Thumb Spire

July 27, 2018

Guide: Scott
Participants: Mike, Katharina
Time: 19 hours

An epic but amazing day. Scott, Katja, and I set out from camp at 07:30 (too late) carrying 60 meters of rope (too little). We climbed up and over Gobi Pass and down the snow until we started angling up towards the impressive monolith known as Thumb Spire. After climbing some very steep grass, we arrived on the ridge after about two hours of time spent on the approach. We roped up and started short roping our way, but it quickly became fifth class terrain which had us switching to belayed climbing. We were climbing in our boots at this point, making pitch number two very scary as we traversed a delicate slab which I had trouble finding footholds that would stick. At one point a foot blew and I was sure I was going to fall, but managed to catch myself with my fingernails. Kat and I changed to climbing shoes shortly after, which made things much more enjoyable. Scott led on upwards, running out 60 meter pitches while Kat and I team climbed at the end of the rope, which worked fairly well as nothing (except maybe that scary slab on pitch 2) was harder than about 5.4. We arrived at the base of a steep chimney and noticed that Scott had also changed into his climbing shoes at some point during the last pitch. "It looks like it gets a little more serious here" was his comment, and we re-configured the rope with Katharina at the mid-point and we climbed the next few 5.7 pitches individually in 30 meter increments. These were exciting and super exposed climbing, with occasional awkward belay stances. After the first pitch, Scott reconfigured the rope with himself in the middle and us at the ends, allowing him to lead on double ropes and us to follow simultaneously on individual strands, speeding these pitches up, and avoiding the annoyance of Kat and I being tied together while on climbing. As we approached the summit, things began to level off, but our world got very narrow. We switched to short roping mode and scrambled, pitched, and walked our way upwards as the terrain dictated. We reached the first summit, an uncomfortable perch, and discovered that the summit of Thumb is actually composed of four separate mini spires, all with about ten meters of prominence converging at a series of knife edge ridges. The one we were on was the shortest, so after a few protestations from Kat, we carefully traveresd down, over a super exposed ridgeline, and up to the top of the second one. It was difficult to tell whether we were on the highest point, but I suspect that one of the other two spires is actually about one meter taller. Given that it was now 17:00, we decided that this tiny pyramid of rock in the sky that we clung to (no room for standing), was our summit of Thumb, and we accepted the fact that we were likely going to be late for dinner. Au-cheval back to the first summit, and a little down climbing brought us to our first, of way too many, rappels. We rapped down the west flank. This took a very long time, as we could only go 30 meters at a time, and suitable anchors were difficult to come by. We left a lot of cordage and slings on the mountain, in addition to pitons and nuts for some anchors. We descended down to a col, where Scott scampered up a small sub-peak to scout where we were going. He spent a lot of time looking around in all directions, and I could tell that he was getting frustrated. None of the options looked good. We relunctantly committed to an ugly gully of loose shite, which Kat and I downclimbed 50 meters on belay, as boulders and other crap were knocked off the mountain at our feet. We stopped just before the base of the funnel, Scott joined us, and traversed to the other side to look for an anchor. I pointed to a promising boulder and he checked it out, but did not hide his frustration as this option turned out to be no good. Scott climbed back upwards looking for something to anchor off of, and finally found it, most of the way back up this bump. Kat and I were belayed up, and we abandonned the crappy gully. We managed a few more rappels off the west side, mixed in with a few pitches of short rope down climbing. Darkness fell and we rigged our helmets with our headlamps. Scott shone his headlamp over the edge of the ledge we perched on and said that we were probably only sixty meters from the talus slope at the base of the mountain. He threw the rope and declared that he was "pretty sure" that it was down. We fixed the rope in single strand configuration, and he sent me down first, rapping off of an expensive anchor of cams. Before launching, I grabbed some more cams in case I did not reach the bottom, and then plunged off into the dark unknown. As I passed the halfway point on the rope, my heart sank as I could not see any rope on the ground. Scanning my headlamp below me, I spied a big tangle of cord, caught up on the cliff. I rapped further until I could free this, and joyfully saw it hit some greenery below. I reached terra-firma (or maybe I should call it terra-loose-a), and got off the rope on a small patch of level ground, where I sat down to rest and wait for the others. Kat came down next, and suddenly she was shouting "rock!" and I could hear some small rocks bouncing down the mountain. Not daring to look up into the darkness above, I hunkered down and hoped. I heard something whiz by my left ear... phew! that was close... bang! My ears were ringing as my helmet was struck square in the middle, by something the size of a tennis ball. I could feel a chip out of the shell of the brain bucket, but I was fortunately fine. I crawled as best as I could underneath a rock and prayed that nothing else was coming down. Kat arrived and we started down climbing the steep talus slope to get us out of the firing range as Scott came down behind us. It was now 23:00... we were definitely late for dinner. We also were very dehydrated, having run out of water several hours ago, and hungry as we really had not stopped for food much along the way. Once Scott had re-joined us, we hiked as fast as possible down the steep slope, the sound of sweet running water below being the proverbial carrot leading the horses. Finally we found a trickle of water flowing over a rock ledge. It was a 5.4 move to get a bottle in, but we all repeatedly made this move as we filled and chugged well over a liter each, before continuing the descent. The moon came out full, which helped light our way, and the reflection of the glacier creeks below provided for an absolutely beautiful scene for our hike back. At a nice spot along another creek, we sat down for our first real break of the day. Lots more water was consumed and some sandwiches provided for a midnight lunch. We continued up the snow patches, the moonlight allowing us to switch off headlamps, and after some steep climbing, managed to gain Gobi pass. Here we spied two headlamps coming up and then across to us, which turned out to be Pierre and Tim, who had graciously hiked up to make sure that we were all right. They brought hot tea and food, so we stopped for a quick break before making our final triumphant descent back to camp. We arrived back at 02:40, making for one epic day. Shannon had left us some delicious coconut curry which we scarfed down a plate of, before hitting the sack. At just over nineteen hours, this makes today the longest day of my climbing career.

Thumb Spire, as viewed from Un-named. Our route pretty much followed the ridge line on the right, and our descent down the facing ridge.