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Northwest Passage, Monkey Face, Smith Rock 2024
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Northwest passage, April 27 2024 Browsing climbs at smith, I stumbled upon this route. I climbed the monkeys face via the west face variation a few months back and had a great time and with a newfound desire to aid climb I thought this route would be great… The one problem was that the “recent” (2020) mountain project comments stated that an anchor bolt had pulled. Not a great look for me. The world is a small place and I went to ascent in Seattle to buy some last minute climbing gear and got to talking w the employee helping me and when I mentioned the route he told he that not only had he had climbed it, but he was the leader when the anchor bolt was pulled (I unfortunately forgot his name since I have the memory of a goldfish). He said to send the route and I’m glad I did, it was a great time! As luck would have it as my partner John and I were walking down the misery ridge trail to the base of the route, we saw not one but two shiny specs where the second pitch anchors were. Sweet, now we wouldn’t have to deal with the hooking section and hollow flake while also only being on a 1 bolt and some small gear anchor. John took the first lead, we racked up and he was off at 9:30 am starting with a few hook moves to get to the first bolt of the ladder. Once he got to the top and fixed the rope I whipped out my ascenders and begin to pull out all the rope stretch. Every time I thought I finally had it all and stood on my ladder I would sink down to the ground looking like a fool as curious hikers walked by and whispered to each other probably wondering what I was doing.  John makes the first hook move to reach the bolt ladder on P1 Eventually I did get all the stretch out and began jugging, I had a micro trax backing me up and was tying backup knots every 10-15 feet. The only problem was that I wasn’t clipping them to my harness. In my mind the knots were to stop me if I slid down the rope, not if my ascenders popped off. To those saying YGD, I still had the trax and 2 ascenders so to you I’d say that I was “good enough for government work”… but when John saw this and shouted down to me that I needed to clip the knots to myself I quickly did. Problem solved. All this faffing around could have been avoided had I read the chapter on following an aid pitch in “hooking up” but unfortunately I hadn’t had time to do that yet. I did however “rack as I cleaned” so the gear was neatly organized when I finished the pitch. I made it to the anchor at 11:50, a whopping 2 hours and 20 minutes to do the first pitch. Uh oh. To start the second pitch I needed to make a hook love to get to the first bolt and I blew it about 4 times, each time sending a little pebble of rock down onto the unaware hikers looking up at us from the trail. Even as i shouted “ROOOCK” they stayed rooted in place. I eventually got the hook move and clipped the first bolt, after that I tried using my tiniest micro nut just for fun to get me to the out of reach next bolt, to no surprise of mine, it slipped through the scar after a gentle yank. I picked out a slightly bigger one and gave it a few tugs to seat it, bounced it a bit with my aider and committed. The rest of the pitch went pretty well except for one time I daisy whipped. I placed a brass offset nut, bounced it with my aider, committed one foot to it and right as I lifted the second out of my aider it blew. Luckily my aider was still clipped to my previous piece and that held! That sure got my blood flowing. I top stepped as much as I could and tried to make free moves but would usually end up hosing myself by jamming my finger in the only spot I wanted to place gear while balancing on my ladder. Having an alfif made the whole process go incredibly better than if I only had adjustable daisies so thanks skot! I eventually made it to the anchor and fixed my line at 1:05 pm, just over an hour wasn’t bad for my first real aid pitch. John made it up shortly after, also racking as he cleaned. He then took off for his lead. The hollow flake was still there and was still hollow so he treaded lightly and carefully for that and the subsequent hooking section then the wondery free climb to the cave got our lead and tag line a bit twisted but after a bit of monkeying around, they were untangled and I was good to jug, this time clipping all the knots to myself from the start. I took Pete’s advice to heart about being a better cleaner than the party before you and spent a few more minutes messing around with my nut tool than i otherwise would have and am now the proud owner of a red ballnut to go along with my blue one. Once I popped the last price out I went swinging into the air and had to fight for my life to jug up the last 15-20 feet of the pitch floating totally free in space. I made it up at 4:25 pm and had not racked as I cleaned.   Luckily the last pitch was just a short bolt ladder that was right above my head when I looked up. Almost all of the bolts were loose and it was a bit awkward starting since you float in the air for the first bolt. But I got up then was quickly onto the 5 easy climbing to get to the top. I spent about 3 minutes wandering around the top with 30 or so feet between my last bolt and I looking for the alleged anchors and finally found some bolts off to climbers right. A fall here would have been pretty horrible and it was getting really windy. We decided not to tag the bag up since the last pitch was just “an easy bolt ladder” so John climbed with the bag and second rope and ended up yarding both of his daisies in and getting kinda stuck between 2 bolts I think. It didn’t sound fun. At 5:35 pm we were both at the summit and began setting up from our rappel. And who would have guessed it but one of the rap bolts was super loose and moved a lot so we left a sling to back it up off another bolt that was a bit further away. We neatly coiled the ropes and threw both ends over the edge. One landed nice and tangled on a ledge near the boulder 15 feet below us. The other rope swung around like a jellyfish with a giant tangle floating 30 or so feet off the ground. Great… last time I had done the rap from the boulder with 2 70s we had had rope for days reach the ground so I decided I’d go first, untangle the mess at the ledge and then would be able to confirm that the rope would reach the ground. With I threw the rope off the ledge it promptly tangled with the mess already floating in the air so I decided I’d just fix it floating in the air, and that I did. The rope luckily reached the ground with plenty of length to spare. A little after 6:30 pm we pulled out ropes, took our harnesses off, chatted with a party who had climbed the east face aid route for a few minutes and were on our way back to the car by 7 pm. What a day.  John seen rappelling off the top of the monkey face Gear: 2x 70m rope 1x C4 0 and .1 3x black totem 2x blue totem 1x yellow - green totem 2x C4 .3 - 2 2x set dmm offset nuts 1x set dmm micro brass offset 1x set brass micro nuts 2x blue ball nut 1x pink tricam 6x hooks of various sizes 2x beaks 5x cam hooks 12x alpines 18ishx draws PASs, ladders, jumars, other various things also We definitely brought more gear than needed, the blue ball nuts and brass offset micros where far and away the MVPs of this climb, the black and blue totems got used a lot, I placed a number 2 on the 2nd pitch. We used the small hooks a bit but never used cam hooks really, the crack and rock quality weren't great. I think beaks could have been placed, I just forgot I had them. |
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Isn't the Northwest Passage a free climb? |
Mark Hudon wrote: It is indeed. Hopefully the aforementioned hooking practice that kept ripping holds off the wall was on the og bolted start to pitch 2 (the worse way to do it on the West Face) and the start to the NW Corner and The Backbone didn’t just lose a bunch of footholds. |
Max Tepfer wrote: Nothing was broken off the NW corner or the backbone, the climbing was done pretty much entirely with nuts and small cams. Sorry about my misuse of gear with the hook. I’ll make sure to do more research in the future before climbing a route to ensure something isn’t accidentally permanently damaged… |
Mark Hudon wrote: Ya, I suppose it is, but at this point from what I can tell, a lot of old routes originally aided have gone free and this route doesn’t seem like it gets a lot of traffic either free or aid. Honest question, what would you suggest I do to learn aid if I shouldn’t be aiding routes that have gone free since doing a nailing route off the rip doesn’t seem particularly safe to me… or is it more that the hooks I used should not have been used? What to you determines what “clean gear/aid” is? Because I was under the impression that hammering placements isn’t clean but hand placing beaks and hooks is “clean.” Is it different on different types of rock? Would “clean gear” at a place like smith be considered cams and nuts whereas hooks and cam hooks would be considered “clean” somewhere with granite rock since the rock quality is better? I understand that you always want to minimize and damage done to the rock you’re climbing but want to hear what you think. I’ll admit that I should have looked harder for non-hook placements at the start of p2 because I did eventually use a nut. The hooks I did blow were in the hole where one of the old leeper (I think, or other thin rusty) bolts had ripped out of the wall at some point in the past so I could reach the second rusty bolt in that ladder. It was a few moves before I was in reach of the newer glue ins on the arete and with the exception of those initial hooks, I used brass and regular offset nuts, a ballnut, and a few small cams as well as the other sporadic bolt or 2 on the route to climb that pitch. |
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Clean aid should be no problem but hooks on Smith Rock tuff doesn't seem appropriate. |
Cameron J wrote: In this particular case I think it's key to know the climb you're aiding so you know when you have to be careful vs when it's less consequential to chip or alter the rock. The start off the deck is an A0 bolt ladder, so go crazy down there and it won't really matter. The NW Corner on the other hand is one of the most classic 12a's in the state and should be preserved in its current form to the best of our abilities. It doesn't get as much traffic as Churning, but that's mostly due to its location. It's truly a gem of a pitch and it'd be a shame to see it changed.
Yes. Softer rock is more easily altered by tools that leave harder rock types unaffected. Sandstone is the obvious example, but the tuff at Smith is fairly soft and hooking small edges in particular could easily ruin a free climb as those are usually the hand and footholds.
Sounds like it's a no harm/no foul situation as a random old bolt hole isn't an integral hold on the pitch. |
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Gotcha Max, those points make a lot of sense. Thanks. |
