Dave Anderson
Flap, Flap, Flap. The tie-down cord on the right side of my tent beat rhythmically next to my ear. It was a sure sign the weather was changing. I brought down not one but two altimeter watches and have been carefully tracking the barometric pressure ever since I arrived in Rio Blanco. Every day I check the temperature, cloud cover, elevation of snow line and the condition of the glacier. I even have the alarm on my watch set to go off if there is a significant rise in the pressure, which would potentially mean good weather.
Despite all of the high tech equipment, I knew that when the cord on the right side of my tent started flapping, it was time to wake up and start climbing. The flapping of the cord meant that the winds had shifted at Base Camp. From my experience last year I knew this shift in the wind was an indicator of changing weather patterns.
At 12am, Andrew and I started the 4500-foot approach hike to our climbing objective, Poincenot. The wind was not silent and its gusts brought waves of warm air from the south, causing us to strip down to T-shirts. Above us, the atmosphere was black and the stars poked through like tiny cookie cutters in a dark dough sky. The stars looked different to us and they were. Andrew pointed out the Southern Cross, which can be seen only in this part of the world.
I have climbed the hill to Laguna de los Tres over 30 times in the two years I have been here and it is like walking down Main Street in Lander, WY. But instead of looking in the windows of the shops and greeting familiar faces, I say hello to the quiet creek, the beech trees and the boulders along the trail.
The warm southerly breeze played havoc with the glacier. There was no frozen crust to dance upon to Paso Superior, only slush to wade through. We took turns breaking trail and arrived at our snow cave tired but psyched with the clear skies. On the Piedras Blancas Glacier, we put on our snowshoes and headed toward Poincenot.
With the abundance of snow and ice on the massif this year, Andrew and I have focused our attention toward mixed lines, saving the rock routes until they are in better condition. From our Base Camp we scoped out a new line on the southeast corner of Poincenot that looked do-able.
The snow on the approach got deeper and drier the higher we went. To gain the ramp on Poincenot, you have to cross above a huge hanging glacier that drops over 1000ft to the Rio Blanco Glacier below. The slope you traverse across is over 50 degrees. As the grade steepened, Andrew and I were forced to ditch our snowshoes and begin post-holing up the powder snow. Soon we were full-on wallowing, waist deep. We took turns trailbreaking, 40 feet at a stretch. It was exhausting work. Andrew dug several snow pits to assess the avalanche danger. The snowpack was fairly stable, but conditions deteriorated as we got higher. The sun started to peek on the horizon and we needed to be off this slope and up the snow ramp before the heat from the sun turned the frozen snow into a big slushy mess.
Literally a hundred feet away from the start of the route, we were stopped by dangerous avalanche conditions and not enough time to safely climb the snow ramp. The morning light illuminated the golden granite above us in an almost a mocking manner as we turned tail and followed our tracks back down the glacier.
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Dave Anderson, MountainZone.com Correspondent
