After Hours: One of the Last Unclimbed Peaks in the North Cascades
Western Professor Eric Wehrly made the first ascent of a remote Washington peak known as ‘Lemolo’, a Chinook jargon word for wild and untamed
By Matthew Tangeman
ADVENTURE ON A LARGER SCALE
Backpacks make for less than adequate sleeping bags, as it turns out.
It’s a frozen night in early September, and Eric Wehrly and Rolf Larson are a long way from comfort. They hoped to be off the mountain by this point, but the mountain had different plans. Two thin ropes coil neatly on the ledge to create a makeshift sleeping pad. Each of them have pulled their emptied backpacks over their legs. It’s the only shelter they have.
They’ve almost accomplished their objective. A few hundred vertical feet and a whole lot of unknowns still lie between them and victory. For Eric and Rolf, victory is the 8,500-foot summit just east of Southeast Mox Peak — a stunning bastion of banded gneiss nestled at the head of a remote North Cascades valley. The summit is unnamed, unclimbed and the exact route to climb it was previously unknown. The bulk of the vertical 3,000-foot wall they’ve already surmounted lies below them.
In the 21st century, finding a mountain that has never been climbed in the lower-48 states is rare. By the mid-20th century, mountaineering and rock climbing began to gain popularity. The remote mountains of the North Cascades were summited one by one, yet some, like the nameless 8,500 foot point Eric and Rolf are attempting to sleep on, are just too intimidating to have been checked off.
“I had been kind of lusting after this thing for a while and convinced [Rolf] to have a look,” Eric says. “This was a big unclimbed wall in the Cascades, a place I’ve never been to and a place to stretch my problem solving skills and risk management skills.”
Difficulties the peak presents are amplified by its remoteness. The journey begins by boat, continues by trail and finishes by bushwhack — and bushwhacking in the North Cascades isn’t friendly. Devil’s club and slide alder threaten to impede travel altogether. The brush causes these two horizontal miles of travel to take over seven hours.
“That was the motivation, as ever,” Eric says. “Adventure on a large scale.”
And once they make the day-and-a-half long approach, the hard part starts.
THE LEGEND OF NO NAME PEAK
The collective quest to climb the unnamed peak’s massive face began decades ago out of one man’s desire for a freer wilderness. Harvey Manning was a Washington mountaineer, environmentalist and writer during the 20th century. In the early 1960s, “the indomitable” Fred Beckey and dozens of other climbers raked the Cascades for first ascents, establishing new and increasingly bold routes up the glaciers and rock faces that comprise the range. Manning feared in this space-race-type quest for new routes and personal glory they were losing “the true value of the mountains,” Manning’s friends Dale Cole wrote in a winter 2006 issue of “The Wild Cascades.”
Manning had seen in person the peak east of SE Mox — the one Eric and Rolf would set out to climb 50 years later. He wrote a fictitious account of an attempt on the wall by a climber named Paul Williams. He called the mountain “No Name Peak.” A rudimentary map incorrectly placed the peak 10 miles south of its actual location. Rain-soaked brush and incredibly rugged terrain guarded the mysterious peak with a wall Williams described was “like an apparition in a fairy tale.” Williams’ fabricated adventure wasn’t successful, but he wrote enough to draw attention.
“Although we did not conquer No Name Peak,” Manning wrote. “We are sure that the Great Wall of No Name Peak will eventually be ranked as one of the finest and most difficult climbs in the North Cascades.”
Manning quietly submitted the tale under the Paul Williams’ name to “Summit,” a nationwide mountaineering journal, with the hope of sending these new-school competitive climbers on a wild goose chase. The hoax was soon found out, but the mystique of that No Name Peak, nicknamed “Hardest Mox,” had just begun.
ONE PITCH AT A TIME
Surprisingly, Eric isn’t too nervous when they arrive at the base of Hardest Mox. It is the end of their nine-hour hike in.
“After nine hours of hard work, you wonder as you look up at this beast of a wall, am I gonna have the energy for this?” Eric says. “I’ve gotten used to that with climbing. It happens a fair bit to me, but if I can lay down for five hours I could be feeling good enough.”
They get exactly five hours of sleep before they begin their siege. Their plan, as Eric says, is to just take the route one pitch at a time, and never move past the point where they couldn’t pull the plug and come back down.
EARLY ATTEMPTS
This face hadn’t been climbed to the summit for a lack of trying. When Fred first saw the face — prior to Manning’s hoax — he was immediately inspired.
“Spectral,” he wrote in his book, “Challenge of the North Cascades.” “A climber’s dream, waiting to be made real.”
After a reconnaissance mission several years later, he returned with less optimism and reports of bad rock. However, Fred was known for severely downplaying things to deter other climbers. While that may have been the case, he never returned for a successful ascent.
Long, vertical crack systems are key lines of weaknesses in a cliff for climbers. They provide guaranteed hand and footholds and offer the only place for climbers to place pieces of gear in the rock to secure the rope. Generally, the goal for a “safe” climb is to place gear around every five-12 feet, so a fall would never be more than twice that. When a climber is forced to go a long ways without any options to place gear, it is referred to as “runout.”
Mike Layton and Erik Wolfe attempted the first serious climb on the face in years in 2005.
“Protection continued to be a battle of nerve and creativity, the runout got worse, and loose rock threatened to end the climb and our lives like missiles from the wall,” Layton wrote in an online trip report after the climb. “We both pushed and pushed until we were spread to the limit of our physical and mental capacity.”
The two climbed past old gear left by climbers from the previous attempt on the face — an Oregon party 35 years prior. That team retreated a third of the way up.
Layton and Wolfe climbed the majority of the wall through the major technical difficulties, but stopped just a couple hundred feet short of the summit. They named their route “The Devil’s Club” after the horrendous vegetation in the valley below. Their ascent was groundbreaking and sparked a renewed interest in Hardest Mox. But they acknowledged the complete line to the summit remained undone.
AFTER HOURS
A coin toss determines who would climb first — Rolf won. From there, Eric and Rolf swap leads up the route. In climbing, one person must lead and the second follows. The mental challenge and most of the physical risk is on the leader who climbs with the rope below them, placing gear as they go. When they find a good ledge or are near the end of their rope, they build an anchor, and belay the second climber up. The second then climbs with the security of the rope above them with little risk of actually falling.
They worked up the steep slab that forms the base of the wall, right off the line Layton and Wolfe took in 2005. The leads are long and runout, but the difficulty of the climbing is well within their comfort level. They quickly find themselves at the meat of the route: a steep, slightly overhanging headwall.
The climbing is technical, cerebral and runout, but never over the team’s head. That is, until dehydration and exertion from the last two days begins to catch up with Eric.
“My hand started cramping and I just couldn’t operate it,” Eric says. “My thumb was cramped into my palm and I had to take my teeth and pry it out, or try to pry it on the rock, while I’m still at a tenuous stance about to take a big fall. Placing gear became difficult.”
In the interest of safety and efficiency, Eric passes the next few leads over to Rolf as the climbing becomes exceedingly runout, technical and scary. Luckily, Rolf handles the climbing with one of the most impressive leads Eric has ever witnessed. The cruxes of the route are better approached with thoughtfulness, creativity and patience then brute strength. Rolf climbs up, then back down, weighing every option and considering every possibility. He shakes out his arms, recovers a little energy and ultimately commits.
“You have a backpack full of stuff, you’re climbing 5.10, you have loose rock to manage and the gear’s a little finicky,” Eric says of the lead. “I was just impressed that he had such a level head.”
The pair reaches the highpoint gained by Layton and Wolfe — a narrow ledge at the top of the steepest part of the wall. The sun is setting. They could retreat, as Layton and Wolfe did, rappelling through the night down the 2,500 foot face. Or, they could press on, pass the point of no return, toward the summit.
Neither seems like a good proposition in the impending darkness. They have no shelter, only a light puffy jacket, little food and a half empty water bottle for each of them. They hunker down on the ledge for the night with ropes as their sleeping pad and backpacks as their sleeping bag.
“That was pretty miserable. It got unseasonably cold that night. We were freezing,” Eric says. “We were hoping we wouldn’t have to bivy. I think I deluded myself and didn’t want to bring the extra weight.”
Uncontrollable shivering interrupts 20-minute bouts of sleep. Eric and Rolf did jumping jacks to put the shivering temporarily to rest, while their water bottles slowly turn to ice.
The night, which seems like it would never end, finally does. Faint pink tones begin to illuminate the jagged North Cascades skyline. Sunrise.
THAT LIFE-SUSTAINING LIGHT
Light pours slowly into the valleys. It’s time for the exhausted pair to complete the remaining few hundred feet of unknown climbing across a narrow, knife-edge ridge to the summit.
“I remember being grateful for the sunshine,” Eric says. “The warmth of the sun is that much more meaningful when you’ve been cold and shivering all night — that life-sustaining light.”
Eric describes the feeling of being on that knife-edge ridge that morning as ineffable.
“I have this clear picture in my head of climbing, watching Rolf climb, being up at 8,500 feet and having this immense relief all around,” he says. “You’re like, ‘This is why I do this.’”
Though the feeling of the summit is exhilarating, Eric mostly remembers feelings of trepidation. There is a mixture of the gratification of problem solving coupled with the dread of knowing more problems remain.
The relief of a return to solid ground and safety doesn’t come until the end of another full day, around 36 hours from when they first started climbing. They name their route “After Hours.” It has yet to be repeated to this day. The summit where they are the first to stand — formerly Hardest Mox, was named Lemolo. The name comes from the Chinook Jargon word for wild and untamed. Perhaps it was the last major summit to be climbed in Washington.
“It was both thrilling and a relief at the same time,” Eric says. “That’s one of the great things about climbing, you know? You’re in a flow, a flow state and you experience all of it, at once. Both the beauty and the stress.”