In early August, Clay James, Brandon Kupczyk, and I established a new route in the Mendenhall Towers outside of Juneau. Our line is on the Curtain, a south-facing wall between the Main and Fourth towers, and follows a clean crack system for roughly 1,000’.

We arrived on the Mendenhall Glacier with hopes of putting up a new route, and despite Juneau’s rainy nature, we found ourselves in the summer’s best weather window. We camped below the Curtain where, in 2009, Blake Herrington and Jason Nelson established Iron Curtain and Resisting A Rest (see AAJ 2010). Clay and Brandon spotted our line from camp, to the right of the 2009 routes, and one evening we began questing up its first pitches in a corner and crack system. Two pitches of splitter hand jams, a fingery roof pull, and steep laybacking hinted at the route’s quality. The next morning, we climbed the route in full and topped out with plenty of sunlight. We intended to follow Blake and Jason's Iron Curtain rappel route but ended up making several anchors with tat and nuts.

The Mendenhall Towers are an interesting place, eerie yet comfortable. Gaping wide moats and harrowing descents make each endeavor a bit spooky, all while having 5G phone service. We named our route Inside Passage (5.10+) in reference to the waterway connecting Washington state to Alaska.

—Sam Cohen, USA