The Watchtower
by SCMA Member Brandon Thau

Grant and I have been looking for increasingly more torturous activities dealing with climbing. The ideas that we had needed to take place during the winter. Keeler Needle was one idea, but it had been done a long time ago by Galen Rowell. Shasta was another but it would be mainly hiking for a few days. Then the idea of the Watchtower in Sequoia came up, which we believed not to have been climbed in the winter (except for Moonage Daydream) It looked like it would be a worthy feat in the middle of summer let alone the dead of winter. Our idea was to make an assault on the north face with full aid gear, including ice gear, portaledges, and lots of down. Richard Leversee told us about a groove that had been attempted as a variation to John Long's and Richard Harrison's All Along the Watchtower route. Along with the winter ascent of the face we were also going to try and straighten out the route by finishing the groove variation.

The beginning the trip went well since the road in Lodgepole had been plowed all the way to the heated bathrooms and we didn't have to deal with Boy Scouts in the morning. We put on our double boots and 60+ pound haul bags and started on the trail. 1.5 hours later we filled up bottles at the creek and got a good look at the snow/ice approach. The snow was hard but steep, we occasionally postholed to our thighs. After about 500+ feet of elevation gain we had to fix ropes. I headed up the ice/unconsolidated snow slab with two axes and crampons with the occasional light spindrift avalanche. 300 feet of rope was required to fix the section safely. We then traversed steep snow over icy death slabs to the base of the route. We kicked out a ledge and organized our gear, it had only taken 6 hours from the car so far. I volunteered Grant for the first lead which required dry tooling with screwed up protection. After 3+ hours of swearing and shivering Grant made it to the belay. In the summer this section is 5.8/5.9. I thought we had a slim chance of success since we set up our first bivy on the first pitch. The next morning consisted of me hammering big chunks of ice out of a dihedral onto the portaledge. The 5.9 climbing was more like aid climbing since I hammered pitons and carved steps out of ice/snow. Even the 5.5 section at the end of the pitch had to be aided since my shoes had no friction on the edges with thin ice. Every once in a while some ice cut loose off the top and crashed near us. This gave the climb a more legitimate alpine feeling to it. Grant cruised his pitch by freeclimbing a snow free 5.9 dihedral then making a pendulum and backcleaning 50 feet to the belay. Grant received the crux aid pitch which used beaks, rurps, and 10 copperheads, some of them #1's. The first ascent party used a new-wave definition of A2 for this pitch, which was done in 1985. It was at the end of this pitch the groove connected to the climb, the original ascent pendulumed away from this obvious feature. The groove looked very appealing but was running water, which doesn't make for solid head placements. We only had two more hours of light so we abandoned the new variation idea and continued with the original route. The topo indicated that it was .10b. I got into free shoes and started aiding about 20 feet into my lead. The pitch turned out to be A1 with pitons and cams. Towards the end of a 200 foot lead it started to get dark and I couldn't find the belay, so I started penduluming. I made two of them onto a ledge with minimal gear at my disposal. I shoved some small aliens into a crack and one #3 camalot and said off belay. It was dark now and Grant had to follow my screwed up lead. The hardest part was hauling the bags around an arete and not getting them stuck. The bags got stuck many times and I was exerting so much force on them I was afraid I was going to blow my meager alien placements. We eventually got to sleep at 9pm, Grant in a Himalayan down jacket and me in a Dryloft sleeping bag. The next morning we connected with the Rowell route and made the first steps in the snow on top. It was the only day of the climb that we received sunlight. We had a gourmet feast of peppered salmon and packed our bags.

Nothing worked the way we wanted it to on the way down including Grant's bowels. Our boots would posthole and our snowshoes would skate with the heavy loads. Eventually we got the idea to take our breakable items out of the haulbag and roll our bags down the snow gully. Grant rode his beast down the suicidal slopes, narrowly avoiding water holes and rocky drop-offs. The decent down took only 2.5 hours and was much better than the approach. This seemed like an intro climb to Alaska or some other alpine wall area. (If anyone is aware of the Watchtower receiving a winter ascent via one of its wall routes let me know.)