East Arete of Mount Russell (14,086 ft)

Summary
OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-06-17 15:52:18 UTC-0400
DescriptionEric Gilbertson and Woody Hoburg

June 16th

Woody and I are working together at JPL in Pasadena for the summer, and this was our first weekend in Southern California. On Friday night we decided we would climb a 14er in the Sierra's. It was too late to get a permit for anything that needed one, so whitney and any overnight trip were out. Mount Russell sounded perfect though, 14,000ft and right next to mount whitney - we would just have to do it in one day instead of the two or three most people take for acclimatization.

We left Pasadena around 4:30am and started driving north, first through the San Gabriel Mountains. We hadn't realized there would be no gas stations for 50 miles in the San Gabriels, so had to coast as much as possible on the down hills until we made it to a station in Palmdale.

We made it to the Whitney Portal trailhead around 8:30 and started up the trail with minimal gear. This was a terrible snow year, so we didn't need to worry about crampons, ice ax, etc, just food, water, and some extra clothes. We followed the whitney mountaineer's route up to upper boyscout lake, and then consulted our topozone map printout and summitpost route description for the best way up. It turned out we had to ascend about 2000ft of scree to a saddle between Russell and Carillon. If you don't know what scree is, it's basically stones scattered in sand, so you take two steps forward and sink one step back. To minimize this we found some class 3 rocks to scramble up on some of the ascent.

The Russell-Carillon saddle (~13,000ft)is where the altitude really started affecting us. I was having a pounding headache and Woody said he felt like throwing up. I had heard from a guy I met on the AT that intentionally breathing harder, especially on the exhales, can help with the altitude. We tried this and, at least for me, my altitude symptoms went away. (of course they came back whenever I forgot to breath hard).

From the saddle we started onto the East Arete, a long 3rd class knife-edge ridge with a ~500ft vertical drop on the south side and a 70 degree slope on the other. There were good enough holds and footing that we didn't need to rope up, though some sections I would certainly have rated class 4. One part called the "mantle" was a 10ft vertical climb with no way around. About halfway along the ridge we passed two other guys returning from the top (we found out they were the only others climbing russell that day).

By about 3pm we made it to the summit, and were rewarded with a spectacular view of mount whitney to the south. We had been semi worried about afternoon thunderstorms, but the sky was luckily completely clear. Woody took a peek at a 5.9 "fishhook arete" climbing route up south side of russell and after about half an hour we turned around.

The ridge seemed easier this time and we continued hard breathing to help with the altitude. When we reached the scree we took it instead of the class 3 rock because it's almost like glissading going down that stuff. We talked to a few guys camped at upper boyscout and then returned to the portal, reaching our car at 8pm and not even needing our headlamps.

We decided to head back to pasadena that night, and made it back by 1:30am, making for a 21 hour round trip.