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Trip Report    

Intermediate Alpine Climb - South Early Winter Spire/West Face & Southwest Rib

It started off great, until an unfortunate lead fall turned the climb into a (successful!) self rescue operation.

  • Road suitable for all vehicles

8/25/24 SW Rib SEWS - 5.8+, intermediate climb with 4 participants

We were all really excited about the climb given its reputation of excellent quality. None of us had done it before so we gave ourselves plenty of time. We left the Blue Lake trailhead at 6am and started climbing at 7:30am. No other climbers were in the area at the time. The first two 5.8+ pitches went off without a hitch, although the Wavy Crack elicited some funny obscenities. It was a beautiful but cold August morning after several days of rain, and there was still some moisture seeping across the lower angle terrain here and there.

As the climb leader, I volunteered to go first to tackle Nervous Nelly as I had mentally prepared myself for her all season. Nelly is a 5.6 slab that has quite a bit of runout but has been described more as a psychological than a technical obstacle. I was comfortable on 5.9 slabs on sport climbs, so really not too worried. We started on the pitch at about 10:30am. I built a really great gear anchor at the bottom of the pitch and placed a lot of gear on the first part of the pitch because I knew all about the reputation of the runout 5.6 slab and the frightening step across to the safe haven of an easy crack.

When I arrived at the step across, it looked different than I had imagined. You really were moving sideways and perhaps a little downwards across a section of slab that appeared more difficult than 5.6, from a spot that was about 20 feet above the last gear – two solid cams (0.5? 0.4?) behind a flake. I waffled a bit and then thought to myself, “let’s just go for it, I’m very calm and I’m definitely not a Nervous Nelly!”. I stepped onto a fairly blank spot that looked like it should give me enough friction for my right foot, but as soon as I weighted it, I slipped out and started run-tumbling down the slab. The rope caught me what felt like an eternity later, but I was really only 6-8 feet below where the rope had gotten wedged behind the flake that held my uppermost cams.

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A: belay anchor. B: spot where the leader fell. Yellow hatching: spot where the rope caught behind a flake. Purple dots: pro. C: fall line. (Topo from Washington Pass Climbing/Ian Nelson)

I immediately felt that my right ankle was hurt. I gave it a minute to see how bad it really was. It didn’t look deformed. I tried to put some weight on it and felt a sickening crunching sensation. At this point, we decided to activate our Inreach SOS button, and made a plan to evacuate by reversing the route. I worked the rope out from behind the flake and isolated the section that looked frayed from getting wedged. Fortunately we had plenty of rope to be able to lower me down on my gear to the bottom of the pitch, and even further to the bottom of the 5.0 traverse that was just below Nervous Nelly to get me to a huge tree ledge.

From there, we rappelled the route, using solid trees as anchors (top of pitch 3, 2 and 1 in the topo above). We had some difficulties with ropes getting stuck, and had to lead back up to retrieve one of them. A 2-person team was coming up at this point, and they were kind enough to wait at the top of pitch 1 to let us all get down to there, and to make sure we were able to pull our ropes. They even retrieved the gear we had to leave behind on Nelly. The last rappel was an overhanging double rope affair from the top of pitch 1, to get me all the way to the bottom of the slabs that you scramble up to get to the start of the climb. The rappels took a total of about 5 hours.

IMG_20240828_084145.jpgYellow: Nervous Nelly pitch, the arrow points at the spot where I fell. Red circles: rappel anchors. Red lines: rappel lines.

From there, I butt-scooted my way down the climber’s trail until the Okanogan County Search and Rescue team met us about a quarter mile down the trail. The technique was to sit on my bottom, put my hurt leg on top of the good one, and use a two-arm one-leg crab walk. We decided that a combination of assisted one-foot hobble (with each arm over a rescuer’s shoulder) and butt-scooting the steeper bits would be most efficient until we could get to where the trail would allow for a litter carry. A helicopter evacuation had been considered earlier, but I am glad that we were able to do it the old fashioned way. Once we met the team with the litter, things went very quickly. The litter had a mountain bike wheel mounted on the bottom to allow 4 people to wrangle it down the still very steep and bumpy trail. It only took another hour to the trailhead.

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From there, we were able to drive home in our own car and by 3am I got the good news at Kaiser Capitol Hill urgent care: no fracture! That was a happy surprise, as the degree of swelling, bruising, pain and crunching had me convinced something ugly was going on in there. It is probably still ugly but hopefully won’t require surgery.

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Things that went wrong/issues/concerns:

  • The lead climber should have been more solid at this must-make move. Potential contributing factors may have been impatience, and potentially some moisture and/or dirt on my shoe, which really diminishes its sticking power. I should have carefully checked my shoes before embarking on this section.
  • This is a good-and-bad thing: the rope caught behind a flake quite violently, which caused it to be firmly wedged in there and have some abrasion on the sheath. I don’t think the core was injured but it gives me the shakes to think about that possibility. We isolated that bit of rope but did end up using it at the bottom for a rope stretcher rappel because we figured it was OK enough. I will dissect that piece of rope to confirm whether it had any core injury.
  • We called SOS on 2 different Inreach devices, which led to a bunch of crossed wires but we think overall it got us the fastest response so not sorry we did it.
  • We tried to put a Sam splint on my ankle but it was really just window dressing. We forgot that you need to bend it along the long axis to give it stiffness. Search and Rescue put it on properly.

Things that went right:

  • My belayer pulled in lots and lots of slack as I was falling, probably 10-15 feet, so my fall was much shorter than it could have been.
  • I was confident in my gear. I put 2 cams in the crack right above the 3-cam anchor, slung a bomber flake, and had 2 more good cams in the topmost flake.
  • I had less than half the rope out when I fell. We had the necessary training to get me down from a lead fall with more than half the rope out but we were very glad not to have to do that.
  • The four of us worked together very efficiently as a team to coordinate the evacuation. This required quite a bit of decision making: which anchors to use (are they solid, can I get there safely with 1 good foot, will we be able to pull the rope), balancing efficiency and security (making sure we were always prepared to get back to a stuck rope).
  • We had plenty of daylight
  • We had radios
  • We had trees
  • We were extremely careful to check every team member’s safety and setup while rappelling, and backed up each rappel until the last climber went down.
  • I was able to rappel with a single good foot. Having had plenty of experience rappelling in various tricky terrain definitely came in handy. We briefly discussed tandem rappels but that would have been exponentially more difficult and probably more painful too. Having control of the rappel was also better than being lowered.
  • The only other injury besides the busted ankle was bruising on my legs and some skinned knuckles. This meant I was able to meaningfully help with motoring along the climber’s trail. If we had had to lower a litter down that, it would have taken all night.
  • A giant thank you to Okanogan County Search and Rescue and the Methow ranger for their quick and professional help. Their kindness really helped with this bummer of a situation.