Mount Fairweather. On June 20, John Imbrie, George West and I were landed in Gilbert Inlet of Lituya Bay. We had originally planned to approach Mount Fairweather from Cape Fairweather, but the pilot on duty at Channel Flying in Juneau that morning wasn’t certain of the landing spot there. We decided hastily to go with the adequate flying weather at hand rather than wait for Ken Loken: “After all, Desolation Valley is a flat approach, and we won’t have to bushwhack from the Beach.” And so, fifteen days later, we reached Base Camp beneath the South, or Carpé, Ridge. Desolation Valley had been a big mistake. Running right along the Fairweather Fault, it contains stagnant glaciers which are melting out from underneath, producing wild and grotesque jumbles of séracs, lakes, and other horrors. We sidehill-gouged several of the more difficult sections, doggedly ferrying supplies under gloomy but usually dry skies. Access to the Carpé Ridge was a little dangerous, as we had to climb the right edge of an icefall next to a rocky buttress; large ice blocks fell on the route several times between our passages. The ridge itself was continuous snow and ice at 40° to 45°, broken only by two rock bands. We belayed occasionally on steeper sections of ice, and made high camp at about 9700 feet on a little crest where we enjoyed an enormous panorama of Mounts Salisbury, Lituya, Sabine, and the Pacific Ocean. We made two trips to High Camp, returning from the first in bad weather. Two perfect days coincided happily with our second time up, and so leaving our tent at five A.M. on July 12, we cramponed quickly up long open slopes, which steepened in a few spots to over 55°. We straddled two knife-edges of crumbling ice, then continued, in T- shirts, to the shoulder at 13,800 feet. There deep snow and crevasses slowed us considerably, and we reached the Ice Nose at about five P.M. We front-pointed a gully to its left in two pitches, belaying with tied-off pickets. From there the going was merely tiring up the last 800 feet. Shivering on the summit, we could see Logan and St. Elias, lit by the setting sun; far below us, deep shadows rested between the dramatic peaks of the Fairweather Range. A low layer of cumulus cloud extended far out to sea, shimmering in the sunset like rippled, polished brass. After an exhausting descent by moonlight, we stumbled into High Camp at eight the following morning with grey storm clouds creeping down the mountain on our heels. We walked out the Fairweather Glacier to the sea, and then down along the magnificent beach to Lituya Bay, where Ken Loken met us on July 25. It was an occasionally frustrating and lonely but deeply satisfying adventure.

David K. Coombs, Harvard Mountaineering Club