I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to recognize the pattern: nearly all my close-calls in the mountains have involved a snow and ice slope that has received > 2 hrs of direct sun. All have faced northeast. The NE couloir on Colchuck; the Ice Cliff Glacier on Stewart; the NE face of Serra Three. I'm just not going to do it anymore.
Jim and I headed up the Tellot glacier at 05:00. Initially we cruised along on a perfect hard crust, but as we neared the base of the route we began postholing into knee and thigh-high drifts of fresher snow. We were treated to a gorgeous sunrise on the way up the glacier, but that meant the route had already been baking in direct sunlight for over an hour by the time we started up it.
I took the first pitch over the 'schrund and up the steepening face. What looked like snow from below turned out to be a unnerving rotten 2" crust over what felt like hard ice. We opted to pitch it out, neither of us being comfortable enough on the terrain to simul. Jim led a 2nd 60 m pitch up the now consistent 50-degree snice, using excavated screw placement for protection. I took the 3rd pitch up and right into the couloir directly above us. The slope steepened to 60 degrees.
I put in my last screw, and began the final 10 m climb up to an obvious crack system in the couloir wall were I intended to set my belay. Poised in the center of the couloir, I heard a soft *FUTT* from above. Quite and gentle, like snow sliding off the hood of your car. I looked up. There was a collection of rocks falling from the sky. The big one in the center could have been anywhere from softball to basketball-sized.
I planted my free tool to the hilt, and cowered. Tried to hide under my hardhat. I should have shouted "ROCK!" to warn Jim. Instead I closed my eyes and whimpered softly. Thought of Grace. Listened to the tearing sound of the rocks speeding by. Something small hit my shoulder.
By the time I opened my eyes the rocks were gone. Jim was safe, but he'd had a near miss too and understandably wanted me to MOVE so he could get out of the line of fire as well. I down-climbed 15 m back to where a smaller subsidiary gully branched off, and made my way up under the shelter of a monolithic granite buttress. Fuck. No cracks for a belay, and all I had was one stubby screw. I dug, found some beautiful, solid, gray-black ice. I sunk the screw and backed it up with my tools. Jim sprinted up the pitch.
We could have continued from there. The subsidiary gully cut left across the face, and likely would have gotten us up. However, the ice was rapidly rotting in the sun, and we were psychologically whipped. Instead, we began our V-thread descent. The first of these was fine; done in the same dense old ice as my belay screw. The second was terrifying. What I had taken for a substrate of solid alpine ice in the cool of the morning had rapidly rotted into a porous matrix that resembled loosely bonded marbles. It didn't seem to matter how deep I dug. I didn't trust my v-thread, let alone the backup screws! Still, I managed a tolerable stomp-test of the anchor while clinging to my ice tools. It held, and fortunately got us back over the bergschrund.
So, what is it I'm not going to do anymore? Climb alpine routes? Hardly. What I'm not going to do is climb NE facing ice routes unless I can manage to finish before or very shortly after sunrise. I don't know why it's taken me so long to recognize how important this is.
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