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We climbed the main couloir on Harrison's N Face yesterday, Saturday September 10.
Roads all the way up to the Bull River are pretty smooth. The last section (BR D) has a few minor washouts that proved to be no match for an '03 Tacoma in 4WD. Having adequate clearance is probably the main requirement, I think most SUVs wouldn't have a problem.
We took the faint trail that starts about 100m north of the stream (not flagged). Using my bona-fide Borneo machete and a bush saw we made some improvements through the 500m rough section in the avalanche path. A bit more bush saw work on this section would be good. Once the trail crossed the creek we followed the good flagged trail into the upper valley. On the way out we followed the flagged trail all the way down the stream but it is rougher and thicker and I don't recommend it.
We scraped out a tent pad in the gravel at about 2400m (fits a small bivy tent). This is at the highest vegetation in the moraines, near a trickle of water.
The route itself had good snow conditions even after a warmish night. Mostly ankle to boot-top steps up the little icefield, several options to get over the schrund, more steps in the lower couloir. Where it narrows and steepens we did 7 pitches on harder "snice". Good screws were had with minimal digging on the climber's left of the couloir. The route is in the shade almost the entire day right now and we did not hear any significant rockfall on the face on Friday afternoon or Saturday.
We descended the regular SW face route, which had its regular 1.5 hrs of horenndo talus and scree. If you are going down that way without ever having been up it, the cairn at about 2930m at the edge of the first scree bowl traverse is correct even though the traverse across that bowl looks extremely unlikely. |