No not the marine mammal kind....the epic peak that I've been wanting to climb up since I got here! Orca is outside of the recreational travel area, so Malcy our station leader and I headed up to Orca on skidoos outside the flag line. It has been snowing heavily the past week so the snow is very powdery and thick so we dumped the skidoos and skied to the windscoop of Orca. As you can see below we were skiing with a line attached to us as there are a few crevasses around.
After dumping our skis we climbed down the windscoop with our ice axes, then we trundled up to the start of the climb to one of the ridges through knee high deep snow - good resistance training!
In the photo above we started what turned into a 7 pitch climb. This type of climbing is called mixed climbing, where we where crampons on our boots and use ice axes (where possible) to climb up the routes with snow, ice and rock.
This was a fun part of the climb as the slabs were quite large which meant you really needed to trust your crampons by using sometimes only 2 spikes to balance your body weight onto, coupled with small holds for the axes made it very interesting strategizing where to climb next.
The view was incredible, the clouds lingered around trident and N2.
Once we got to the peak the view of the Sheldon glacier was amazing and we could see all of our base companions skiing at Vals. We then belayed from the top down to about half way, then we walked back to our skis - we got back in time for Sunday roast!!!
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| Malcy our Wintering Station Leader - both with frozen hair/beards! |