In The High Sierra ~ Mount Morrison (1974-1985)

Up until 2008, our past endeavors were retained only as memories and on 35mm slides. While our memories may have faded (just a bit), the slides haven’t – and we have a lot of them. So we’re digitizing a select few to bring a bit of our past into the 21^st Century. The photos below are from a few of those old slides.

---

My first trip to California’s High Sierra was on a backpack in 1968. That started, haltingly, a granitic attraction to The Range of Light that has now endured for more than 50 years. The first “real” mountain I ever climbed was (appropriately) Mount Hood in 1972. I did a NOLS Mountain Guide course the next summer during which our attempt on Gannett Peak (Wyoming’s high point) was foiled by a blizzard. My first attempt at mountaineering in the High Sierra was on Mount Morrison (12,241 ft (3,731 m)) in 1974. That was the start of an eleven year long saga of uninformed optimism.

Mount Morrison’s pointy summit, and the truly impressive couloir bisecting its northeast face, are both clearly visible from Highway 395 near Convict Lake. Morrison is a lot more visible from afar than is the Sierra’s most famous peak, Mount Whitney. I think it was this visual proximity which first drew me to Morrison in general and specifically to its couloir. It looked so doable – from a distance.

So, in 1974, I got some members of our tiny university mountaineering club to join me on an attempt of this couloir, then innocuously named the Northwest Couloir. We had a good hike on snow to camp, then a nice snow climb up to the base of the couloir, then a sudden burst of common sense, followed by a nice hike back to camp. After a night on the snow, we hiked out and went home.

With a changing cast of climbing partners, I would try climbing this couloir six times over the next eleven years, failing miserably each time. On our best and last try, in 1985, got us to the top of the lower rock band before we were forced off by snow cascading down the chute. Never before, or since, have I spent so much time and effort on one route.

By 1999, the guidebooks were clearly stating that this couloir (now called (perhaps more accurately) the Death Couloir) is only climbable with minimal safety when filled with snow from top to bottom. Which it rarely is. And which it never was during any of our attempts. If I’d only known. 🙄

In 1983, Larry and I lead a weekend Sierra Club snow climb up Morrison’s comparatively gentle Eastern Slope. We hiked in the first day to a great campsite nestled in a broad gully, then did a not-too-difficult, but very fun, climb to the summit the next day. The group was competent and congenial, the weather perfect, the snow just right for climbing, and the view from the summit magnificent. This climb was everything that trying to climb the Death Couloir was not.

You don’t always know how magic a moment was until you look back.

BACK TO BLOG POSTS