Edith Cavell, North Face Indirect. In mid-July, Mark Hesse, Joe Hladick, and I put up a new route on this 4000-foot roadside face. Leaving our car sometime after midnight, we climbed directly and anxiously up the very active icefall of the lower Angel Glacier. We moved unroped until the icefall’s final two pitches, which involved some sections of vertical and overhanging sérac climbing (done free). From the upper Angel Glacier’s eastern corner we contrived a line that is steeper than, and well to the right of, the upper Chouinard-Faint-Jones route. We were on steep blue ice for all but 150 feet of the mountain. We broke through the difficult, rotten summit cornice 300 feet west of the east summit after taking a distinctive ice couloir (up to 75°) up the right margin of the east summit’s rock pyramid. We topped out at dusk in the face of a violent electrical storm. We did the entire upper wall unroped except for one lead over a low rock band and the final six leads.

John Krakauer