Some people are alpine start people. I am not one of them. So it was notable that I had woken up before my 2:30 AM alarm. It could have been the nervous excitement around the day’s objective, conversations over beta photos the previous night replaying in my head. I wondered, groggily, if maybe I’d been dreaming about serac fall. As my brain slowly spooled up, I changed my mind. The perpetrator behind my last, lost ten minutes of sleep was certainly the enormous porcupine rustling around the engine compartment of Logan’s truck. How it didn’t wake him up as he slept in the back I’ll never know, but it probably had something to do with the 12 hour “scoping” mission we’d just done the day before.

This is part two of my trip report on our visit to Mt. Mummery this spring after the length of the post started to get out of hand. If you haven’t read part one, it’s got lots of details about the route, our planning process and a very pleasant ski descent of Mt. Mummery’s south summit. In either case, continue on for an account of a geographically similar but altogether spicier mission.

Anyway, the porcupine. It didn’t seem much inclined to leave the cozy confines of the truck and who could blame it? Eventually, after some noisy convincing it slunk down and waddled away to stare at us balefully from the ruins of the decommissioned rec site’s outhouse. A downgrade in accommodations to be sure. We were able to verify that it hadn’t chewed through the brake lines and that the truck still ran. Anything more would be a problem for later – just now, we had breakfast to wolf down and skiing to do. Yesterday’s scoping mission had really paid off and despite the extra weight in our legs we made substantially better time up the moraines and onto the glacier.

The day was marginally warmer than the one previous so we hustled a little, well aware that there was up to 20cm of new snow sitting on solar aspects above us. High enough up it wouldn’t be an issue and the north face we were headed for would surely be unaffected. Still, there was a lot of terrain between us and “high enough”. As if to illustrate the point, a nearby glide crack chose first light as its moment to make an impression and dumped a slab into the fan of the gully were ascending to the ridge. After that, the pace never slowed and we reached the end of the previous day’s skintrack in terrific time.

There’s an absolutely enormous glacier separating Mummery’s twin summits. What looked like a quick jaunt across took far too long, requiring navigation around some pretty bizarre features. Without much depth perception on the rolling sheet of ice we underestimated the size of every single one.

Left: Logan hits the ridge. Right: The short but steep east face of the south summit.

Logan and I gain the north summit, with the south peak and various glacial oddities behind.

On the north summit, things quickly got real. Logan launched the drone again and with better light and angles, soon noticed the cruxes were even cruxier than we’d bargained for. Spots that had seemed trivial before now looked borderline impassable under the added contrast of a bluebird sky. Then there was the scale. How big were these features anyway? The drone was helping us see what we otherwise never would, but the perspective it was giving is was bananas. At a certain point we were no longer getting any new information and speculation wasn’t helping, and so it all came down to the moment I mentioned in Part 1.

We had a solid plan, all the beta we were going to get, and desire to spare. Below us, the unskied north face began as an intimidating jumble of ice features, then just rolled away. The vast Mummery glacier stretched out far below, while the empty space between echoed the questions on both of our minds. “Are you good enough for this?”, whispered the wind. “Do you think you can pull it off?” called the raven circling overhead. I think I was the more convinced out of the two of us. Logan had several rather logical reservations. We talked them through. I agreed in principle, but I also knew it was going to come down to our problem solving ability and I believed. I told Logan as much. We both needed to be 100% on board.

The wind asked again whether we thought we were good enough. With as much conviction as we could muster, we decided that we were willing to find out.

The face was, in fact, more a series of distinct features. First, a steep glacial ramp angling towards a bench. My pitch. A solid ski cut followed by a couple of belayed turns before I felt good enough to commit fully to the snow. Then the spine; maybe the mental crux of the descent. Full commitment, full exposure. Logan’s pitch. The skier’s right side of the spine was warming up rapidly. The narrower and more exposed left was cold and would stay that way. Logan’s slough hissed into the void as he got it done.

We regrouped near the bottom of the spine. The first technical crux lay ahead, and already what had looked skiable from the air was proving not to be. Or, I mean, it was – there was snow attached to it, but the spine rolled over into terrain so steep and unsupported that putting a turn into it would have represented an indefensible risk. That was still the Rockies after all. With nothing to belay off of, we decided to rappel an ice chimney to our left, trading avalanche risk and exposure for serac hazard. Happily, the ancient ice underfoot was solid and two v-threads got us down quickly enough. It didn’t hurt that Logan was on his game and nailing them.

Next, the hanging glacier. Traversing turns under an absolutely massive serac. The scale of the place was immense and helpful as they had been, photos from above hadn’t even come close to doing it justice. The second technical crux lay at the bottom skier’s left edge of the hanging glacier. We’d identified two options. One, a ramp, was hilariously larger than we’d thought. That was right out; not even worth inspecting. The other, an ice gully that was our original plan A anyway, was much more plausible. We’d hoped to just ski through it, but as we descended closer it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. The snow got thinner, with rotten ice poking through from below. I stopped turning and sideslipped my way over to the far wall of the gully. Rotten too. Shit.

Deep breaths. A few meters further. My brain offered unhelpful questions like “how well bonded is this snow, really?”. I got around a bulge and found a curtain of refrozen meltwater. Success! A weight I hadn’t noticed lifted off my chest with the knowledge that we’d be able to get out of there with a simple ice anchor. The serac hazard was less in the gully, but certainly not zero. An efficient exit would be a relief. Logan came down and joined me at the station comprised of one lousy v-thread and my original anchor screw to back it up. The V held us both on rappel but I sure as hell wasn’t going back up there to retrieve the screw.

A look back at the line and our tracks.

Left: A recommendation: when that chunk of ice falls off, don’t be under it. It’s easily the size of a small apartment complex. Right: Yours truly rapping off the blob of less nasty ice.

After a few hundred meters of broken glacier, we skied onto one of the main lobes of the Mummery, suddenly exhausted and dehydrated. Elated too, as the release and sense of accomplishment washed over us. It took something like 20 minutes of continuous straight lining back down the glacier to put us level with our shoes, which really spoke to the scale of the place and the distance we’d covered traversing the mountain. I thought back to Dylan’s report from their traverse in the reverse direction and felt immensely grateful that we didn’t have to walk down. Naturally though, we did ski right past our approach line and have to skin back up. An admittedly lesser hardship.

The previous day’s miracle slide debris still had more enough snow to make for a reasonable exit, even on our tired legs. I managed to avoid tripping over anything while Logan was watching, both in the debris and later on the trail. Back at the truck, no new or previously unseen porcupine damage presented itself, which meant that the trip could officially be declared a success.

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