Region: White Mountains, NH
Type: Trad, Alpine
Grade: 5.8
Length: 5 pitches (done in 3)
Style: Onsight, All Leads
TLDR
Remaining close to the the crest of the ridge requires straying from the traditional route twice and ups the grade from 5.7 to 5.8 each time, but this results in an amazingly exposed (read “fun”) route for the grade. Despite it’s “alpine” label the rock is quite solid, the ascent relatively short and easy, and descent even easier. What a fun route!
Back in the early 2000’s while I was still studying I frequented Cathedral Ledge and was always impressed by the sight of Cannon Cliff en-route. Sure, it wasn’t as pretty looking at Cathedral Ledge, with it’s onion-like layered rock constantly peeling off into the talus field below. But it easily won over Cathedral in height and was probably the closest thing to a big wall you could find out East. In any case, I never made a trip to it back in those days so it remained as an objective always scratching at the back of my mind. Hence I was excited to finally do a route here 20+ years later! I would be climbing with Sam, who I did some multi- pitching with in Val-David earlier in the year. However, Sam had never done anything alpine-like so I settled on Whitney Gilman (5.7) to keep things simple and easy, and figured I’d keep Moby Grape as a back pocket option if the WG was too busy for my liking. Also, if all went well, I’d suggest hitting up Reppy’s Crack as well.
Alpine climbing?
Ok, the elevation of Cannon is much too low to be considered a true alpine environment but the climbs on it are none-the-less widely regarded as “alpine” climbs due to their adventurous nature, higher levels of commitment and, of course, abundance of loose rock.
Whitney Gilman Ridge, Direct Direct (5.8)
The weather this Fall had been too good to remain a weekend warrior so I decided to take a day off mid-week to hit a more sizeable destination. Sam was game so I picked him up Tuesday evening and we drove 3-1/2 hours to the White Mountains (from Montreal).
Tesla Side Story: Blocked Supercharging (if I may digress)
Originally I was going to take my RAV4 (which has ample space to sleep) to avoid the need for charging pit-stops, but then I learned about a Camp Mode offered by the Tesla and figured this would be a good excuse to try it out. Unfortunately, en-route, I also got to try out Tesla on-demand customer service when the Supercharger refused to start! It was around 11pm and I had no idea if there was any sort of 24 hour support for this sort of thing. After wasting a bunch of time trying to get support through the app (which always lead to either a scheduled service appointment or roadside assistance) and being unsuccessful trying to find a 24 hr support number on the internet I recalled a number on my credit card statement associated with the $10 charge that was being claimed as unpaid. So I looked up the charge from my phone and, long behold, it was a phone number that did indeed turn out to be customer service! Not surprisingly that service started with an AI agent that wasn’t very helpful for my scenario but eventually put me on hold for an actual person. While waiting on hold Sam found that there were a handful of non-Tesla chargers in the small town we had pulled into so while waiting for a human to talk to we drove in search of the first one which we never found (the pin point lead us to a construction site) but then fortunately the next and only other pin point led us to a dealership with a single fast DC charger. Lucky for me I had already fit the bill for the absurdly expensive adapters that allow you to use these stations with a Tesla and had stowed the adapter in the car. So at least we now had a back-up plan for getting out of this town! About 15 mins into charging (and at least 30 mins since being put on hold) somebody actually picked up! Given how frustrated I was with this Tesla experience I’m glad the lady that answered was super nice and super helpful. It turns out the message about being blocked for a previously unpaid charging fee was erroneous and the true issue was that the app didn’t like the way I entered my postal code but somehow let me get away with it on a one-time basis the last time I used a Supercharger (which was actually the first time I had ever used one). So after removing the “space” character from my postal code I unplugged from the fast DC charger and drove back to the Supercharger to find that, yes, that simple update to my billing address info was enough to unblock me. Well after that little fiasco I’m happy the rest of the night was uneventful.
I couldn’t find any info online acknowledging that overnight parking was allowed at the Cannon Cliff trailhead parking. Actually, info I did find suggested that overnight parking wasn’t allowed at any of the regular parking lots for the state park but was allowed at the base of the Cannon Mountain ski hill which apparently acted as overflow parking throughout the hiking season. So the plan was to spend the night there, and we rolled into the lot around midnight. As far as I could tell we were the only car there when we arrived and, conveniently, there were also a couple outhouses. We hit the sack as quickly as possible with our alarms set for 5:00 am. I had heard this route could get busy even on weekdays so the plan was to hit the trailhead parking before sunrise to hopefully get ahead of any other parties.
Tesla Side Note: Camp Mode
So Camp Mode apparently just runs climate control throughout the night. We didn’t need the extra warmth as we both had good sleeping sacks, but the continued air exchange was supposed to help prevent condensation in the car and also just make it more comfortable. What I read online was to expect about 1% per hour if significant heating or cooling wasn’t needed. The low at night was only going to be ~10° C so I turned off the heating entirely. I found it annoying that after enabling Camp Mode there seemed to be no way to turn of the screen. It did eventually turn off but that wall after we put our heads down. When I got up around 5 hours later the battery drain was only 1%. Nice! And although there was still some condensation on the windows, it was no where near as bad as a normal car.
In the morning we packed up hastily and headed to the trailhead, getting there well before 6:00 and being the only car there, which was a relief. Then I checked the climber’s log and saw that six parties headed to the route just the day prior (a Tuesday)! Well, for now we would take our time with breakfast and sorting gear as we wait for the sun to rise and if anybody shows up we’d just hit the trail ahead of them. Eventually, after sunrise, another vehicle did show up but I don’t think they were climbers. In any case, it was impetus to get moving so off we went.
The approach was straightforward and the trail was easy to spot based the photo posted on mountainproject. Once on the talus field the route is visible most of the way and probably the most prominent feature of the entire cliff so you’d have to try pretty hard to get lost. Despite all the traffic this place gets there was still a fair bit of movement in the talus field. In fact, I’d say there was more loose rock down here than up on the route. Navigating through bushes and small trees nearer the top of the talus field can be a little annoying, but nothing you’ll loose time over.
We did the route in 3 pitches (used a 70m but I’m not sure that was even needed). And stayed as close to the ridge crest as made sense, which brought us through the 5.8 hand crack variation on the 2nd pitch and a more straight-up the face variation on the 3rd pitch which I felt was no harder than anything else we had already done. Overall I was impressed by the quality of the rock for being labelled an “alpine” climb. On mountainproject it seems like there are more comments about loose rock than anything else, but I suspect these people have never been exposed to true alpine climbing. The decent was also very straight-forward. I would say more so than the approach. Again, mountainproject comments about a long approach and never-ending decent. In comparison to a typical crag out East I guess this is true, but it’s about the shortest and easiest “alpine” approach and decent I’ve ever done. In fact, easy enough that we decided to repeat the approach after getting down so that we could hit up Reppy’s Crack.
Before moving on I just want to say that the exposure on this climb was absolutely amazing for the grade. You can get good exposure on moderate climbs in The Gunks as well, but the setting here on this larger cliff is just so much more amazing. I must admit, it was way more fun than I expected based on observations from below.
Reppy’s Crack (5.8)
I had heard a lot of hype about this crack and I got to say that it is indeed pretty good. It’s only a single pitch, but it’s rare out East to get the feeling of swimming up a crack for an entire pitch. Most cracks here are too discontinuous. It’s no comparison to India Creek splitters, but as close as it’ll come on this side of the country.
In any case, I lead the pitch to the second rap anchors and Sam followed. Then we did two single rope rappels to get back down. The descent of the talus field once again had a fair bit of rock movement, probably posing the highest risk of injury the entire day. But we made it back to the car in short order and charged back home.