As we packed gear late into the night in Mike Loch’s basement suite in Squamish we each had a moment of, “Wow that’s a lot of cams!” or “This is enough bolts, right?” We didn’t really know anything about what we were getting into except we were going to attempt a big alpine wall on the north face of remote Peak 2,355m, near the eastern border of Foch-Gilttoyees Provincial Park. We had come across an aerial photo of the wall taken by a team climb- ing nearby in 2019 and knew of one successful climb of the peak, by John Clarke in 1998 (see CAJ). As far as we knew, we’d be the first climbers in the cirque on the north side.

Ryan Van Horne, Mike, and I rolled into the town of Smithers in the evening of August 3. In poor weather, we took some time to scope our exit point from the mountains. After the climb, we would hike overland to Jesse Creek and pack-raft south to Jesse Lake. From there, we would hike on a newly developed ATV trail that would deposit us at our truck, parked on logging roads southwest of the town Kitimat. We hunkered down for a few days and hung out with Drew Leiterman before heading to Terrace to get our flight. Unfortunately, Drew had an ankle injury and was unable to join us on the expedition as planned. On August 7, once the weather finally settled, we flew in by helicopter and got dropped off at the unnamed lake just north of the formation that some friends had dubbed the Moon Dog Arête (53°58’48”N, 129°01’31”W). We were all a bit taken aback by the absence of natural features on the north-facing wall; we saw very few cracks anywhere.

After we got our base camp established, we shuttled a load of gear to the wall to get a better look and climbed three pitches of very polished slab using a mix of free climbing and aid. With such featureless rock, we needed to place bolts to keep ourselves safe.

The next day, we pushed the rope up three and a half more pitches. Again, we encountered a mix of aid and slab, placing bolts where needed. At this point, we were getting into a huge section of mossy slab that extended at least halfway up the wall. We found a spot to set up our ledges and hunkered down for the night. It rained for the next few days, and we decided not to climb in the rain, as bat-hooking up dirty, wet slab wasn’t how we wanted to climb this impressive feature.

After some serious chats, we made the decision to go down. At the speed we were going, we didn’t think we could climb the feature in the style it deserved (as free as possible). In the end we climbed six and a half pitches and placed 17 bolts.

Back at base camp, we began organizing and then shuttled a load down valley toward Jesse Creek, where we found a nice gravel bar to drop our gear. After two more days of shuttling loads (14km in total), we inflated the rafts, loaded the boats, and started the 20km float. It was a great class 2 paddle almost all the way to Jesse Lake. After reaching the lake at about 8 p.m. on August 14, two hours of hiking on the ATV trail brought us to the truck. Huge thanks to the John Lauchlan Memorial Award for their support of this expedition.

— Max Fisher