I guided an ascent of the 1961 Becky/Chouinard/Doody route on the North Face of Mt Edith Cavell, August 2-5.
August 2nd we drove to Jasper and sat our a rainstorm eating lunch. By 13:00 the rain had stopped and we started up the rock approach to climber's right (north) of the Angel Glacier. We climbed four 5th class pitches. Good pictures and info are at:
We arrived at a bivy on the upper glacier, across from the route, at 19:00. Running water available on the glacier all night.
August 3rd, we cramponed away across the glacier at 05:30 leaving our bivy gear stashed there. Good travel on firm summer snow to the bergshrund with one skirting around a large recent rockfall/landslide from between the Becky/Chouinard/Doody and the McKeith Spur (pictures below). Crossing the bergshrund was delicate, but straight forward. While I belayed my guest across, the only rockfall of the morning came down after the sun hit the face. It was enough of an event -a briefcase sized rock that bought down a bunch of smaller buddies- to scoot us over to the ridgeline proper (note that this is right of where most parties scramble up easier ground -but that scrambling is where the rocks come down). We felt much safer on the ridgeline proper, but the climbing is harder, ie; all low end 5th class. We took off our crampons. A number of pitches, and several short sections of step kicking up snow, bought us to the bottom of the "steep" crux buttress. We climbed on the true crest of the ridgeline and the first 10 meters were indeed the fine quartzite that I'd read about. Pulling through a small shale overhang at that point changed everything. The next 25 meters were loose, fractured, hard to protect, and felt serious. The situation is that a large flake of the mountainside is exfoliating here. At it's top the flake is separated, and leaning out, from the wall by one foot. I think that this flake will fail in the near future and create a major landslide, similar to the recent one described above. If I were to go there again today I would take a line 20-30 meters to climber's left (east) as drawn, yet counter-described?, in Selected Alpine Climbs in the Canadian Rockies (an old piton was winking at me from over there, yet there was four fixed pieces on the line that we did climb. I think it use to be the way to go before this exfoliation). Above that spooky, spooky flake the rock became the good alpine quartzite that I'd read about, and our line, and the one from the left came together at a steep clean offwidth with flakes in it. We climbed two more pitches up this crux buttress.
Above we climbed a number of easier 5th and 4th class pitches, although always anchor to anchor. Above the last quartzite band we put on crampons and grabbed our ice axes and mixed climbed to the summit icefield. Three 60 meter pitches rising to the left to avoid the final shale band plunked us between what is left of the summit cornices at 24:00 (I started one small surface slough of snotty snow starting the first pitch when the sun was hitting the iceface obliquely at the end of the day). The top out involved some digging to get to firmer snow, and climbing by headlamp, but was quite straight forward. We stood on the summit in a cold breeze at 00:30 on August 4th. It was no place to stay so we followed the footprints of a recent East Ridge party that traversed off west towards the scramble route descent. I had planned on rappelling one of the ribs at the head of the Angel Glacier to retrieve out bivy gear. We passed the rest of the night scrambling towards that objective and lying down on our packs to shiver and doze.
Dawn saw me gazing down at my intended descent from the col 2 km eastnortheast of Cavell (overtop of a satellite peak on the ridgeline). It looked too big and committing from the top, or maybe I was just cold and tired. We traversed back over the satellite peak and descended the normal route to walk out the Astoria River. The rest of the day was spent sleeping and eating in Jasper.
August 5th we ate more, then headed back up to retrieve our bivy gear, which took us from 10:30 to 15:30. We were able to rappel the steep approach pitches with one 57 meter rappel, a 35 meter one, then some scrambling back north to a final 35 meter rappel off of a large tree.
Our rack: 2 x 60 m 1/2 ropes. A full set of stoppers; cams from finger to fist; 3 knifeblade pitons, 1x 1/2 inch angle, 1 lost arrow; 3 ice screws (I'd take 5 or 6 if I went again).
Happy trails,
Barry Blanchard
Mountain Guide
www.barryblanchard.ca
www.yamnuska.com
