Fiasco 97 - The Plan

Lotus Flower Tower

by Mark Sanctuary and Grant Else

An account of the climbing adventure of  Mark Sanctuary and Grant Else in the Cirque of the Unclimbables, North West Territory, Canada. - August 1997.

Written November 1997 by Grant Else and Mark Sanctuary... Published in Canadian Alpine Journal 1998.

Plain Text : Mark Sanctuary
Itallic Text: Grant Else

The Plan:

Things were looking grim for Fiasco 97!

I had been hoping to go North this summer and tick off one of those boxes on my big list of things to do. The Lotus Flower Tower had caught my eye in a friends book of “50 Classic Climbs…” way back in the days before I knew what a lay-back was. Now that’s a LINE!  I’m not a hard climber and I’m not a sport climber; I just like to get out into the back country and have an adventure every now and then. I climb regularly in the summer but have never been obsessed with the game. The LFT aint that hard! I figured I could free climb at that level (5.10c max and mostly below 5.9) and if it got too hard I could aid past the tricky sections. I’d been living in Vancouver B.C. for a couple of years and I hadn’t got around to seeing much of the country yet. This would be a great opportunity for an expat’ Ozzy to see some of the "North". I really like traveling but for me its much more fun to be traveling to or from an objective, rather than just for the sake of it.

I’d been gathering information on the LFT in my random sort of way for the last couple of years (since I moved to Vancouver), and I had planned on finally doing something about it this summer. However I needed a climbing partner for this one. Its not like climbing “The Nose” on El Cap’ where you can just role up in Camp 4 in Yosemite, stick a note on the board and “bingo” have partner, will climb! No; this is real back country stuff. Whoever you go with had better have their head screwed on and you better get along well with each other, since its likely to rain a lot and a if you have a falling out, the tent can get very crowded. You also need someone who you can rely on to get you out if there is an accident, and who has the money and commitment up front to pay for flight bookings. In general your average sport climbing jock just won’t do. So with all this stuff in mind I had been looking for a partner for over a year and had come up empty handed. People had the skills but not the personality, or the personality but not the money, or the money but not the time … Looked like I would have to wait another year… Bummer!

I was lamenting this fact with one of those qualified friends without the time and he suggested another acquaintance that I had done a skiing/mountaineering trip or two with. I had not been aware that Mark was into rock climbing as well. By all accounts he was the right sort of fellow, and my friend seemed to think his climbing was at a good level.                  Some one give me a phone!

One phone call later  -- Hmmm he sounds remarkably positive about it! Looking for something to do for a Summer trip, Leading 10b or so, Money on hand, Time depends on work        OK

I rapidly pipe off some email with proposed trip details.

We go climbing the next 2 weekends  - Great guy, Good sense of humor, He climbs well.

His work gives the go ahead.

I send off a credit card number to the flight company

Good Lord the trip appears to be on!

Time is short.

We arrange a planning meeting:

Over a beer and a burger we decide the important details: - Your tent, my rack, You don’t have a car - OK my car!

Wham 4 weeks after that phone call I’m picking Mark up at 6am on a Saturday morning  in Kits’, and we’re going North.

 

We left Vancouver with a loose plan to climb the Lotus Flower Tower.  A granite wall rising 2300 vertical feet above an alpine meadow.  The climb is rated at 5.9 A1, or  5.10c.  This is an alpine/back-country rating, quite different from your typical urban crag ratings, as I discovered... eventually.   The plan was to drive up to Watson Lake, catch a bush plane into Glacier Lake, hike from the lake to the base camp in the cirque with all our gear, and climb the wall over two days.  The climb involves 20 pitches of moderate to difficult climbing, pitch ratings vary from 5.7 to 5.10c.  There is a bivy ledge 10 pitches above ground.  The first day would be spent getting to the bivy ledge, we would have a haul bag with our extra food and water and sleeping bags.  The second day, we would leave all the extra gear on the ledge, and climb the remaining pitches to the top.  To descend, we would rappel the route.  The first three pitches are notoriously wet and slimy and we planned to aid them. The rest of the climb we would do our best to free climb.

We gave ourselves 10  days in the cirque; two days to get to base camp, two days to get out, 2 days to climb, and a 4 day contingency for bad weather.  At the end of our ten days, the float plane would return to pick us up.  And then we would have three or so days to make it back to Vancouver, in time hopefully to resume our normal lives as engineers.