Guides Bayard Russell and Elliot Gaddy Reclimb New Ground on Cathedral Ledge

Note: Steve Larson and Marc Chauvin had climbed the whole Mordor Wall, aid climbing to the ice and ice climbing to the top of the cliff in one of the huge ice years of the late 70's, 1979. Larson said he didn't recall any memorable difficulties once on they got onto the ice.

The Mordor/Pendulum Roof, climber visible above the right hand column.

Photo by Ian Austin.

I've been looking at the icicle that forms between Cathedral Ledge's Mordor and Pendulum Roofs for years wondering if it would go. The other day fellow IMCS guide Elliot Gaddy and I decided to go have a look.

The problems with this beaitiful pitch is access. There is no straight forward way to get to it. You could climb on of the aid routes like the Mordor Wall, or maybe even rappel into it, but neither of these options were what I was looking for. I wanted to climb up to it like I climb any other winter route around here, with my ice tools and my crampons starting at the bottom of the cliff and climbing to the top.

We started up Standard Route about 11:00am, a North Conway alpine start, knowing we had plenty of time. After the first pitch we headed right to the Diagonal dike and things started getting interesting. There was tons of snow on every ledge and the dike was covered too. In the best conditions this pitch is a pain in the ass, but when its like this its scary; hidden sloping footholds and hard to find gear of which there isn't a tremendous amount to start with. Finally at the base of the Diagonal column, we took a hard right and I drilled a v-thread. I was now about sixty feet above the left side of a fifty foot long ledge, the Sidewalk, on the right of which the icicle I wanted to climb spills onto. I downclimbed great ice to the ledge, enjoying a toprope in an incredible setting. Eventually Elliot joined me.

Once reorganized, it was time to have a closer look at what we came for. After traversing across the snow covered ledge I started up the ice covered snow to the base of the column above. The climbing was easy and eventually I started getting gear, and to my surprise, it just kept on coming. Running low on excuses I found myself, my double ropes clipped through three cams at the height of the curtain, standing comfortably below an enormous granite roof and behind an unlikely column of ice, realizing that this thing might actually go.

Usually, the curtain dangled off the lip of the roof innaccessably, but this was the second time it had touched down this year and I couldn't let another opportunity pass me by. The spurt that formed the colulm actually came out the backside of the curtain, below the roof. In these conditions, the column gave gave me something to lean out from to get to the curtain another four feet away. It was like leaing out a four foor ice roof and swinging above it with your feet out horizontally in front of you, but instead of a solid wall the curtain was only a few inches thick. After a few false starts I got it together and went for it, once again I was pleasantly surprised, this time finding good, relatively solid ice. It took about four or five swings to get high enough to get a crampon into the thin curtain and to get my feet below me. This was plenty of time to get pumped, but Elliot was cheering me on, and encouraging the idea into realty. In a short while I was standing on a slab placing a screw, no more weight on my arms, and wondering at the fact that I was where I was, somewhere I had wanted to be for a long time.

In the final forty feet to the belay I placed a lot of screws, not sure if my swollen forearms were going to give out on the simple grade 4 terrain. We decided to belay at the very point that the cliff's angle kicks back, a wonderful spot to hang out overlooking the valley. Elliot cruised the pitch and quickly lead the final hundred feet to the trees. We coiled our ropes and hiked down, breaking trail most of the way.