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? Submitted By: J. Fox on Aug 4, 2010

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.

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?

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.