Eric, Scott, Linsey, Andrea, Rena and James set out for Merchant peak at 8:30 a.m. Our start was delayed by a missing ice axe and helmet that caused us to do some extra driving on the way to the trailhead. We were further delayed by the snow on the road to the Barkley Lake trail head – the road is impassible about 1 mi. from the parking lot. However, we were fortunate to have good footprints in the snow leading us to the bridge over Barkley Creek; Mike Warren had been out attempting Merchant the day before and his meandering steps saved us some time.
As one might expect after the winter we had, there was a lot of snow in the gullys that make up the ascent route for Merchant. Last year, there were two steps that had to be negotiated with some rock climbing or scrambling around; this year we kicked steps right over these rock bands. Our first challenge of the day (aside from the near whiteout conditions) was the big step in the 2nd gully that starts around 4000’. There is a lot of water flowing down this gully now and the waterfall is bigger than last year, leaving less room to negotiate a step on wet rock. We also noticed that if we successfully made this tight move, we’d get ourselves onto some slabby rock that had a few inches of snow on it – enough to make it slick but nowhere near enough to kick steps. So we decided to leave the main route and make our own variation, not exactly sure if it would work but knowing that we needed something safer than what we were looking at.
Here, the snow helped us. We were able to get onto the right-hand ridge and ascend a steep chute. The going was slow but the deep, heavy snow made for good self-belays and Scott put in good steps for the party. We used a hand-line for a little extra security on a slabby section that had less snow. Eventually, we were able to traverse off the ridge and back into the gully – our variation had got us past the problem area but it took us two hours to go 400’! I also believe we wound up climbing a different gully than the main route ascends – there seems to be two gullys on the topo map and we were in the more southerly one. This was easily corrected at 5000’ where both gullys top out into the upper basin.
The travel was slow as the snow was very deep. Scott kicked the majority of the steps with Linsey and I spelling him only long enough for him to get frustrated that we were moving too slow. Hey, if he can kick them faster, who am I to get in his way? We experimented with snow shoes in the upper basin but ultimately went back to boot-packing since we’d had to take gentle traversing angles on the shoes. In the whiteout, we gained the summit ridge sometime around 3 p.m., only to realize that the nob we ascended was not the true summit. We saw the bigger quary up the ridge and went after that. In a complete whiteout, we topped out at 3:20 pm. After taking a few celebratory summit shots, we whipped out the GPS and lo, we were still not on the summit. So again we traversed the ridge, and at this point we got a break as visibility improved. By 3:45 we topped out on the real summit (GPS confirmed this time!), although we stayed clear of the absolute peak since there’s a large scary cornice and we saw evidence of cornices pulling away from the summit ridge as we made our traverse (we stayed away from those as well).
Due to the late hour, we snapped a few shots quickly and started our descent. Fortunately, the descent was easy and fun – we probably glissaded 70% of the way from the summit to the bottom of the lower gully. Our route variation in the gully was easily reversed, again using the hand line over tricky sections but relying on the ability to step safely and self-belay in the snow on steeper sections. We were back at the cars just before 8 p.m.
Pictures can be found here: