Gothics North Face
Been a long time, but decided needed to post this one for posterity sake. Past weekend a local buddy Jeff & I decided to finally put rubber to the pavement and make tracks over to the Adirondacks since snow has been pretty good this year. We had been talking about skiing over there for years now, just had been waiting for the right time. Stars aligned on this one as his wife and kids were in Puerto Rico and my kids were with their mom and the snow conditions were legit. We had a pow-wow one evening over a couple beers with a local Dak's guru who lives in this area, but has a house over in Keene Valley. After much debate, we set our eyes on climbing Gothics North Face up to a slide called True North. Here is a pic of the area with the North Face being the big cirque which gets a little lost in the perspective of this photo since is wraps around to a west facing slope which is hard to see. True North being the slide on the left:
Had a 4:15 wake up call the morning of the big day. Picked up Jeff and we were on the road by 5am. Unfortunately some miscalculations on timing, we were hoping to be skinning by 7:30 from the Garden parking lot and to the base of the North Face by 10:30. Reality was, we were skinning by 8:30 and base of the North Face by maybe 12:30.
Second major hurdle we faced as we were climbing was that quite a bit of the white on the face was just 2" of crust on top of smooth rock. Route finding became quite a challenge since the snow was not more than just a facade in many spots and no ice to dig into with crampons & ice axes. Since time was already limited, we didn't have the luxury of trying to work our way around the practical dead-end we had reached. Our goal was to climb to the saddle where we surmised the top of the slide True North existed. At one point Jeff had to belayed me across a 30' face of rock where I would have take a pretty good slide if he hadn't had me on belay. So we ended up going up the far left chute on the face where it dead-ended at the top. At that point it was ~3 in the afternoon and we both quickly came to the agreement that instead of wallowing through deep snow, bushwhacking through tight trees with the possibility of not even finding True North, that it was time to cash in our chips and start down-climbing.
We ended up just down-climbing to a point where we both felt comfortable to don skis and ski the bottom bowl. Most definitely still found some incredibly deep & steep turns in the bottom bowl which slowly funnels down into a creek bed which becomes a luge track, The creek bed was still easily skiable. We made it back to the car without headlamps but was definitely very late twilight stage at that point. Scenery there is truly breath taking, I have been describing it as "making Tuckerman's look kinda small." Am 100% ready to go back and have another go at it. As Jeff & I talked about, think we would opt just to climb True North next time though and maybe stay for an overnight or two. So much to explore back there it's unbelievable...
Had a 4:15 wake up call the morning of the big day. Picked up Jeff and we were on the road by 5am. Unfortunately some miscalculations on timing, we were hoping to be skinning by 7:30 from the Garden parking lot and to the base of the North Face by 10:30. Reality was, we were skinning by 8:30 and base of the North Face by maybe 12:30.
Second major hurdle we faced as we were climbing was that quite a bit of the white on the face was just 2" of crust on top of smooth rock. Route finding became quite a challenge since the snow was not more than just a facade in many spots and no ice to dig into with crampons & ice axes. Since time was already limited, we didn't have the luxury of trying to work our way around the practical dead-end we had reached. Our goal was to climb to the saddle where we surmised the top of the slide True North existed. At one point Jeff had to belayed me across a 30' face of rock where I would have take a pretty good slide if he hadn't had me on belay. So we ended up going up the far left chute on the face where it dead-ended at the top. At that point it was ~3 in the afternoon and we both quickly came to the agreement that instead of wallowing through deep snow, bushwhacking through tight trees with the possibility of not even finding True North, that it was time to cash in our chips and start down-climbing.
We ended up just down-climbing to a point where we both felt comfortable to don skis and ski the bottom bowl. Most definitely still found some incredibly deep & steep turns in the bottom bowl which slowly funnels down into a creek bed which becomes a luge track, The creek bed was still easily skiable. We made it back to the car without headlamps but was definitely very late twilight stage at that point. Scenery there is truly breath taking, I have been describing it as "making Tuckerman's look kinda small." Am 100% ready to go back and have another go at it. As Jeff & I talked about, think we would opt just to climb True North next time though and maybe stay for an overnight or two. So much to explore back there it's unbelievable...
posted by More Cowbells at 10:15 AM
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