by Chris Comair
We had spent the previous day hauling up to the 7400’ camp of Eldorado. This camp is such a long way to go that it doesn’t particularly make sense to me for anything except mini-basecamping. Our primary objective of the trip was to climb the rarely touched North Ridge of Eldorado, with the NW Ridge of Dorado needle as a warmup. Being the slightly overlay ambitious people that we are, chatting over our rehydrated meals, the East Ridge came up. “Why not!” [...]
2018, sitting on the summit of Forbidden having just climbed the classic West Ridge, Jere and I watched a team make their way up the North Ridge. The route just struck me. The increased solitude, the variety of terrain, and the overall burliness of the ridge just had me impressed. It looked like the true classic. [...]
I had climbed this route back in 2016, and with Jessica just moving here, it was a great opportunity for her to nail a classic and for me to get on the sharp end of the rope. Our normal prep was pretty much tossed to the curb for this climb. We intended to have a rest weekend after hitting our workout routines pretty hard for the past few weeks.[...]
One of the considerations I have had for a long time has been spending a summer season climbing a bunch of alpine routes close to home. The irony of me leaving for peaks abroad during the core of the climbing season here has never been lost on me. For that, I have never actually had the time to climb in the Boston Basin.[...]
Somewhere on the internet I read that people could climb Shuksan’s North Face in a long day. I knew that would probably be a bit extreme, so I figured 2 days would be optimal. I sent Chad a message with my timeline and he said he would really prefer to do it in 3. In fact, he would truly prefer to do it in 4. In hindsight, 4 would have been nice.[...]
Stepping onto the route itself was pretty exhilarating. It was something I had been dreaming of for the last few years. Even more exhilarating was our high speed crossing of all the lower slope’s avalanche debris that we did not want to hang around in.[...]