Mountain: Mt. Deltaform
Route: North Face Super Couloir
Country: Canada
Height: 3424 meters
Dates of Expedition: February 1977
Overview of climb: Standing on the summit of Mt. Temple the last week of January 1977 with Phil Hein, I had stared at the impressive Super Couloir of Deltaform. It was bitter cold, and we had been 5 days on Temple's North Face. It seems insane for to me now to imagine that I would even dream of trying another complex Canadian alpine North face at that moment. However, that was exactly what crossed my mind. Within a few days, Mark Whalen and and I were striding towards Moraine Lake towards this colossal winter objective.
Team Members: Mark Whalen, Carlos Buhler
Lasting Impression:
Mark and I had no idea what awaited us above the ice of the couloir. We had not done our homework. We found a vertical, +/-50 meter, dark, diffiult to protect, limestone cliff separating us from the sunshine on the NW Ridge. It seemed so unfair. During the remaining 4 hours of that day and at least 4 hours of the next morning, I worked on climbing that fifty meter wall via an obvious corner directly above the gully. The relief I felt pulling over the cornice onto the ridge was immense; hard to quantify in words. We reached the top late that day, and bivied just beneath the summit where we could actually lie down. We descended the following 24 hours via the traverse over Neptuak Peak. Looking back 50 years, that final headwall stands out as one the three or four deepest alpine-pitch efforts of my life. Unknown to us, in July 1973, Chris Jones and George Lowe had followed the right hand gully at the top of the couloir and exited via a completely different line. A more moderate exit through the cliff band was found later by initiating a traverse out to the left from farther below.
