Epic

With 4500 vertical feet of technical climbing (if done all the way to the summit)—the Direct South Buttress of Mt Moran is the longest continuous rock route in the lower 48. The approach, on the other hand, is about as plush as it gets. Jesse and I loaded a rental canoe with everything but the kitchen sink and paddled across two lakes with a short, flat portage between. Then we schlepped all the gear 50-feet from the shore and set up camp. Getting to the base of the route is notoriously complicated, so we sussed it out that afternoon and stashed gear while we were at it. We ate a nice big dinner, drank water until we were bursting at the seams, and turned in for the night.

We set the alarm for 3:00 and were moving by 3:30 in order to start the climbing as the sun rose. Despite getting off route for two pitches, we managed the lower portion pretty quickly. Quality was hit and miss, but mostly pretty good, and Jesse freed the 5.11d traverse in fine style. The 5.12 crux came on my block, but I opted for the A1 version to keep things safe. Blowing the send would likely rip several pieces of sub-par gear and end with a factor-2 onto a belay that consisted of a fixed knifeblade and two of the smallest stoppers on our rack. It wasn't a risk I was willing to take. A short hand-traverse took us to the end of "the route" by noon. Most people turn around after these first 11 pitches, but we still had 3000 feet or ridge to go.

As we would shortly find out, it's not the vertical that gets you on this one. It's the nearly one-mile of horizontal that you have to cover which takes up time. We folded a 70m twin rope in half and simal climbed in sections until we ran out of gear or wanted to consult with the other on route finding. During one two-hour chunk, we moved perhaps seven or eight rope lengths without gaining more than 100 vertical feet. Reports on the ridge are both scarce and wildly different. We found the vast majority of the climbing between 5.6 and 5.8 with a few sections of 5.10 here and there. It was definitely not the hauling-ass-on-5.4 that we were expecting.

Despite continuous movement pausing only to place gear every 50-feet or so, we watched the sun set while we were still 1000-feet from the summit. Jesse stopped to place a piece of gear, put on his headlamp, clipped mine to the gear, and kept going. Shorty after that he found the luckiest trickle of water either of us had ever encountered, and we got to refill all of our water. Route finding in the daylight was hard. At night it was nearly impossible. All we new was that the black stuff was rock and the area with stars was not rock. We tried to follow the black stuff as much as possible.

As the night wore on we found ourselves in pretty rough shape. I was climbing so sloppy that I made the decision to stop simal-climbing for fear of falling and pulling Jesse off the rock. Withing a couple pitches after this decision, Jesse has started to fall a sleep at belays. Just past 11:00 Jesse took us through an overhanding squeeze chimney fueled by nothing but a steady stream of F-bombs. I got to follow it with the second rope on my back and the pack that he had clipped to a piece of gear.

At midnight we pulled the plug. Jesse just looked down at the belay ledge we were standing on and said "you want to sleep here?" I just replied with "sure" and committed to the first open bivy of my life. We were at just over 12,000 feet.

Each of us had a windshell, and we had one ultralight belay jacket to split. Since Jesse is a full foot taller than me, he didn't fit in my shirt, so I took his base layer top and he took the down jacket. We each flaked out a rope for insulation and left our helmets on as pillows. It was by far the coldest night of my life. Every time I looked over Jesse was in a different position, and each one looked more uncomfortable than the last. I just tried to ball up as much as I could to expose as little to the wind as possible. I thought all night "I should take some pictures of this" but I was way too cold to actually put those thoughts into action. The sun rose at 6:00, but we were still experiencing seizure-style shivering fits at 8:30.

By 9:00 we were more or less normal again, and I led out for the day's first pitch. It only took us 45-minutes to get to the summit and begin the descent. Having never been up the CMC route (descent route), we managed to waste 4-hours attempting to find the correct path down, had to reverse two rappels, and eventually ended up descending into the wrong drainage, downclimbing a 400-foot, 40-degree snowfield with nut tools, climbing back up 1000-feet of scree to get in the correct drainage, and eventually finding the trail and make our way to the lake. Jesse commented that he'd only recommend the climb to someone he absolutely hated.

That night we ate pounds of Jimmy Dean and pasta, drank beer cooled in the lake, and slept for 14-hours before getting up the next day for the paddle out. Seeing 50-people splashing at the takeout, mothers yelling at kids, and overweight tourists floating on innertubes was a serious shock to the system. Jesse asked if we could just go back and sleep in the open again.