McHenry’s Peak, Northwest Face, Rocky Mountain National Park. Late in the fall of 1978 Bill Feiges and I departed the Bear Lake parking area at 2:30 A.M. for a headlamp approach to the hanging valley below the northwest face of McHenry’s. We entered the seldom-visited valley at sunrise. The 1200-foot northwest face of McHenry’s, directly above, looked almost as good as Bill had said. The face is broken up into five rather distinct parts. First a rock band contained the crux rock climbing (F8) on very loose rock; then a low-angled icefield led into a dead-end ice gully. We exited from the gully by climbing the airy overhang directly above. A little more easy rock climbing put us on the névé above the second rock band. Several hundred feet of easy mixed climbing just to the left of the vertical rock took us to the summit.

Peter Metcalf