I’ve always I've admired Mt. Andromeda in the Columbia Icefield for its size, technical challenges, majestic frozen beauty and the difficulty involved in making an ascent of any of its icy routes. While part of a cluster of beautiful Columbia Icefield-area peaks, the dangers presented by this peak are often understated, with its steep crevasse fields and icefall, hanging glaciers, corniced ridges, collapsing seracs, its proximity to the remote icefields to the west and the frequent storms that often envelope it while its neighboring peaks escape relatively unscathed. Many unfortunate climbers have died on this peak; in crevasse falls, falls from its high corniced summit ridges and from avalanches. Several cases of disappearance have occurred as well from climbers missing after solo or unroped attempts; grim testimony to the deadly black holes and deep crevasses that permeate every part of its often benign-looking lower glacier. The frequent whiteouts have caused many intrepid adventurers to become lost, ultimately requiring rescue. It's not hard to bite off more than one can chew on Mt. Andromeda, as there is no easy route up or down and the long approach in to the routes is often underestimated.
My friend Justin and I had wanted to attempt the peak for some time, so one Friday after work we headed west for the long five-hour drive to the trailhead. It had been a long work week, and after arriving and setting up a quick bivy we finally got to sleep for a few hours by 12:30 am. Or I should say, tried to sleep - my Thermarest air mattress leaked out during the first hour, leaving me cold, stiff and uncomfortable on the gravel parking lot next to the car. We both awoke around 4:00 am, feeling unrested, and prepared to depart the trailhead. The hike up the paved road to the Snocoach station went quickly and at the station we veered off to the left and began the sharply rising moraine approach to the Andromeda Glacier. The Skyladder was our intended route, and we admired it in the pre-dawn gloom. Passing the toe of the AA glacier guarding the AA Col routes for Mt. Andromeda and Mt. Athabasca, we continued across the spring snowfield covering the high moraine, and after about two hours we reached the beginning of the Andromeda Icefall and roped up.
Left photo byAdam's Gallery
Left photo by
We eyed the jumble of sharply pointed seracs and huge ice blocks, the obvious deep black holes between and under them, the blue ice covered in a thick, puffy layer of unconsolidated fresh snow, and tried to figure out a way through this major obstacle. Going around it to the right didn't look too inviting; the glacier dropped off sharply, and while there were fewer seracs to negotiate, the crevasses were daunting and the route through the right side would be time-consuming. Since the standard route to the north side climbs veered to the left around the biggest crevasse field on the center of the glacier, the least technical path through this maze was obviously going to be to follow the rock to our left where the icefall pinches against it, bypass as much of the icefall as possible to gain the glacier, and head south around the giant crevasse field in a wide curving arc that would leave us at the bergeschrund at the bottom of the Skyladder. So we headed left to follow the edge of the big rocky buttress to the east of the icefall, and began to try to ascend the wind-deposited, steep snow piled up into a narrow slope between the icefall and the rock.
This steep snowy rise, which looking pretty easy at first, turned out to be so loose it was impossible to surmount, as we would take a few steps up, then slide back down, half buried in sugar-like, fluffy snow. While looking like the perfect detour, after several attempts it was obvious we weren't going to be able to climb right to the top of the loose slope without sliding back down covered in snow, and we were wasting time and valuable energy in trying. The rocky buttress was too steep and high to even consider a traverse as it was mainly a near-vertical cliff. We had no choice but to head right into the center of the icefall if we wanted to continue. We had already wasted an hour exploring our options and it was now morning and the sun would soon be warming up the deep snowpack and bridges over the many crevasses. We picked a spot where it looked like we could follow the crest of a long jagged line of seracs. Above all, we had to try to stay on top of the seracs and not slip down between them, roped up or not.
This proved to be a sketchy endeavor, and we found ourselves having to set fixed belays in places, climbing through sections one at a time to ensure our safety and prevent a fall into one of those sinister black holes. Where we could we jumped over the holes in the flatter spots to save time, using boot-ax belays to protect one another. Some of the seracs were so large we had to use our ice tools to climb up, down and between them, often on belay as the dangerous black holes between them would have been most unforgiving in case of a fall. About three-quarters of the way through the icefall the surface seemed to flatten out a bit, with patches of gravel and scree lying on the snow, looking deceptively like the benign, snowy gravel parking lot we had slept on the night before. The long, subtle snow ridges were the only indicator of the hidden danger, and we spotted them and carefully jumped over most of the concealed crevasses, most of which appeared to be two to three feet wide under the snow bridges, which were becoming softer in the sun's rays.
I was walking through one of the easier places, being careful to step directly into Justin's tracks, and he was leading about forty feet away from me. Suddenly I felt myself drop straight down, as if the glacier had tried to swallow me. I had become jammed in a crevasse, the only one we had not spotted up to this point, and was fully inside with only my head poking up over the lip. Later in the day the lip of the crevasse would likely have broken off, plunging me far into the depths of the glacier. My fully-loaded pack had prevented me from dropping right into the icefall; I could feel nothing under my feet, and indeed even had difficulty raising my arms out of the crevasse to hack my way out of it with the ice tools I carried. I called out to Justin to wait, and he turned around, surprised to see my head almost below the surface of the ice. I was able to crawl out on my own as he backtracked to me, taking in the slack rope. We had been lucky; even though we were roped and each had a rescue coil at either end of the rope, he had been walking along the crevasse without realizing it was there. If I had taken a long fall deep into the glacier he'd have undoubtedly been pulled in along with me. We set up an anchor and took a break as I dumped the snow out of my helmet and picked it out of my clothes as Justin took a picture of me for a laugh.
I looked down the ugly black hole I had punched through in the middle of an otherwise ordinary-looking area of gently rising snow; it was about three feet wide, and the shiny, smooth walls of the crevasse narrowed about sixty feet below where I stood, becoming a black, bottomless void. I'd been fortunate in that while dropping, my crampons had not dug into the sides of the crevasse; a painfull or incapacitating leg or ankle injury could have easily been the result of even a minor crevasse plunge like this. Mt. Athabasca's glacier had been nothing like this place, I thought to myself. We began to move again, finally reaching the end of the icefall as it gradually gave way to a steeply-rising snowfield covering the main glacier. The crevasses mainly ran perpendicular to our direction, which was favorable as we were able to jump over them and see the ridges of the snow-bridged edges as we approached them. We gained elevation as the sun rose in the sky, warming the air rapidly and creating a microwave oven-type effect from the rays deflecting off the glittering slope. We reached another long line of giant seracs and rather than detour in a wide circle around them, we approached them to try and find a way through. One large serac a few hundred feet away suddenly collapsed, or imploded, for lack of a better description, just as I was looking at it. One moment it was standing there, cracked, bulky and huge, then the next moment it had fallen into itself with a muffled crump, becoming a pile of smaller shattered ice blocks and shards, right before my eyes.
MT. ANDROMEDA SKYLADDER Trip Report continued on page two