challenger. None of us had been to the summit before, and all of us had been intrigued by the mystique for a long time. We tried to learn as much as possible about the notorious Imperfect Impass that guards the approach, including various options to go through the Impasse proper, or descend around it. In the end, we had to forge our own way and found a reasonably non-puckery although still challenging way around. 

We brought a 60m single rope for our 3 person team, and 2 pickets in case of bergschrund problems or crevasse rescue, neither of which occurred fortunately. A few pieces of rock pro too, but the only thing I think could come in handy for the safety conscious leader would be a 0.75 cam.  

The only complaint about the weather was that it was just way too hot. There was a bit of swirling smoke but it did not cloud our appreciation. 

Day 1.

The flower meadows along the trails to Hannegan Pass and down the Chilliwack River were in peak splendor. 

We located the Chilliwack River crossing without difficulty as Kevin had been there before and we kept a sharp eye out for the little side trail that forks off where the trail gets closest to the river, at ~2760ft elevation. The river was  only calf deep and a nice refreshment in the hot hot heat.

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Going up the trail to Easy Ridge, we sweated so many buckets and moved pretty slowly. I don't really want to talk about our speed but we certainly did not set any records. It took us about 10 hours from the trailhead to Camp 1 on the knoll before Easy Peak. 

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We had water from a snow patch trickle, the views were highly splendiferous. 

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Day 2.

The uncertainty about the Impass did not succeed in getting us out of camp early. Hey, this was after all an Alpine Appreciation trip! The hike along Easy Ridge was gorgeous, punctuated by the annoying loose class 3 choss ascending Easy Peak (even more annoying on the way down!).

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We traversed down into the basin of the Baker River headwaters on talus and snow fields, and soon stared into the Impass (5200ft). After some scrambling around to assess the situation, I decided that the exposed class 4 scrambling failed my spit test (I could not spit because I was too scared). There was no snow in the chasm, and no way to protect the route. We decided to go around the bottom - how bad could it be??

We dropped below along the creek chasm and spotted a crossing at 4440ft elevation. This is the only spot where the creek briefly pops out of the chasm, before going right back into the maw all the way to pretty much the valley bottom.

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Getting through the creek was easy, getting back up to the level of the Impass was more challenging. The terrain was decidedly gnarly and picket-ey! We debated whether from the creek crossing we should cross over further to the east along a treed ridge, but then decided to ascended slabs into the first gully above the crossing. I ended up scaling a near vertical green headwall (we named it the Punk Rock Band) to get out of the gully to climber's right, and belayed the rest of the group up. From there, we were in a broader class 3/4 gully which deposited us on the low angle slabs below Perfect Pass.

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Blue = approach, green = deproach

Much sweating and grunting got us to our beautiful camp in the pass after  way more hours than we thought this should take (8-9 hours to be precise). 

Day 3. 

We got an "alpine start"  at 6:30am, which was really early for the Alpine Appreciation Team.

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Heading up from Perfect Pass, Whatcom Peak in the background


The stroll across the Challenger Glacier was smooth and easy.

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We wore crampons on the way up, but not on the way back. The bergschrund was visible, but there were multiple solid spots to cross.

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You can see the bergschrund starting to open up. We took the right side snow arete to get to the summit block.

We chose the chill climber's right snow arete, and wrapped around to the summit block where we deposited our glacier gear in the moat.

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An easy walk to the rock pitch, and as everyone says, the ancient pitons make a solid impression and protect the pitch really well. 2 pitons are right at the start above the belay. We had brought a couple of pieces of gear just in case, and I managed to put in a 0.5 cam to extra protect the 5.5 crux move, but a 0.75 would have been better. The third piton comes right above the crux, and then a completely trustworthy stuck cam a few steps before the rappel anchor. We set a handline from the rappel anchor to the summit block to help out the exposure weenies in the group, but the scramble is very clean with no loose rock. We forgot to look for the summit register.

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Took out some white bleached tat at the rappel anchor and added some fresh material. We had figured we'd be back at camp at noon, but it was more like 1:30pm. Some hot lunch and additional appreciation of our situation occurred, and we left for the descent at 3pm. Yes yes yes. 

We descended the way we had come up, popping through the trees on the climber's left edge of the gully that gains Perfect Pass. Then down a boot path that goes through the middle of the tree triangle, and down talus to the skier's right edge of the smooth slabs, where they roll over into steeper terrain. There was some consternation about downclimbing the gully we came up with our heavy packs. We ended up setting an anchor at the top, above the center gully (we had come up the side slightly climber's left, but there were no good anchors). Lowered one person down a full 60m rope length with 2 packs, and the second rappelled down after. The third person took down the anchor and easily scrambled down the way we had come up. I can imagine that these gullies would be problematic if wet, and there may be other options that involve pulling yourself up a bunch of steep trees. We also saw rappel anchors dropping down into the gully further climber's left that we had originally started up into, but that seemed like a less good option. Hopefully the topo map makes some sense. 

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Blue=scramble, red=rappel

But we were not done yet! We continued down to the bottom of the gully because we had a track that went that way, and we did NOT want to scramble down the gully we had come up. This dropped us slightly below our original crossing. The track we were looking at crossed the Impass creek in a spot that was completely impossible ("not here" in the topo above - it must have been filled with snow for that group??), so we bushwhacked our way back to the original crossing.  We made a 20m rappel back down the slabs to the creek from a tree that others had used before us, crossed the creek, and crawled back up to Easy Ridge. We collapsed into our sleeping bags at about 10pm. 

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Day 4. 

We hiked out. The flowers were beautiful. Our bodies were sore. We entertained ourselves by fantasizing about the finer aspects of world cuisines. The overall verdict was that this is a really gorgeous and worthwhile climb, that we would totally do it again now that we figured out the way to do the approach, that the Pickets deserve everything about their reputation, and that it is best to tackle this with peak conditioning and the absolute lightest possible pack weight (ahem!). 

GPX track here