[This Mountain Profile essay about the Tiedemann Group originally appeared in Alpinist 92, which is now available on newsstands and in our online store. You can read all five essays here. Only a small fraction of our many long-form stories from the print edition are ever uploaded to Alpinist.com. Be sure to pick up Alpinist 92 for all the goodness!–Ed.]
THEY CALLED IT MYSTERY MOUNTAIN because, just a hundred years ago, it was a blank spot on the map. It was still a mystery to me when, in 1985, my best friend Greg Foweraker blurted out the idea of not just climbing Mt. Waddington but traversing the range. I leapt at the idea like I leapt at all things climbing. Then a couple of weeks later, Don Serl, the acknowledged King of the Coast Range, suggested to me the same thing—without thinking, I leapt again. Like a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet, I often gave a knee-jerk yes to everything. Now I’d have to break my word to one of them and say no. So, the Waddington Traverse didn’t begin with psyching up for an epic climb or planning an alpine strategy; rather, it started with the difficult task of figuring out how not to be an asshole. After all, what’s worse: Slapping a hero in the face or betraying your best friend?
Swallowing my self-loathing, I spoke to Don about my dilemma. Without missing a beat, he broke into a wide, easy smile. At first his simple logic (two plus one equals three, or something like that) proved too tough for me. After all, rock climbing as a party of three practically ensured a slow-motion junk show. But Don added up the pluses, figuring we’d still only need one tent, one stove, one rack and two ropes. Even with my limited math skills I could grasp that more bodies meant lighter packs. Plus, we planned to solo most of the terrain, meaning the pitfalls of having three people on a rope would rarely be an issue. Within a minute, the heavy load of my blunder was sluffed off, transformed into the weightlessness of my own divine foresight.
Choppering into these mountains was a jaw-dropping mind bender. Other peaks I’d visited possessed proud frontal faces but were usually paired with embarrassingly unspectacular back sides. Here, though, were about ten summits strung out along a continuous crest, waterfalls of exposure bigger than anything in Yosemite plunging down gigantic granite buttresses and blue-streaked ice faces. We all drank in the spectacle, but I failed to fully appreciate the remoteness, how cut off we would be in case of an epic or an emergency. This was back in the last century, before backcountry radio technology became normal and before bragging became sharing. There would be no livestreaming our heroics if things went well and no rescue until we were well overdue if things went bad. I, however, was in my twenties and of course believed that my good luck was a constant throughout my universe. And at first, I was right.
When we stepped out onto the snow it was early evening, sunny and calm, not a hint of the legendary stormy mountain range my friends and books had warned me about. It felt like Squamish on a nice day—except for the glaciers and the fact that I couldn’t see any green trees, even in the far distance. And that, if we did have to try to walk out to civilization, I had no idea which way to go or how long it would take. Actually, I realized, it was nothing like Squamish.
As our trip got underway, I knew I was lucky to have the partners I did. Greg and I had been friends and had climbed together since just out of high school. He was far smarter than me but never pointed it out and was kinder and more generous than anyone I knew. The worst thing I think I ever saw him do was hog all the Sugar Frosted Flakes. And if laughing and doing stupid stuff was a sport, he and I would have been Olympians. Don, on the other hand, was more serious and perhaps a little bit of a father figure—I don’t even think he smoked weed. With him, I’d been caught in an avalanche in the mountains above Vancouver and endured a stormy Himalayan bivouac with no bivy gear, somehow surviving both experiences. Nothing seemed to faze him, or at least not the way it scared the crap out of me. Greg, a fun-hog like me, and Don, the mountain sage. So, for various reasons in a weird combination—my floundering attempts at forming a plan and the random patterns of chaos theory—I had found myself in the perfect place, the perfect space.
The next morning, we reached the top of Mt. Waddington. After all the stories of epic failures, the route to its spiky summit seemed practically pedestrian. True, it was steep and festooned with Patagonia-style rime ice, but even as I soloed it in clumsy plastic boots, it was all hero climbing, spectacular but easy. This had little to do with our ability but rather with what had to be the best conditions in a hundred years. We napped soundly, as if in a coma, in warm sunshine before descending. Our luck continued through that day and the next, as we summited the granite mounts of Combatant and then Tiedemann, where we bivied. Everything was going so well, we decided to jettison more than half of our food before continuing. Soups and noodles (all the stuff that’s supposed to be good for you) got stuffed into a rock cairn on the summit ridge. The Halloween candy we kept. We were flying high, on top of the world, unstoppable—until we woke up the next morning. I sat up and glanced at Greg, who did not look good. Vomit puddles haloed the area around his makeshift pillow, and after a night of barfing he was now reduced to dry heaving. We were as close to the middle of nowhere as I’d ever been, and it sank in hard that I had no clue what to do if he continued to circle the drain.
After a morning of hanging out hoping Greg’s condition would improve, our wishes came true, or at least he said he was good enough to continue. So, we carried on over Asperity and then made a long angling descent across a hanging glacier. It was not too difficult but was horribly exposed, with thousands of feet to the glacier below. I was keeping tabs on Greg when I heard Don shout: “Watch out!” Rock and ice had cut loose from the ridge above and it was now cartwheeling toward us. At the last moment, Don tried to dive out of the way but a bad bounce sent the debris after him and clipped him hard. Regrouping, I saw that his injuries were not nearly as bad as they might have been, but I still remember the close-call look in his eyes.
It seemed like suddenly, after days of beautiful scenery, plenty of snacks and long midday naps waiting for the snow to firm up, it was time to pay our dues. Greg and Don were hopefully all paid up and I now had a sinking feeling that I was next as I watched the sky turn from robin’s-egg blue to an ugly steel grey. What added to the general heebie-jeebie-ness was that we were now entering the most remote part of the traverse and what we knew would likely be the crux: Serra V, which had gone unclimbed since the first ascent two decades before.
It all started out so well. The granite was solid and straightforward, and even though the sky was still scowling at us, I started to believe we might just sneak it out before any nastiness happened. That was before we looked down the other side. If there was ever a poster child for the perils of descents, Serra V would be it for me. After a couple of rappels, we entered a zone of metamorphic horror. I actually have no idea what it consisted of; I think it had been granite once but had since been corrupted into something evil and deadly. I was leading the descent when, for lack of anchors, I swung way off to the left, eventually finding a Lost Arrow crack. After a few swings of pin pounding, cracks shot off in all directions, disappearing around the corner of the buttress, accompanied by a horrible hissing, grinding, whining sound. The whole cliff appeared to be on the verge of collapse. I kicked out and swung hard right, impacting a wide right-facing corner with my right arm and shoulder, losing all my strength in my brake hand. Immediately I picked up speed, surely spurred on by my heavy pack. My bad luck was coupled with stupidity; I had no emergency prusik loop and no knots at the ends of the ropes. As I accelerated, I flogged my hand against my thigh, trying to get some feeling going, and somehow … it worked. I clamped down on the strands and came to a stop ten feet from the dangling ends.
Finally, I was able to make an anchor and breathed a huge sigh of relief. But as Greg started down, some blocks shifted and threatened to launch. He and Don yelled to take cover as they worked to control the rockfall, but there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. “Get ready!” they shouted. Get ready for what? To die? I was directly beneath them. Boulders the size of TVs and mini fridges rained down. I plastered myself in close to the wall, face against the rock, and could feel the suction as my windbreaker cracked and whipped. The only thing that saved me was the steepness; a hiccup or a sneeze and I would have been swept away.
Once safely off the hellishness and on relatively flat ground, I refused to go any farther. Greg’s tummy and Don’s arm seemed to have recovered but I was still jittery from my gulp of adrenaline. I had to chill out. So, I started beating the crap out of the mountain. Whipping out my ice axe, I hacked away at the moraine at our feet, carving out the bivy ledge I needed to recover. Now that we appeared to be out of the death zone, the sky suddenly turned blue again. We had passed the gatekeeper, paid the boatman. The next day we finished the traverse, the final four peaks felt like dessert after the poisonous main course of the day before. Sitting at the Plummer Hut, we stripped to our undies and basked in the sun (and the warm deliciousness of being alive).
Coming from the crags of Squamish and Yosemite, where deciding factors simply revolve around fingers and toes, I experienced the traverse as a concentrated slice of life. Crux sequences played virtually no role in the difficulty of what we encountered. Rather, the crucial moments hinged on various freak-show occurrences—the seriousness of our position that sank in when Greg practically puked his heart out, the giant rock Frisbee that almost swept Don off the planet and my real-life nightmare of a mountain that was just itching to fall down.