UKC

Wil Treasure and Duncan Barrack share a trip report from Greenland's Tasermiut Fjord, where they established 'The Bad Man from Bodie' E2 5b (650m) on the North Face of Half Dome this July. New routeing on Greenland's granite walls is a dream for many climbers, but who'd have thought heat, mosquitoes and bolt clipping would be the biggest issues? This is a story about suffering, sage advice and striking gold.

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In reply to UKC Articles:

Superb article! Really enjoyed that, good or the psych.

New routeing or routing?

In reply to Paul Crusher R:

routing

Agreed, nice article and an excellent looking route.

In reply to Paul Crusher R:

You tell me! http://wikidiff.com/routing/routeing

My eye prefers 'routing', although it also makes me want to pronounce it as 'rowting'

In reply to UKC Articles:

Awesome

In reply to UKC Articles:

Oh wow - intrigued, I checked out Ketil on Google Earth. Fabulous, like Canada's NW territories and Norway rolled into one and without the crowds (!).
Fabulous article

In reply to UKC Articles:

Great article and really inspiring. Love your honesty about the things that dont go quiet to plan, a lot of articles brush over this.

In reply to UKC Articles:

Thanks guys, it's great to see a few strangers can enjoy my writing Get a visit there if you get a chance! The mozzies aren't so bad up high.

I feel bad I didn't namecheck the team, a special thanks should go to David Coley (of this parish) because without his organisational skills we'd have never made it there! But also Ellie, Nat, Kieran, Richard, Jon, Chris, Mark, Nathan, Natalie, Jamie, Tom and Nick. We were a big team. While Dunc and I climbed together for the whole trip, having a good busy basecamp to return to made the whole thing a lot easier on the head.

In reply to drysori:

And Eddy....

In reply to UKC Articles:

Really enjoyed this, very inspiring

In reply to drysori:

Good job - both route and trip report. Don't know whether you have this:

http://aac-publications.s3.amazonaws.com/aaj-12201115400-1410908536.jpg

I think #1 is Les Temps Sont Durs and #2 is the Dash/Friday; no idea whether the two red dots high on #2 are significant. It looks as if your route starts just off the picture to the left, passes left of that overlap at apparent one-third height, and then skirts just to the right of the obvious hanging/bottomless flake at about two-thirds height. Any idea whether the steep face round to the right has any routes yet?

In reply to Ian Parsons:

We had that photo with us, as well as topos for the other routes. Sounds like you've picked out our line too. We were put off the second one (The Dash Friday route) by the thought of running out the crux pitches above skyhooks! I think the red dots must be belay points - a Norwegian team repeated the route (thinking it was a first ascent) and abseiled the line, leaving some bolts at belays, along with nuts. When Dash and Friday did it they headed off the back of the peak and descended the glacier, leaving no fixed gear. Coming down the glacier looked pretty dangerous to me, there were regular serac falls in that valley.

Les Temps Sont Durs looked to be very bold on the crux pitches too, F6c slab climbing with some 10m+ runouts and no obvious line of weakness. The wall to the right has no recorded routes as far as I know, it doesn't get much sun at all as it's in the shadow of Ulamertorsuaq.

I put together a large database of routes before our trip, I'll put it on my blog at some point. Nalumasortoq sees a lot of attention and had at least one new route added this year, and the same Argentinian team put up a route on or near the Honey Buttress (to the right of Half Dome). We could hear them shouting occasionally, but couldn't see them on the face, so I'm not sure quite where it was. Tony Penning did a couple of new routes on there in the 1990s.

In reply to drysori:

Here's Zambetti's topo of Les Temps Sont Durs:

https://nicolaszambetti.ch/ftp/files/1188667179scandom2.pdf

Does it match the Argentinean one? [Zambetti and team are actually Swiss; they were there in 1998 with Christian Dalphin, the "grand old man" of Tasermiut climbing who first visited the area back in the 1970s.]

In reply to Ian Parsons:
Ah, my mistake then! Perhaps I was confused with another team. That was the topo we were given. Cheers.

In reply to Ian Parsons:

Now I look it up I see that Les Temps Sont Durs is actually French... I asked my brother what it meant assuming it to be Italian, he speaks French too though.

As a side note, I'm impressed at the level on detail that some teams can put into their topos. We struggled to pick our line out from a photo, I think the topo I've drawn is fairly accurate, but I'd have struggled to give anything by way of pitch grades, beyond thinking that there were a few E1/2 pitches in the middle and a lot of VS/HVS climbing, but nothing easier until the top. I'd have stood very little chance marking the belays on the picture.

In reply to drysori:

Yes - Bob Honey and I spent a very damp couple of weeks there with Tony P in 1998. He'd been there a couple of years earlier with Jerry Gore and Silvo Karo doing a new route on Nalumatorsoq, during which - he kept assuring us - they'd had day after day of fine weather. I think the only time I actually got any wetter was when I fell in the torrent emerging from the glacier below "Half Dome" and disappeared from view!

In reply to Ian Parsons:

Of course, I should have known that as Tony sent me some details.

We didn't have a drop of rain the whole trip. I'd expected to be hiding from the rain the whole time.

In reply to drysori:



I'd assumed they were all from the Geneva area, ie French-speaking - that's where Dalphin is from, along with other Tasermiut pioneers like Piola and Wietlisbach. I see that Zambetti in fact comes from the French-speaking part of Canton Bern.

Yes; unless somebody in the team has an extremely good memory I think the only way of accurately recording a new route of any length is to make notes as you go along - which is obviously easier and more likely to happen if the team consists of more that two people. When you're following a known existing route you already have a descriptive framework to provide a background on which to hang your various recollections, making it all much easier to remember; on a new route, with little idea of what to expect, it's natural to be very focused on where to go next and completely forget the detail of where you've just been!

In reply to UKC Articles:

Thnx for a nice read, Wil, enjoyed it. And congratulations with the new route! I took me a little time to find the location of Half Dome. But luckily the satphoto for inner Tasermiut on Google Earth is really good, showing lots of details. So I found it behind (east of) Ulamertorsuaq.
With three friend I spend a month in Klosterdalen in 1987, aiming for Ketil Westface (and meeting absolutely no one). We only had a short trip into Ulamertorsuaq area, doing the Swiss Route on Pyramiden. Since then I have many times wondered if the wall behind Nalumasortoq has ever been climbed...? The lines look nice and moderate, the access horrible. Anybody here knows anything?

Regards
Michael Hjorth

http://bigwall.dk/billeder/Greenland/1987_wall_behind_Nalumasortoq.jpg

In reply to Michael Hjorth:


I was curious about that wall too, there are no reports of any attempts that I could see. It's another one which doesn't get a lot of sun, and it's quite a bit bigger than the popular wall on Nalu, looking to be 800-1000m high. I think Kate Rutherford and Jasmin Caton wanted to attempt a route near there in 2010, but had bad weather and couldn't get up the glacier - it looks quite crevassed. We didn't get close enough to see how complex the glacier might be, but a French team climbed a new 5.10 route on one of the faces near it. The west face of RDVN (just out of sight on the left of that pic) looked to be an obvious target for a free route to me, being around 600m and having a TD ridge which could be used for descent.