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clanger

Trad climber

Jul 21, 2015 - 02:55am PT

Avery

climber

Jul 21, 2015 - 03:26am PT

Thanks clanger. I've been searching for a decent East Ridge pic taken from the south.

jaaan

Trad climber

Chamonix, France

Jul 21, 2015 - 04:15am PT

I don't know if it ever appeared in print - maybe in one of John Barry's books or maybe in the above article and I've missed it... but JB told me a sort of epilogue to the trip. Rob Collister and JB decided to walk (a long way) out and on reaching a road were picked up by a couple of guys in a big pickup, guns on a rifle rack at the back of the cab. JB - both John and Rob have accents of which the Queen would be proud despite John's claim to be Irish - says:

'So what have you chaps been doing?'
'We bin hunt'n' grizz. Whad about you?'
'Well, we've climbed Mt Deborah...'
'Jeez, how come you can do that when you sound like a couple of poofs?!'

Clanger? Is that you, Rog?

Avery

climber

Jul 21, 2015 - 06:06am PT

I think it just might be, jaaan.

clanger

Trad climber

Jul 21, 2015 - 06:45am PT

I also remember that JB's motto was "Never let the truth stand in the way of a good story".

Aye Jan it is.

jaaan

Trad climber

Chamonix, France

Jul 21, 2015 - 07:22am PT

Yes, I remembered that as I was typing it but it's too good a tale not to tell! Thought it must be you.
Jon

hobo_dan

Social climber

Minnesota

Jul 21, 2015 - 07:34pm PT

Roger--if memory serves you owned the entire world in the 90's-after Deborah didn't you take a walk down south to visit the pole?

clanger

Trad climber

Jul 22, 2015 - 01:34am PT

The world's a big playground.

Avery

climber

Jul 22, 2015 - 03:04pm PT

Brits Climb Mt. Deborah’s Northwest Face (15th Ascent)

By Dougald MacDonald

5/8/15 - British climbers Jon Griffith and Will Sim have made the first ascent of the northwest face of Mt. Deborah, a seldom-climbed, 12,339-foot peak in the Hayes Range, a group of mountains at the eastern end of the Alaska Range. The two climbed the right side of the steep face to gain the northwest ridge (Cady-Nash-Nolting-Watts, 1976), which they followed to the summit. They descended the ridge to a point where they could rappel north to return to their base camp on the upper Gillam Glacier.

Sim described the climb as “the hardest three days either of us have spent in the mountains, and the face was undoubtedly the most spooky and unnerving thing I’ve ever been on.”

Just getting started was epic: The two men chose their objective from Google Earth imagery and had never seen a photo of the face. They had to hitchhike to Fairbanks with 200 kilograms of gear, and then the helicopter they’d hired to access the mountains was broken, and they had to spend two days helping the pilot repair it. On their first night at base camp, a severe storm destroyed their tent and forced them to dig a snow cave where they spent the rest of their trip when they weren’t climbing. “The trip was a full-on adventure,” Sim said. The 2,000-meter route is called Bad to the Bone.

Deborah was first climbed in 1954 by Fred Beckey, Henry Meybohm, and Heinrich Harrer, during the extraordinary season in which Beckey also did the first ascent of Mt. Hunter and the northwest buttress of Denali’s north peak. The first ascent of Deborah followed the south ridge. This season, the New Hampshire team of Elliot Gaddy, Bayard Russell, and Michael Wejchert, winners of a Mugs Stump Award, flew in to Deborah for their second try at an unclimbed line on the south face. Their first attempt, in 2013, was defeated by temperatures of -40°F, and this season the stormy conditions did them in: “We had some terrible weather, left, and then it got good…bummer,” Russell said.

Sources: Jon Griffith, Bayard Russell
http://willsim.blogspot.co.nz/2015/05/the-nw-face-of-mount-deborah.html

The northwest face of Deborah. The 2,000-meter route climbed the right side of the pyramidal face, then followed the northwest ridge to the summit. Photo courtesy of Will Sim.

Thanks to Dougald MacDonald