Emperor Ridge  5.7 AI3 Steep Snow

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Type:  Trad, Ice, Snow, Alpine, Grade V Consensus:  5.7 AI3 [details] FA:  Ron Perla, Tom Spencer 1961 Submitted By:  John Peterson on Dec 19, 2012 You & This Route  |  Other Opinions (2) Your todo list: Your stars: Your rating: -none- [change] Your ticklist: [add new tick]

Climbing the last gargoyle before the summit

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Description 

This historic route was nearly climbed in 1930 by Underhill and O'Brien before the successful 1961 scent.

You would be crazy to get your information on this route from a website. This is a serious route that requires significant commitment. I'll share my story but the difficulty depends greatly on conditions and my experience may not be typical.

My full experience is at mcis.western.edu/~jpeterson/me/bigr.html - take this for what it's worth. The difficulty of this route depends greatly on the condition of the gargoyles - if the snow is in bad condition retreat is the only option.

Here's a few things to know:

The lower part of the route up to the Black Towers is mostly rock with small bits of ice to cross. We encountered climbing up to about 5.7 but most of it is much easier. There are few good anchors and plentiful loose rock. We stayed near the left side of the face. It's possibly to avoid some of the harder climbing by climbing on the lower angled terrain to the right.

We passed the Black Towers through a chimney on the left - this seemed fairly obvious. The only fixed gear we found on the route was a pin at the top of the chimney.

Once you attain the ridge proper you have to deal with a number of vertical steps and nearly a mile of often questionable snow gargoyles to reach the top. We passed most of the vertical steps on the right except for the final short one where a short trip to the Emperor face was required. Don't expect any solid anchors once you hit the gargoyles.

Protection 

A small rock rack and some ice / snow gear.

Photos of Emperor Ridge Slideshow

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The Emperor Ridge	About 3/4 way up the gargoyles. The rope weaves o...	The initial part of the ridge before the gargoyles...
Nearing the summit - Wishbone Arete is on the left...	The first significant vertical step in the ridge. ...	In the main part of the face - note the vertical s...
Berg Lake from just before the technical part of t...	The initial climbing was easy (low 5th class) but ...	At the summit looking down the North Face
Sunrise on Whitehorn, start of our 2nd day on the ...	Early on in the gargoyles. Robson was the only mo...	At the first vertical step after the Black Towers....
Looking up to the summit from the final set of gar...	Back from the climb. I lost at least 60 pounds ov...