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By Kristin Bigsby For only the third time in history, climbers last week reached the top of Mount Emmerich, the saw-toothed outcropping in the Chilkat Range also known as Cathedral Peaks. Local mountain guides Eli Fierer and Will Wacker traveled up the southern wall of Emmerich last Tuesday, a route pioneered in 1976 by mountaineer Fred Becky that Fierer called "the easiest way up the mountain." The expedition began around 3 p.m. Monday. Crossing the Chilkat River near 8 Mile Haines Highway, Fierer and Wacker hiked up the Kicking Horse Valley and made camp that night overlooking several icefields on the elevated horizon. They arose at 3 a.m. Tuesday to push for the summit (approximately six miles from the west side of the river), which they reached five hours later. The view from atop the 6,500-foot mountain was "amazing," said Fierer, 26, a climber of 10 years who grew up in Pennsylvania. "We could see all the way up the St. Elias, Mount Fairweather…we had a nice view of town and the peninsula," he said. While Fierer said scaling the mountain wasn’t very challenging, 27-year-old Wacker called the climb "challenging, absolutely." "Getting there was not easy," he said. "We had to bushwhack to get up there, battle the mosquitoes… We saw a lot of bear tracks. We actually followed a bear trail two miles…it led us right where we wanted to go." "It was all timing," Fierer said. "We hit it on a day when the snow was firm. A lot of gullies and chutes were filled in, so we didn’t have any problems there." Sean Gaffney, director of Alaska Mountain Guides, called Wacker and Fierer "substantial climbers." Gaffney said the climbers’ experience helped them recognize the conditions were right to make the attempt. Fierer, an employee, has led climbing trips in Ecuador and Mexico and also climbed in Peru, New Zealand and the Lower 48, Gaffney said. Wacker, a Utah native who’s lived all over Southeast Alaska but most recently Juneau, has also led trips in Mexico for the company and climbed throughout North America, including an attempt at Mount Fairweather. The Mount Emmerich climb is technically challenging, said Gaffney, who has attempted the peak with others and been turned away from the summit just 400 feet short by unstable rock and ice. "It’s not just gut-it-out, put one foot in front of the other and you’ll get there," he said. "It requires technical skill and experience as a climber to be able to safely and successfully do it… The conditions were good for them. They went right at the end of the cold, when the snow was still pretty consolidated and stable, just before the time in spring when the mighty avalanches come down the mountain. Taking on challenging routes in the mountains requires as much experience as it does recognizing when it’s time to go. That’s what a number of other folks in the past who didn’t make it to the top had run up against." The second successful group to climb Mount Emmerich was a trio of Colorado geologists with climbing experience who summited in 1982. They went up the north buttress, "the big ridge where Becky had given up on earlier attempts due to rotten rock," local mountaineer Paul Swift said. Swift called Emmerich "a very steep, definitely dangerous mountain." He said reaching its summit is "quite an accomplishment." "The mountain itself is a pile of crumbling rock." Museum director and climber Cynthia Jones said the first time she attempted to summit in July 1989, the glaciers were so broken up it was nearly impossible to move forward. In 1992, she and other locals tried again, but surface avalanches and crevasses kept them from the top. Wacker said he and Fierer are looking at attempting a 6,800-foot peak behind Emmerich later in the summer. |