In 2021, during a traverse of the Trident Range (AAJ 2022), Maarten van Haeren noticed the big, steep northeast face of Oldhorn Mountain (ca 3,000m) to the south. It had about 600m of quartzite (the good stuff in the Rockies). Although it was hard to imagine the face hadn’t been climbed, I remembered that this is the Rockies, and these days the majority of climbers focus on sport projects or flock to Squamish for splitter cracks.

So there we were, on July 8, at 3:30 a.m., looking down at the peanut butter and banana bagels in my Tacoma. “Coffee first,” I declared, and then off we went to the Tonquin Valley trailhead. A kilometer down the trail, I realized that I had left my lunch bagel in the truck. “Guide’s lunch, good for two,” we laughed, repacking our shared bag below Oldhorn.

Maarten’s first block led through steep and exposed corners, which were surprisingly moderate thanks to the plethora of crisp, square edges. Progress slowed on pitch three, as the singing of Maarten’s hammer indicated his tenuous position. I followed his great lead up the “Beak Pitch,” struggling to remove the Peckers he had placed to protect delicate face climbing.

Above the belay, Maarten stemmed up a deep corner, which abruptly ended at a steep roof. Trying once, twice, thrice to follow the overhanging jug rail around from right to left, he pumped out, lowered on the rope to the no-hands rest below, and swiftly passed the roof by climbing directly up and left. “I’m just going to belay here,” he said, only 15m above me. I was a bit bummed the pitch hadn’t gone free to start and wanted him to come back down so it could be re-led. The reality is, the belay we set was completely arbitrary. He could have just set a belay from his last no-hands rest and thus carried on.

I grabbed the rack at the top of the roof and set off, climbing four pitches over moderate terrain. The feature we were climbing had two massive gendarmes before reaching a headwall leading to the summit ridge. Instead of climbing up and down these towers, I opted to cruise left and skirt the edge of a large gully, careful to stay out of the line of rockfall coming from above. An exposed fin brought us from the back of the second tower to the base of the headwall. A steep black corner veered upward. I was psyched.

Two body lengths of Indian Creek–style cracks on fiery orange quartzite led to a long and sandy corner system. I stemmed and jammed around loose blocks and grainy features, careful to test the blocks I weighted and not trundle anything down onto Maarten. The climbing was technical and serious, and demanded my attention. I finally reached a large ledge below the dark corner. Maarten followed the “Zion Pitch” with ease, pulling out lots of loose blocks along the way.

There seemed to be a few options above. I opted for the largest corner system and started moving up and left of the belay. After ten meters of easy but loose crack climbing, the corner started to look more chossy, and I decided to make a difficult hand-rail traverse right, into a different corner, this one right-facing. The climbing was steep and burly: hand jams, technical stemming, and fists through a roof. I haven’t done enough Rockies summer choss wrangling to say for sure, but I thought this climbing was pretty good. “Way better than your average Rockies alpine route!” Maarten exclaimed, reaching the ledge at the end of the rope-stretching pitch, dubbed “The Corner.”

We were now in the middle of the headwall, and the exposure grew with each step upward. The turquoise Astoria River ran far below in the valley; to the east, the summit of Mt. Edith Cavell seemed close to level with our position. Maarten climbed two pitches of easy, loose ground—not what we’d expected halfway up the headwall, but mountain features are often more three-dimensional than they appear from below.

Even before starting up the route, we had noticed the abrupt change in rock marking the final pitch to the ridge: white and pink quartzite, in horizontal stacks, full of discontinuous roofs. There was a weakness on the right side, and now, looking up at the final pitch, Maarten passed me the gear. “Happy to have a Yosemite climber on my rack,” he said.

I nibbled half a bar and started up the “Bloc Party” pitch. I banged my hand against each block, no longer listening for the sound of attached rock, but rather for the blocks that seemed the least detached. Climbing slowly and meticulously, grabbing steep juggy holds, placing big cams, and pulling into and around corners and roofs, I reached a state of full focus, unaware of the world outside of the radius of my extended arms and legs. Wild! I crested the ridge, hollered “off belay!” and brought Maarten up to where we could finally sit down, coil the ropes, and take the climbing shoes off our throbbing feet.

The summit tower looked less imposing from up here. We had breached the castle and only needed to tip-toe up the final spiral staircase to the top. We scrambled across the ridge and up the final hundred meters, a series of blocks leaning this way and that, somehow suspended above the abyss. It was 7:30 p.m., 10.5 hours since we had started up. The 600m route had gone at 5.10+. We took a moment to savor the fruit of our labor, the panoramic view of the Ramparts to our west and monstrous Mt. Geikie guarding the end of the range. We could see rain from a couple thunderstorms in nearby valleys, reflecting and scattering the evening sunlight like a crystal on a windowsill.

With three hours of daylight left, and a long and convoluted descent ahead of us, we shared our last candybar and began the long downclimb, heading more or less southwest on loose ledges and through scree-hell (and perhaps intersecting some of the same terrain climbed on the first ascent of the peak).

“Any alpine route with one good pitch is destined to be a Rockies classic,” Maarten said, grinning. “And this one has at least six.”

“The descent has to be quick and straightforward for the route to become a classic,” I replied.

“Yup, no one will ever repeat this thing.”

Only time will tell.

The next evening, we were back in Canmore. “Hah!” Maarten’s wife, Lin, remarked to him. “You were like Ethan’s lunch lady...the Lunchlord!”

— Ethan Berman, Canada