Meteor Arete - North Face Granite Peak (AI3 5.9)

Beartooth Range, MT

Dates: September 9-10, 2022

Strava Links: https://www.strava.com/activities/7799295468 https://www.strava.com/activities/7799328256

Trip Report:

Granite Peak. Montana’s tallest mountain. It’s impossible to climb the standard, East Ridge route and not admire its daunting North Face. Guarded at the bottom by the Granite Glacier, several ribs separated by shallow gullies line the North Face of Granite. As with most routes in the Beartooths, there’s virtually no information about routes on the North Face of Granite other than the tragic 1994 trundling incident. There’s mention of the “Chadwick Bowman” route in the Select Alpine Climbs to Montana which starts on the left side of the “Shield” and climbs up and over the rib above it and finishes on the right side of the rib near the summit. There was also an entry in the 2009 AAJ describing a potential new route on the North Face of Granite named “Directissima”. There are no photos in the entry and limited details, but it sounds like the route heads up the central rib that the “Chadwick Bowman” cuts to the right side of. Now that I’ve briefly discussed the existing routes, I’ll go into the details about our trip.

The North Face of Granite sees very little sun, so it takes a while for the rock on the North Face to dry out. Allegedly, the best time to attempt the route is late in the summer to give the best chance of climbing dry rock so we chose a week in early September to give it a go after being consumed by the Tetons in August. There is major rockfall hazard on the North Face, so we chose a weekend with lows dipping below freezing to hopefully keep the mountain glued together.

The plan was to head up the Huckleberry Creek drainage and camp on the north end of Avalanche Lake. Aidan joined me for this outing and I’m very thankful to have great friends eager to accompany me on my often overly ambitious plans. Thankfully, West Rosebud Rd didn’t sustain as much damage as other parts of the Beartooths from the catastrophic floods in early summer, but we did have an extra mile of road walking to get to the normal trailhead. Both our packs weighed 65 lbs which added to the fun on the approach. The absurdly heavy packs were due to my great idea to bring our normal climbing and camping gear plus fishing equipment and spotting scopes and binoculars to scope out climbs and do some pre-hunting season scouting in the area. The forecast called for questionable weather on Friday, which was our approach day, and then perfect weather through Monday. As much as I didn’t want to get rain/ sleeted on, the low-pressure system made for very dramatic scenery on the hike in. The towers above Mystic Lake were perfectly peeking out of the clouds and we couldn’t help but stop to take lots of photos.

We hit the intersection of Huckleberry Creek and Mystic Lake and took a quick snack break and discussed which side of the creek we wanted to follow to get to Huckleberry Lake. We landed on hiking up the right side of the creek and it seemed to be the right choice. There was a pretty beaten in path all the way to Huckleberry Lake with minimal deadfall to maneuver around.

Huckleberry Lake to Princess Lake was the next segment of the approach and we followed the right side of the creek until we were almost to Princess Lake where the trail veers a little further west of the creek to avoid some cliffs near the Princess Lake outlet. We stopped for a quick snack break once we hit the shore of Princess Lake and couldn’t help but pull out the fishing rods after seeing all the trout swimming around. The trout seemed pretty lure shy, so we made our break brief and continued up to Cold Lake.

Here, either the trail disappears, or we lost the trail. We headed up the right side of an unnamed creek and found a steepish short couloir to grant us passage through the headwall below Cold Lake. Note: we took the other side (north side) of the creek on the way down and it seemed far worse (thicker, marshier, etc.). We passed Cold Lake on the west side of the lake which was relatively straightforward thanks to a faint trail through most of it. Here is where the approach got pretty shitty… Between Cold Lake and Avalanche Lake you’re navigating boulders which range from refrigerator size to small gas station size. It’s not a long distance to cover through this terrain, but it’s pretty involved with heavy packs on your back with many hours in the legs. Thankfully the precipitation I mentioned previously never happened because the bouldering hopping would have been treacherous if the rocks were covered in rain or snow.

We made it to the north end of Avalanche Lake and found an awesome campsite a few hundred yards above the lake, complete with a rock wind wall and a fire ring. The trio of resident mountain goats quickly stopped by to welcome us to the neighborhood and waited around impatiently for a gift of salty liquids. We brought my HMG Ultamid 4 and thankfully had great, soft grass to stake it out as it would be hard to get a taut pitch on rocky ground with that tent. Just as we got in the tent to cook dinner, a light pitter-patter of snow started falling; It couldn’t have been more perfect timing. Getting snowed on was quite the contrast from the highs in the upper 90s that Bozeman saw just a few days prior. Nighttime lows were forecasted to drop to the low 20s at the elevation we were at, so we decided an early start wasn’t necessary.

We set the alarms for a very casual 6 am and were out of camp by 8 am. It took us an hour and a half to get to the base of the glacier where we put on harnesses and got out the sharps. We observed some substantial rock fall but it was all to our right barreling down the Notch Couloir and Ignorance Couloir, so we continued ascending with the plan to stay as far climbers left as possible. Despite the heavy packs on the approach, we did make an attempt to go light so we both opted for two Petzl Gully tools and Petzl Irvis Hybrid crampons. It took a few swings into the glacier to realize the ice was beyond bulletproof and we might be slightly under gunned for the conditions. Still, we proceeded on and agreed that we’d get the rope out to simul if either of us got the least bit uncomfortable. Each stick seemed to take 5-10 swings and our progress was steady but definitely slow. We found a huge rock jammed in the glacier (LOL) about 2/3s of the way up and we made the decision to use this nice perch to swap over to simuling. We brought a whopping three screws on the trip, so we used one to anchor the belayer and then I had 2 to lead on. I ran out the 60m rope to its end and placed a screw and continued climbing placing one more screw before we hit the top left corner of the glacier. It gets a little steeper at the top and you’re swinging into a mix of frozen gravel and ice that’s more gravel than ice in some spots. On top of that, you’re navigating sizeable crevasses. Needless to say, both of us we’re pretty relieved once we topped out the ice and got back on rock. I think our experience on the ice would have been slightly more enjoyable had we brought more substantial ice tools and crampons.

We started the day planning on roughly following the “Chadwick Bowman” or “Directissima” but the rockfall to our right pushed us to the far-left corner of the glacier. From here, there was a melted-out snow gully that we climbed next to that got us to a good looking arete separate from the existing routes. We debated if we wanted to try to traverse back right to get to the existing routes but ultimately decided to climb up the arere we were under. We found an old BD piton with a very heavy-duty quick link at the base of the arete. It easily pulled out by hand, and we took it to both clean up the mountain and have a souvenir from our route. I would love to know the backstory of the piton we found. Alex Lowe skied the north face solo after climbing the Notch Couloir so maybe it belonged to him? Who knows…

I took the first lead and found good 5.7 climbing without too much loose rock (for Beartooth standards). We swapped leads and found pitch after pitch of surprisingly good 5.7-5.8 climbing. Below is a pitch-by-pitch breakdown I recorded in my notes app as we climbed:

P1: 55m 5.7

P2: 45m 5.8

P3: 40m 5. 8+ awesome triple flake corner

P4: 40m 5.7

P5: 50m 5.8+

P6: 50m 5.7+

P7: 45m 5.9 OW

P8: 40m 5.7

We tried to stay on the arete the best we could and traversed as needed to find weaknesses that offered moderate climbing. We never had to stray far to find climbable terrain. As luck would have it, I got to lead the two best pitches which were Pitch 3 and Pitch 7. Pitch 3 was this awesome corner that had 3 different cracks running up it and Pitch 7 was an offwidth with holds appearing just where you need them. Not much specialized offwidth technique was required thankfully since I don’t possess said technique. The route was quite ledgy, so every belay was very comfortable. The smaller gear seemed much more useful than the big gear and I would probably bring singles of the #2 and #3 next time versus the full double rack we brought. We didn’t see any existing gear or signs of previous attempts on the route. We decided to call our potential new route Meteor Arete (5.9 AI3).

We topped out our arete and intersected the East Ridge. We found ourselves at the traverse below the famous “Keyhole” feature. We dropped packs and quickly tagged the summit. This was Aiden’s first-time up Granite, and I would be willing to bet he’s the first person to have climbed the North Face as their first route on Granite. We stood on top of Montana at 6:30 pm before heading back to our packs. I really wanted to be at the Granite-Tempest saddle before dark, so we bolted down the standard, East Ridge route. Thankfully, I’ve been up this route three times, so I was pretty familiar with the route finding. This was the first time I’ve seen the “Snow Bridge” completely melted out but also the first time I’ve climbed Granite in September. Just as I had hoped, we hit the saddle right before sunset and transitioned back into crampons to descend the snowfield to get us down to Avalanche Lake. I was kind of dreading this snowfield as I feared conditions might be similar to the glacier below the North Face, but we found snow soft enough we could walk down. We made it to camp after dark but still at a reasonable time and celebrated an awesome climb on Granite’s illusive North Face.

A few thoughts on timing, it seems to be a tricky balance between good ice conditions on the glacier and dry rock higher on the route. I feel as if the rock would have been dry by mid-august this year and the ice on the glacier probably would have been much friendlier earlier in the summer. I also don’t think I would have wanted to climb the route on a much colder day than we had as climbing barehanded would be out of the picture. Still, I feel like we pretty much nailed the timing as I would assume rock fall would be substantially worse earlier in the summer with warmer temps than we had. Another interesting observation, the rock fall was most active while the face was seeing direct light in the morning. By about 10:00 am, the face was completely in the shade, and we didn’t notice anymore rockfall. Maybe an even later start is the move if the temps are low?

I have mixed feelings claiming a potential first ascent on the North Face of Granite as it seems to have a history of being a “chose your own adventure” kind of route. The Directissima seems to be a direct finish to the Chadwick Bowman as it states that it finishes 100 yards left of the Chadwick Bowman in the 2009 AAJ entry. Honestly, I think if the “Directissima” warrants an AAJ entry than our route does as well. Our route was on a completely separate arete feature far away from the existing routes, so I feel decent about claiming a potential first ascent. It might not be my place to, but I’d also like to break the tradition of keeping climbing and skiing in the Beartooths a secret. The approaches are far too heinous to ever worry about Teton-esque crowds in my opinion. To anyone, I may offend by claiming a first ascent or even writing this trip report, I apologize, and I would love to talk to understand your point of view. Also, if you think this route has been climbed previously, please let me know. With that said, I’m super proud of this route and had a great trip into the Beartooths with a great friend. It’s hard to beat climbing a technical north face complete with ice on the highest peak in Montana!