Mt Slesse, The Heart of Darkness

Written by Peder Ourom

The Heart of Darkness  (Mt Slesse, Fraser Valley)
Grade 5, 1000m, WI 5, M4 crux
March 1980 

Joe Buszowski
Perry Beckham
Peder Ourom

After my successful ascent with Joe, our thoughts now turned to a winter ascent. To the right of the northeast Buttress, there is a huge gulley on Slesse. It’s a scary place, north facing and surrounded by monster feeder walls that continually avalanche during storms. We named it The Heart of Darkness. We had enlisted the technically skilled climber Perry Beckham to help increase our chances of success, and he was very keen to join in.

After a few stormed out attempts, the route conditions looked good and we committed to the climb.  

On the attempts we still had a lot of fun. Hitching and hiking for the day, we would aim for our base camp that was located in the valley below the mountain. It was not really a base camp, only an abandoned explosives shack that was used when they built the road. It featured no windows or heat and was covered in a light coating of “loggers special” dynamite residue, and was well-ventilated in order to prevent any spontaneous disassembly events. One big benefit from using it was that the roof only leaked a little.  To keep occupied as you waited for the weather to clear you could traverse the exterior walls of the shack with crampons and ice picks, and on a few reconnaissance missions this was the technical crux of our attempt.

Eventually everything aligned for a proper attempt. Not too much new snow. A high-pressure window. A strong party of three. Enough gear to aid the last 800 feet of the Heart of Darkness, where the ice and snow gulley steepened and then ended. With our fancy new Lowe Expedition packs stuffed full of technical climbing equipment, bivouac gear, and clothes, we moved up to our advance base camp.  This was located up in the cirque that lies below and to the right of the main gulley. As it was winter we had the mountain to ourselves and the deep snow helped to cover the devastation left by the loggers.

Early the following morning we ascended up into the Heart of Darkness.

I led the first hard ice pitch without a pack, and I was heckled a little for not wearing it. We rated the pitch Grade 4, one grade below the hardest pitch that had been climbed at the time in southwestern BC.

The crampons and technical tools that we used were very prone to breaking and  you constantly needed to check for cracks in the picks and loose straps. In Tami Knight’s excellent Alpinist #74, (Summer 2012) Slesse article, there is a poor quality picture of us ascending in the gulley above this pitch. Somehow the slides  had survived for decades in a box, and I was actually able to find them before the edition went to print.

Higher up we expected the climbing to become much more difficult. The gulley above the ice pitch was very slow climbing, deep snow with a piece of protection now and then. Somehow, we had spent a whole day climbing one moderate ice pitch and a bunch of snow. The huge Lowe expedition packs we carried certainly did not help.

It was starting to feel more like Mount Everest now, as our commitment level increased with every step taken. We dug out a bivouac platform at the very top of the snow, fired up our Svea stove, hoping it would not explode into a ball of fire,  and settled in for the night. The pitch above the bivy looked like it required very difficult aid and mixed climbing techniques, and I was relieved that it was Perry’s pitch.

By the morning our situation had changed. A storm front had arrived unexpectedly, and a few snowflakes had already started to fall. Perry gave it a proper attempt. Combining ice climbing and free climbing and a few aid moves, he worked his way slowly up the pitch. Today this type of climbing is called mixed climbing, however back in 1980 we just called it scary. Eventually Perry had exhausted all the climbing possibilities, except for one. As we discussed the need to hand drill a few bolts in order to access the upper couloir, the decision was taken out of our hands.

The building storm had continued to intensify, and the spindrift began flowing down the 2000-foot gulley walls in waves. By the time Perry had lowered down to us, our bivouac ledge was buried with snow. It would be a difficult and dangerous descent. The huge walls on each side us were acting as a funnel, and we would have to descend directly through this trap to reach safe ground. The surface area of the spindrift feeder rock walls was huge, possibly a square kilometre in total.

Using a combination of snow bollards for rappels, and the unconsolidated  snow for downclimbing we began the descent. 

Eventually we arrived at the top of the difficult ice section that I had led on the way up. The avalanching snow was now constant, and flowed with a hissing sound over top of us. Caught in the “pinch” of the funnel, in the firehose of snow, breathing was next to impossible. The conditions had changed from our team being in control, to Eiger-like survival tactics in a few hours.

For some unlucky reason, I was the last person to escape through the maelstrom. Partway down the ropes, and well above the start of the climb, an intense pulse of snow shot me down and off the ropes.  Crashing and tumbling with spiky tools attached to hands and feet, I bounced down the gulley.  Somehow, I was okay enough to help hunt for my glasses, that had been ripped off my face in the last and final punch of snow. Dark by now, we spent a second night at our advance base camp licking our wounds. Our winter alpine climbing learning experience was now over.

We did not return for another attempt.

In 2015, the strong American team of Colin Haley and Dylan Johnson finished the Heart of Darkness to the top of the mountain. It was a heavy ice year, and the section of rock without ice was considerably less than on our attempt. Using modern mixed climbing techniques this much more technically skilled team  managed to connect the upper and lower gulleys at a relatively moderate grade.