Trip Report
Liberty Bell - Beckey Route — Saturday, Jul. 9, 2016
At 4AM, waking up in my van at the Lone Fir camp site to the brutal alarm of the phone, I didn't need to open the door to know that it was pouring rain. The car roof was rattling with the music of the angry falling rain drops. It was one of those moments when I am happy to drive a minivan. I eventually motivated myself to get out of the sleeping bag, checked in quickly with the other climbers who were camped two sites down and we decided to reconvene a few hours later. Dammit, if this long-awaited climb of Liberty Bell was going to get canceled then at least I would get some decent sleep!
At 6:30AM, with the second jarring phone alarm - surprise! Blue skies had opened above us, and the clouds were dissipating fast, so off we jumped into our cars - of course, not before I had my mandatory climbing breakfast of corn grits and coffee - and drove to the Blue Lake trail head.
The approach to the Beckey Route, the Southwest face of Liberty Bell, follows that to the South Early Winter Spire in the beginning, which I remembered as a no-trouble scramble, but then it veers left into a chossy gully full of brittle rock and precariously piled-up stones and requires lots of caution to negotiate. Then all of a sudden, there it was - the start of pitch 1, still covered by scattered patches of snow and tiny pearls of hale from the night before. Despite the occasional sun break the temperatures stayed in the 40s and my fingers were frozen. Waiting for the first rope team to go I was wearing 4 upper body layers and still shivering. Alpine climbing can be type-2 fun sometimes.
I paired up with Tad, whom I knew from sight but I had never climbed with yet; however, this being a Mountaineers Intermediate climb, you pretty much know what you can expect from each climber. Eager to get off the ground as we were the last team to start climbing, I began by leading pitch 1.
Each of the pitches on this route has a hard move, and all of them are fun and "pumpy". Once I got on the rock, I forgot all about the cold.
- Pitch 1 - you can go through the "tunnel", which is a slightly easier variation, or climb the face on the left side of the tunnel, or climb on the arête to the right. The route to left of the tunnel looked more appealing and challenging so I started there. The first couple of moves are the crux and require some friction and relying on tiny holds to pull yourself up to an easier crack.
- Pitch 2 - Tad lead this part, which starts with a very awkward move in a chimney requiring you to go around a chock-stone and avoid going deeper in the chimney. The move is close enough to the bottom so you can't rely on protection, and high enough off the ground to get you quite hurt if you happen to fall. Thankfully no one fell, this move requires more caution and careful placement than strength.
- Pitch 3 - I lead this one, which starts with a low grade scramble where you have to make sure that whatever protection you place is extended long enough to prevent some terrible rope drag later (which happened anyway, despite all calculations). The easy start is followed by two hard moves which I'm happy I trusted myself to lead: a finger traverse, with not much of a finger hold to use, and later a couple of angling parallel horizontal cracks located above a very exposed slab, which you have to rely on to get yourself - with some liebacking and friction - around a corner and then to the belay station, where, because of the tortuous nature of the route you now have to deal with serious rope drag to belay your partner up.
- Pitch 4 - we all did this un-roped. It's a scramble with a crux move over a large 6 or 7 foot tall, nearly-vertical slab which can only be climbed by relying on friction. This one was definitely more challenging to down-climb on the way back than it was to climb on the way up.
Finally we hit the summit around 3:30PM and celebrated with my slice of traditional "summit pizza" and group photos. On the way down, we scrambled around the first unnecessary rappel, and did two rappels back to where the backpacks were patiently waiting.
The weather spared us from unpleasant complications all day. The skies never quite cleared up, but never got entirely covered, it did not rain one drop, and the visibility was very good. We only met one other team of two on this usually popular route; they caught up with us on the summit. In case I'll ever forget, this was my first official rock rope lead with the mountaineers. Thanks Ian and the rest of the crew for this great day. On to other successful climbs!
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