Mount Stuart - The Complete North Ridge in a day

Ever since I first moved to Seattle back in 2003 I remember hearing about the North Ridge of Mount Stuart as being an awesome climb. Most people "only" do the upper half of the north ridge, which is reported in "Selected Climbs in the Cascades" as being a Grade IV 5.9 with 20 pitches of climbing on solid rock, "best done as a 2-3 day climb". Another option described in the Beckey guide is to do the complete north ridge, which tacks on another 16 pitches of climbing up to 5.9 on the lower half of the ridge, which links into the 20 pitches of the upper ridge.

It has been on my radar ever since I first heard about it, and after almost attempting it last year with Fras (we ended up doing Prusik Peak instead) I finally got the chance to give it a shot at the end of August with Jesse. We obviously planned on doing the complete variation, and because Jesse had a flight to catch on Sunday morning at 6am we had no choice but to try and do it in a day. This could be seen as a positive, since it was added motivation for us to "get 'er done" on Saturday so that Jesse wouldn't have to buy another plane ticket.

We left Seattle around 8pm on Friday night, a little behind our planned schedule because we both had to make abbreviated appearances at summer BBQs with our lovely ladies before heading for the mountains. We headed east on I-90 to Cle Elum and headed north to the Ingalls Lake trailhead, since we would be approaching from the south to allow a more direct return to the car after descending the Cascadian Couloir. We found the trailhead without too much trouble, and after being amazed at the number of cars there we grabbed our sleeping bags and headed into the woods for a few hours of sleep before our 3:00am wake up call the next morning. Here is Jesse about to go to sleep, wondering where I got my awesome pillow from (my Mom made it for me).

The alarm went off as planned at 3am, and after dragging ourselves out of our warm sleeping bags we headed over to the car where we suited up and made some delicious bagel sandwiches for lunch, with cream cheese, sliced turkey, swiss cheese, and roasted garlic, delicious! Here is the delicious bagel assembly line in full swing at 3:15am:

Just as we were preparing to head over the trail head I heard an "Oh, stinker!" from Jesse, and upon inquiry he revealed that he had just checked his GPS and thought that we were at the wrong trail head. We thought we may have missed a trail head back down the dirt road we had driven in on (it had been dark and neither of us had been there so we were not 100% where we had been going), so we hopped in the Subaru and drove back down the road. We didn't find anything convincing though, and upon further exploration we ended up back at the same trailhead about 30 minutes later with the conclusion that Jesse needs a new GPS. Merde! Oh well, chances were very good that we were going to be finishing in the dark in any case, so a 30 minute setback wasn't the end of the world. We started hiking up the trail and soon saw signs confirming that we were on track, headed for Ingalls Lake. As we crested over Ingalls Pass we caught our first sight of the massive granite bulk of Mount Stuart looming above us:

Cool! We continued along the trail through headlamp basin and toward Ingalls Lake as the sun began to rise:

We made good progress, and before long we were skirting along the shore of Ingalls Lake, with Ingalls Peak looming above.

From Ingalls Lake the trail dropped down, and as we continued we came across another group of two as we overtook them, they also had the plan to do the North Ridge in a day. The trail then began to climb gradually through some nice meadows with wildflowers toward Stuart Pass (or something like that, I may be making up names and landmarks throughout this report so if anyone is reading this who knows the route well please disregard all of my nomenclature). Here is the Bod moving fast and light through the meadows, no time to stop and sniff the flowers:

From Stuart Pass we continued up towards the southwest ridge of Mount Stuart, where we had a nice view of Rainier as the sun continued to climb in the sky:

We then traversed across a mix of snow and scree to head up to Goat Pass (that name I am sure of). Here is Jesse heading up the snow toward Goat Pass:

As I crested Goat Pass I was pleasantly surprised to find one of its namesake denizens hanging out and catching some morning sunshine:

Buongiorno, goat! It was now about 7:45am and we were way behind the overly ambitious schedule that Jesse had put together for us, but we refused to let our spirits be dampened and enjoyed some delicious Clif Bars as we surveyed the rest of the approach:

We then headed across the bottom part of the Stuart Glacier, brandishing the ice axes that we had been carrying but still not finding a need for the crampons that we had also been carrying. partway across the Stuart Glacier we saw where the approach for the upper half variation split off, crampons would definitely have been needed for that as it ascended a steep snow couloir. We prefer granite to snow, so we gave the snow couloir a miss and continued heading down to the base of the north ridge. Here is the view looking across the Stuart Glacier:

And here is Jesse making his way across, wielding his ice axe like a wiley old alpine veteran:

As we made our way across the glacier we overtook another party of two, arriving at the base of the north ridge just before 9:00am and a few minutes before the climbers we had just overtaken. They planned to bivy on the route so were not too bothered about us starting ahead of them. We geared up and started climbing, with Jesse stringing together the first two pitches of 5.7 and 5.8. The 5.8 was some sort of weird squeeze chimney and felt really hard the way that we climbed it (not as a squeeze chimney, sport climbers with backpacks on don't climb squeeze chimneys), I was very pleased that Jesse had led that one. I then took the next pitch which was a pretty long 5.9 crack, perfect hand size, but for some reason it felt quite hard. Some reasons for that could be: 1. Just having gained 4000 feet in a 5 hour approach to the climb, 2. This being my second outdoor climbing of the summer and my first trad climbing of the year, 3. Wearing a heavy backpack with 3L of water, an ice axe, crampons, etc. Here I am working my way up the 5.9:

Okay, enough excuses. In any case, I managed to fight my way up it but was pretty relieved that much of the climbing that lay ahead fell into the low 5th class and 4th class range. Here I am happy to be done with 5.9 climbing for a while (until the gendarme pitches on the upper half, which I planned to draft Jesse into handling):

From here we set off simulclimbing, having recognized that the only possible way to climb 35 pitches in a day was by not belaying. Jesse led about and strung a lot of pitches together, then I strung a bunch together, then Jesse again, then me, and before you can say "that's a lot of granite!" it was 12:30pm and we were at the notch where the lower ridge joined into the upper ridge. The climbing was awesome, lots of good exposure with the ridge dropping steeply to the Stuart Glacier on the right and to the Ice Cliff Glacier on the left:

I had thought that reaching the upper half of the ridge might be cause for celebration or maybe just lunch, but as Jesse reached the belay he matter-of-factly accepted the gear and and then launched up into the upper ridge. Here is a shot looking back down the ridge to the belay at the top of the lower half (if you look really closely you can see a red helmet in the middle of the photo, this is me):

Jesse did a long simulclimb, then I did a long simulclimb, then Jesse did another one (hopefully nobody reading this was expecting detailed route beta), and we found ourselves looking at the nice "slab crack" pitch that I recognized from photographs:

 

It looked a bit hard but was actually super stinkin' easy, here I am looking back down at Jesse:

I ran this into one more simul-lead that brought us to the base of the Great Gendarme at around 3:45pm, which was the final two pitches of 5.9. Jesse offered to try and link these two pitches together, which I wholeheartedly endorsed given my lackluster performance on the 5.9 pitch at the start of the lower half. I was pretty sure that my climbing powers had not strengthened in the interim 7 hours, despite all the practice I had just gotten in. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that my forearms were starting to feel like they were about to cramp. Luckily Jesse is a crack climbing machine, so he headed up the Gendarme without hesitation:

The Bod dispensed these pitches with ease, and I followed, here I am arriving at the belay: 

From the top of the two Gendarme pitches there were 4 more until the summit with only the first being 5.8, so I set off and did one last long simul-lead that deposited us both on the final summit ridge just before 6:00pm. Great success! We unroped and then scrambled up the last few meters to gain the summit, yee-haa!

Here is team Lemon-Lime soaking up the evening sunshine on summit of the crown jewel of the cascades:

So awesome!!! We hang out for a bit, enjoying our last sandwiches and some delicious Trader Joe's chocolate until 6:30pm when we decided we better start to hustle to try and get down as much of the Cascadian Couloir as we could before darkness fell. The descent was pretty easy to follow, and as we progressed we had some more nice views of Rainier:

We made our way across a bunch of rock and then down a bunch of snow (still no crampons needed, too bad we carried those the entire time!), then funneled into the Cascadian Couloir where some fun glissading on snow led to some less fun sliding down scree slopes and then some even less fun descending loose and dusty stuff which dropped a notch further in fun factor once it got dark and we were still in the Cascadian Couloir. Luckily we had encountered water part way down the couloir, since we had both run out by the summit and were really thirsty. We continued down in the darkness (aided by two of my frankenstein hot rod Petzl Zoom headlamps), finally reaching the Ingalls Creek trail where we encountered some campers having a fire who offered us marshmallows and candy. We had both just overdosed on chocolate trail mix so we politely declined, and continued along the creek trail until the crossing where we had to start hiking up and over some 1500 foot pass to get back to the car. Here I am on the log crossing:

Legs don't fail me now! Here is Jesse working his way across with the turbo-powered zoom lighting the way:

After a painful hike up and over the pass we paused to look back at the mountain and were surprised to see two headlamps pretty high up in the Cascadian Couloir. Oh man, and I thought we were having an epic long day! By this point it was 10:00pm and they were probably about 2 hours behind us. Stinker! We continued on down toward the car, finally reaching the trailhead just after 11:00pm for almost 20 hours on the go. Whew! I think this was my biggest ever day out in the mountains, I think I'll call this my birthday challenge for the year.

Needless to say we were both very very tired, but somehow managed to pilot Jesse's car back to Seattle while both experiencing weird hallucinations and visions along I-90. We finally arrived back in Seattle at 2:00am, just in time for Jesse to go home, pack for his trip to Michigan, and then get 1 hour of sleep before heading to the airport. Well, I must say that this was a stinkin' amazing day out in the mountains. Everyone should go do this route (not all at once though, that would be too crowded), it is great climbing on super high quality rock.