Blanca Peak's North Face

Other than the Ormes Buttress and the Gash Couloir, are there any routes directly up the tallest part of the NF between the two above mentioned routes?

In this pic below, Ormes is approximately the yellow line on right and Gash couloir is red line on left. Anything in the middle where the question mark is?

Any routes where the ? mark is?

good god no, that face is a
chossy shitpile I wouldn't
send my worst enemy out on.

I don't know if it is the lighting in the photo that makes it look a little concave but that picture reminds me of picture of the Eiger.

But really this is just a bump.

Chossy? That's kinda what I thought, but if it wasn't for climbing choss, there'd be no Canadian alpinism right?

I agree with goatboy. I wouldn't stand under this face, much less attempt it.

Jeff,

Roof of the Rockies, p. 191, briefly describes the 1948 Colorado College route up the center of the face, and another route put up in 1964. First winter ascent of the face in 1973. There's a picture on p. 118.

Yes for CC climbers, past and future.

It is a bit of a stretch to call anything up that face an actually
route that most decent folks would recommend to a friend.

But I enjoy OW's so whutdahfukdoIknow.

was down there a few years ago to recover a body that was basically near the bottom of the yellow line. During the search of the area which too most of the day, I heard a lot of rockfall coming off Blanca. I would love to climb the Ormes Buttress, but I am way scared of the trip reports Ive read. I would suggest having primary, alternate, contingency and emergency plans in place before attempting anything.

It figures that some CC guys have done it. Those guys never could tell the difference between stupidly, death defying danger and fun :-)

This doesn't have anything to do with routes on the north face but here's my experience with it. Somewhere along the right skyline I broke off a cornice with me on it. I'm not sure how far I fell but I dove for it and managed to stay on the face on super rotten snow as the cornice continued to fall hundreds of feet. I had to tunnel up in a crawl/swim motion with my face in the powder to keep from tipping out backwards and could hardly breathe. People were yelling intructions at me and it sounded like they were behind me, which was a bit disorienting. After recovering from a couple of times more of snow collapsing underfoot, my head finally punched through the remainder of the cornice and I could catch my breath. When I went to pull myself up onto the surface, the snow behind me calved off again but I continued on to safe ground. This was ages ago before I knew anything about snow, didn't even have crampons or an alpine axe. Dumb luck survival I guess. Somebody told us to go home and buy a copy of Mountaineering, Freedom of the Hills.

brenta wrote:Jeff, Roof of the Rockies, p. 191, briefly describes the 1948 Colorado College route up the center of the face, and another route put up in 1964. First winter ascent of the face in 1973. There's a picture on p. 118.

"The first day they followed various crack systems to a ledge some two-thirds of the way up, where they bivouacked. The next morning they spent over four hours tackling one "tremendous" overhang, which turned out to be the crux pitch. They reached the summit after forty-two hours on the mountain."

If they camped on it, I wonder how bad the rock fall was?

Jeff, I am behind you 100%, sounds epic.

If I remember correctly the N Face winter ascent was by the couloir between Blanca and Little Bear rather than the N Face proper. I think it was Curt Haire.

Someone needs to get Steve House on this. Looks exciting to me.

Jeff, are you just looking for info or are you thinking of going big?

Greg Twombly wrote:If I remember correctly the N Face winter ascent was by the couloir between Blanca and Little Bear rather than the N Face proper. I think it was Curt Haire.

This is what Bueler writes: "At least six attempts were made to climb this face in winter before Curt Haire and Russ Hotchkiss succeeded in March 1973."

In AAJ, Issue 71, Volume 39, Jim McChristal writes: "After a first attempt was snowed off, Curt Haire and Russ Hotchkiss made the first winter ascent of the north face of Blanca Peak. The route comprised some 3000 feet of high-angle snow climbing interspersed with F6 rock work and a face bivouac."

That's all I've been able to find. Wouldn't a couloir between Little Bear and Blanca be on the opposite side of the mountain from the north face?

cheifitj wrote:Jeff, are you just looking for info or are you thinking of going big?

I was looking for info, but if I had a fast and competent partner, it'd be fun to explore. That face didn't look that bad. I stood right under it yesterday morning. Unfortunately, we got too late a start and it rained all night so the wall and route was soaking wet, there was quite a bit of rockfall off of Ellingwood too. If one could time it to climb these walls after a day or two of dry weather, I think they'd be fine.

Ellingwood Point's NF is huge, near dead vertical and features a lot of cracks etc.

NF of Ellingwood Point.

NF of Ellingwood Peak...ignore the recent massive rockfall!

The couloir which Russ Hotchkiss and I climbed in March of 1973 is on the north aspect of the Blanca-Ellingwood formation, between the two peaks. That puts it to the right/west of the Ormes Buttress line identified in the above photos. I have seen it in some publications identified as the "Wilms Couloir"

-Curt (Haireball) Haire

the NF of ellingwood point is most definitely not dead vertical. but rest assured, it is chossy. when i was researching routes on the NF of Blanca, i think there were 4 total existing. we did what we thought was the ormes buttress, though it was pretty tangled routefinding-wise. hard to say if we were 'on route' any of the time. total pile, i wouldn't recommend it.

My Grandfather, Dave Jonson, was actually one of the people in the first ascent party on the North Face of Blanca!

The following picture was in the August 1951 vol c number 2 edition of national geographic:

He recounted the climb in 2004, in a caption he wrote on the back of our framed version:

"This is a photo of Dave Jonson, age 19, on the first ascent of the north face if Sierra Blanca Peak, a 14er near Alamosa, Colorado.  This was the morning of the second day of the climb.  We didn't reach the top the first day, and had to sit on a ledge all night, tied into the cliff with rope and pitons.  (We might have made the top the first day, except that we were slowed down all day by hauling Dan Kings pack up the cliff, which contained a comfy sleeping bag.  He was the only one of our 4 man crew that slept warm that night.  The rest of us froze nearly to death - we weren't planning on bivouacking!  The three of us were pretty mad at King!)

There is an error in the caption.  I never was a member of the Colorado College Mountain Club, in Colorado Springs, CO - only the Junior Colorado mountain club in Denver.  I climbed most of Colorados 14ers by age 18.

Stan Boucher took the picture, the lead man on the rope, and the only true intellectual I've ever known - he'd read most of the worlds important literature by age 20.  Claire Gregg, an athletic, tall Swede, was an oil geologist in Denver.  King, with flaming red hair, carried a copy of the communist manifesto in his pocket.  I was a successful mining geologist. "

- Dave Jonson, age 74, 8.5.2004

Today is his 90th birthday, and I asked him if he remembered where the route was that they took, and unfortunately could not remember, but thinks it was toward the left of the face.