Forbidden Peak via East Ridge Direct, 5.8
September 15 – 17, 2023
In my first season of climbing, my main focus was on developing myself and my own skills, focusing mainly on improving strength, technique, head space, and just racking up the number of climbs for a variety of experience. By contrast, this year I’ve been able to focus on a secondary but more important goal for myself: working towards being an alpine guide, with the main focus on mentoring and bringing other strong and badass women into the climbing scene. While focusing on this pursuit, I have made some incredible friends, and have the strongest group of ladies around me that I’ve ever had in my life. I would say that I am practically more stoked about having this fantastic network of humans to climb with than I am about the climbing itself, but maybe that is a slight exaggeration. Either way, I knew a big goal for this summer was to have many fantastic female only expeditions, and this one was no exception.
I’d met Brittany on Spirit of Squamish when I was climbing with Neva, and the other two friends I brought along are ladies that Francis introduced to me. He met Ana and Susanne while climbing the Camel, and apparently knew immediately that I’d want to be friends with them so he got their numbers just to give them to me. Hah! Andrea’s little female alpine club is growing which is very funny but sweet.
With Brittany being from Tacoma (WA), we agreed to all meet her at the trailhead. Ana and Susanne slept in Ana’s car, and I crashed in Brittany’s once she arrived. It was funny sleeping in someone’s car whom I’d barely just met, but we hit it off almost instantly. She has this really cool skylight in her Jeep that’s nearly the full length of the roof, and we stayed up for a few hours just chatting and looking at the stars. I was so stoked on this new friendship and on the climb ahead of us that it was actually hard to fall asleep despite knowing I’d have to be up at 4am.
After a quick breakfast and weight distribution among our packs, we set off on the trail around 5am. I’d read somewhere online that this trail is a bushwhack, and while it is indeed in bad shape, I would say it’s nothing like a SWBC bushwhack. If anything, it was just steep and a little overgrown in some parts. The trail is overall easy to follow even in the dark, and we found ourselves happily winding through alpine meadows within a couple hours. There was some debate about which gully to ascent to the start of the climb, but as we approached it became fairly obvious which way to go as the other gullies are much too steep. From the gully, there was a bit more scrambling on loose rock, before we stood directly at the base of the ridge.
Filling up water at one of the creeks on the way up
A line drawn out of our route direction
What looks like snow but is really ice above us on the granite slabs
Brittany, me, and Ana on the approach
Ana & Susanne coming up the granite slabs before the gully
Some fun scrambling after the gully
We split our teams into two: Brittany and I on one rope (twin rope, with one of us tied to the middle and the other to the ends), and Ana with Susanne on the other rope since they’d climbed together before. Brittany was not keen on any trad leads, so I knew it would be on me for the whole day and I was more than stoked for the challenge. I started us off on the first pitch with a long simul along the ridge until we reached the first headwall. Susanne followed closely behind Brittany, placing pro in the exact spots Brittany was taking it out from. In this style, she didn’t have to worry so much about placing pro on lead, which is something she hadn’t done much before. I thought this approach was pretty funny, but it was definitely efficient, and we were able to move quickly in this style!
As we moved along the ridge, we alternated simuling and pitching out some steeper sections until we reached a particularly exposed knife edge. At this point, our second rope team was a little afraid on lead, so we switched to a new system: I lead a pitch, and Brittany taglines their rope across, reclipping pieces so Ana & Susanne could be on top rope. This was admittedly not the fastest system since we were effectively now a team of four, so after a few pitches of this we switched to a new one. For the rest of the climb, I led a full 60m tied into both ropes, and then belayed all three ladies up at the same time; Brittany tied into the end of one rope, and Ana & Susanne tied into the other, spaced a few meters apart.
Beautiful terrain along the ridge!
Me (very small) leading a simul pitch
Ana coming up the ridge as I traverse under a gendarme
Me belaying all three ladies up a pitch
Looking back down over forbidden east ridge and surrounding glaciers
The summit was incredible, with god rays poking through the clouds and perfectly illuminating some climbers coming up the west ridge. Brittany brought gummy worms, and we enjoyed a fairly quick snack with the views. There were a couple really beautiful alpine lakes to our west, and I imagine if you were to do the west or the north ridge that you’d have some pretty incredible views of those the whole time.
Ana & Susanne coming up the final pitch!
The most incredible god rays from the summit
Summit selfie!
I will describe this descent in the most detail since I think there’s not enough information about it online. There were two descent options from the summit: one tat anchor with lots of fresh slings and a few rap rings directly on the summit, and one with a similar setup just east of the summit that you see as you’re coming up the final pitch. Both options allow you to rap down the north face. We took the one directly from the summit, but in hindsight I would take the other. The one we took had our ropes running up and over a thin ledge, and it did not occur to me to make sure the knot was sitting beyond this ledge. When we went to pull our ropes, they were completely stuck. We spent a lot of time faffing around trying to pull it before Ana bravely volunteered to run up and free the rope. Once she returned down, it was still nearly impossible to pull the rope, and we alternated putting our full body weight into pulling it down.
Ana throwing the rope from the summit
Me on the first rappel
Due to the time spent getting the rope unstuck, we’d now given up any chance of finishing the east ledges descent with any light left. We carefully continued our route finding to the next rappel, now in complete darkness. With some careful raps to not go past any anchors, we found two more rap stations with good tat and rings. This makes a total of 4 raps directly down from the summit. At this point, I’d read in a trip report that you need to traverse right along some grassy ledges to find another rap over the rock shoulder. We did indeed find this station, and were able to rap into the next gully. From here, we traversed another short grassy ledge before finding two more rap stations. The lower one is especially easy to spot as it’s on a very obvious horn. Once we’d completed these 7 raps, we had made it low enough to be on the “east ledges” proper. I could see from where we were standing that there’s another rap station off the rock shoulder much lower down, which makes me think you can do about 6 raps directly from the summit, then one rap onto the east ledges proper. That said, there’s slings everywhere and I’m sure if it was light out you wouldn’t have a hard time finding your way.
At this point, it was too dark to say with any confidence if we were 100% on route, and considering the exposure above the expansive glacier below, we were starting to be really stressed about completing our descent at night. There was a lot of group discussion at this point for which I’ll be light on details but we ultimately decided to find a ledge and bivy for the night. We huddled together in a sinlge XL bivy sack and drifted in and out of restless sleep until the sun came up in the morning.
Shiver bivy selfie
Warmth from cuddles 🙂 haha
Once there was light in the sky, it was actually VERY obvious where to go. There were cairns on each rock shoulder as you follow the ledges. Most of these cairns are directly across from the last one so you don’t have to lose or gain much elevation. My friends were still feeling quite nervous with the exposure, so I taglined the rope while I scrambled across, and fixed it to each shoulder so they could prusik across. This system still got us where we needed to go fairly quickly, and soon we were at the end of the scramble. At this point, you reach a gully where we dropped down a bit to get inside it, then climbed directly up and out, taking us straight to the start of our route.
Do I think we could have done this at night? Maybe. But it is nice to do exposed scrambling when you’re not tired, stressed, and the group energy level is higher. If I were to do this route again, I would definitely go as a team of two for maximum speed and ability to simul, and also to make sure there’s still light for the rappels. I think many factors led us to the overnight decision that we made, but overall I’m glad we were prepared with a bivy sack, headlamps, and enough food and water to be totally fine overnight. As much as I wouldn’t like to repeat this, we weren’t close to dying at any point, we just made the safest call for our group and I’m glad that we did.
A look at the east ledges once we could see again in the morning
Sleepy but now happy again faces 🙂
Extra sleepy me
The final gully to get back to the start of the route
Once we’d regained the col where we started, we took a big sigh of relief and packed away the climbing gear. The scramble down from this point was just loose rocks, and we already knew the way so we could just fall into autopilot. We’d soon descended the loose gully above the slabs, and then made it back to high camp. We refilled water and finished off our snacks for breakfast as we walked mostly in tired silence back to the car.
Coming down the gully above the slabs
Walking back down through the meadows!
There were a lot of learning lessons on this trip, but ultimately I’m thankful to have spent it with this awesome crew, to have made new friends, and to have been prepared enough to make it through whatever the mountains throw at us. Sometimes things don’t work out the way you expect them to, and it’s a good reminder to bring a emergency gear! Overall this was an absolutely awesome trip, and I’m so stoked I got out there with this fun group 🙂
Gear
- 60m twin rope (doubled over) per party
- Single rack of cams, a set of nuts (I would bring more to simul longer stretches. I was doing some pretty big runouts just to keep it moving).
- 8 alpine draws (fantastic for slinging stuff. Just the right amount.
- Ice axe & micro spikes (for trail runners) – ditched these below the gully. Not needed in later season, we didn’t cross any snow.