| Summary | None |
| Owner | MITOC Gallery Administrator |
| Creation Date | 2012-05-06 22:19:20 UTC-0400 |
| Description | Mt Lowell via The Chute
Eric Gilbertson, John Romanishan, Nadine Muller-Dittman 10 miles mtn biking 2 miles hiking 3 miles bushwacking 2 pitches of rock climbing 7:30pm May 5 – 11:45pm May 6 Three brave mountaineers succeeded in finding the hardest way up Mt Lowell last weekend, employing every mode of transportation short of packrafting to get there. We drove up to the Sawyer River Road parking lot on Saturday evening, arriving just before sunset. The Sawyer River Road is still officially closed due to damage from Hurricane Irene last year, which means most people have to road-walk for about 2 miles in to get to the official signal ridge trailhead. We were more prepared than most other hikers though – we had brought three trusty mountain bikes along just for this road. We quickly assembled our bikes at the car and headed up the closed road laden with overnight gear and rock climbing equipment. I knew from a previous trip my brother Matthew had taken to Vose Spur [link] that there was in fact an abandoned logging road just a mile past the signal ridge trailhead that eventually intersected the trail and allowed most of the approach to Mt Lowell to be mountain-biked. We made the call to try this old logging road instead of the trail, and made it to the start of the old road just before headlamp time. Nadine and I threw out sleeping bags on the ground while John hung up his fancy hammock for the night. We got up early at 6am Sunday and were officially moving out by 6:45am. After a stream crossing we started mountain biking up the old road. Most of it was well-maintained, but a few sections required dismounting. After an hour or so we intersected the signal ridge trail, and kept biking, turning onto the Carrigan Notch trail. Eventually the trail got too rugged to easily bike with big packs on, so we ditched the bikes in the woods and continued on foot. By 10am we spied our prize – the Lowell Chute. I’d read two accounts of people climbing this in the summer and one in winter. It was unclear exactly how difficult it would be though, so we brought enough climbing gear for the hardest rock route. To make things interesting we hiked to the height of land in Carrigan notch and then bushwacked to the base of the cliffs on the west face of Mt Lowell. I scouted out some future rock and ice climbs as we headed south along the base of the cliffs. We reached the base of the Chute by 2pm, and soon started ascending. The bottom half of the chute was easy scrambling on talus and scree, but soon we got to the technical part. There was a 20 ft headwall with a waterfall coming down, and we decided to rope up. I started up trailing two ropes, and unfortunately the rock was all really crumbly and wouldn’t safely take any protection. And the least crumbly rock was right in the waterfall. I climbed up carefully (soloing though trailing ropes) until I made it about a half rope length and then spotted a scraggly looking tree on the side – that would have to do for an anchor. I backed up the tree with a cam in a crack and belayed up John and Nadine. The climbing was lower 5th class, but was definitely scarier than that sounds since no holds could really be trusted. After John and Nadine made it up I started leading the next pitch, and actually got one cam in a crack halfway up. The rock on this pitch was even more crumbly, with a stream of water flowing in the middle on the only semi-strong rock. I bet this would be an awesome ice-climb in the winter because you could actually get protection in. After another half-rope length I topped out and found a bomber tree to build an anchor on. I belayed John up on this, and halfway up I heard what sounded like an enormous boulder falling through the chute. John perhaps accidentally knocked this down, and I was relieved that Nadine was safely off to the side at our previous anchor. We all made it up no problem, and after a little 30-minute bushwack reached the summit at 6:40pm. According to the summit register 5 other people had summited yesterday! That’s pretty impressive for a trailless peak. The previous sign in was from December though. John suggested wisely that we GTFOH, so he could maybe catch a group meeting back at MIT, so we started heading back. Ideally to save time we would have rappelled the route, but the route wasn’t really safe enough to build bomber rappel anchors, so we decided to bushwack around. The trees on Mt Lowell are as dense as any I’ve seen in the Whites, and that was one of the toughest bushwacks I can remember doing. At one point we hit the top of a cliff and had to go around, and we didn’t regain the trail for a full 2.5 hours. Once on the trail we somehow walked past the bikes, but noticed our mistake quickly when we saw tire tracks in the trail. We went back and got the bikes, and then cruised back down, reaching the car at 11:45pm for a full 18-hour day. |