The Ascendants

THE
AS
CEN
DANTS
BY LEATH TONINO
40
ADIRONDACK LIFE
July/August 2013
Picture a narrow canyon from the desert Southwest with 80-foot walls. Now tilt it up so that it’s
carved into the side of a mountain. Run a waterfall down it. Paint it a gloomy gray. Mottle it with
mosses. Fill it with loose rocks and countless
angled ledges. Emmons, an adventurous soul,
couldn’t pass up the invitation. He deemed the
route “steep and difficult of ascent.”
In summer 1849 two nephews of David Henderson, cofounder of McIntyre Ironworks, climbed
the dike, exited onto the slabs out right, and proceeded to Colden’s 4,715-foot summit. An eagle
flew overhead as if in mockery of the “first ascent.”
Though they were only out for a night, the cousins
packed along bread, pork, tea, teapot, cups, blanket, compass, spyglass, ax, rifle and a bottle of
brandy nicknamed the “Admiral.” They descended
to Avalanche Lake, at the bottom of the route,
where they’d stashed the gear prior to the climb.
That afternoon they shot a deer for dinner. The
next morning they caught trout for breakfast.
More than 160 years later, though their style has
yet to be duplicated, the route they pioneered
remains the classic Adirondack scramble.
I first climbed the Trap Dike six years ago in
January with my friend Craig. That was a miserable day—too cold to be warm, too warm to be
dry. About a third of the way up the dike you
reach the route’s crux, what British mountaineers
TRAP DIKE PHOTOGRAPH BY CARL HEILMAN II
CLIMBING
MOUNT
COLDEN’S
ICONIC
TRAP DIKE
The Trap Dike on Mount Colden,
partially climbed in 1837 by the
geologist Ebenezer Emmons, is
perhaps the oldest mountaineering route in North America.
Mount Colden’s
Trap Dike post–Tropical Storm Irene.
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ADIRONDACK LIFE
July/August 2013
PHOTOGRAPH BY LEATH TONINO
Thanks to a Thermos of coffee we weren’t just hiking fast
but talking fast too, mostly about Tom Patey, a Scottish
climber who died before we were born. Patey stands out in
the annals of mountaineering history as a particularly fervent champion of sloppy routes and sloppy conditions; he
climbed in crap weather on crap rock, often pulling on tussocks of alpine grass or clods of crumbling soil should they
appear at just the right moment. His was the art of Going For
It, of Idiocy and Indefatigability. We agreed that he would
have loved the Trap Dike in the rain.
After an hour or two we reached Avalanche Lake. Cliffs
like walls rose from black water and disappeared in tattered,
moving mist. A dead tree angled out from shoreline muck.
We continued around the lake via slippery ladders and catwalks, eager to get a view across, up into the dike. Given the
heavy weather, we could only see the rubble-fan and the
lowest part of the route, below the bad step. Craig, who studied geology in college, speculated that given enough years,
as more and more debris cascaded down the chute-like dike,
it would fill the lake to form a bridge. Of course, this would
take millennia. In the meantime, we had to walk around.
At the south end of the lake a faint path veers left from the
main trail and 10 steps later frays out in a thicket. Craig said
he’d take one for the team and pressed in head first, the sopping shrubs brushing him down from below and above and
both sides. Emerging onto the open rubble-fan five minutes
later, we both looked and felt as if we’d been swimming. The
deep, dark dike loomed above, its waterfall a zigzagging
thread, sharp and white. That’s our route? I pictured Patey in
his grave, jealous.
Craig and I have been partners in mountain sketchiness for
many years—in Colorado, in Scotland, all through the High
Peaks—and I’ve noticed a nervous pause, a sort of quiet fidgeting, that recurs at the base of each climb. I wandered off and
peed, came back, adjusted my bootlaces, tucked in my shirt,
adjusted my bootlaces again, made sure my shirt was tucked.
Craig tightened his laces and ate an apple, leaning against a
rock. Already I felt myself growing cold. We looked at each
other, cinched down our packs and started up a series of broken ramps, the definition of scrappy terrain.
Time contracts when the mind and body unite in focus,
so I mean this quite literally when I say that we were standing in a whirling spray at the foot of the bad step in no time
flat. The waterfall was dumping and jumping, braiding and
unbraiding, flying out and crashing down. We’d brought a
short rope but didn’t mention it; this was no place to mess
with knots or talk. I stepped forward and about 50 garden
hoses’ worth of water caught my left knee. Moving right, balancing just outside of the main flow’s reach, my “normal
self” left me. Everything disappeared but the imperative: Do
not fall. I didn’t see the edges and cracks inches in front of
my nose, but felt them. They were cold and slick and solid.
It turned out that Irene’s scouring was no match for the
resilient dike. All the old holds were there, and they led me,
just as I remembered they would, to the bad step’s baddest
step, a psychologically intimidating final move where the
Top: The dike’s crux move.
waterfall runs between your legs as you stretch
Facing
page: Illustration from
toward the relative safety of lower-angled terNatural History of New York
rain. I faced that move the only way I could—
by Ebenezer Emmons, 1842.
with horror, fascination, a touch of perverse joy, The dike formed when a deep
fracture in Colden allowed
and not the slightest trace of grace—then stood
igneous rock to push up into
off to the side snapping photos as Craig folthe existing anorthosite.
lowed. Buzzed with adrenaline, we scampered
and laughed our way through the upper dike to the exit onto the slabs. It
was surreal out there, visibility maybe 150 feet, maybe less. My raincoat hood
framed a long blur of dimples and fissures, chartreuse lichens, patterns of
trickles. A bird, our first of the day, cheeped from out of sight. The buzz faded
and endurance took over.
On the summit we changed into dry shirts and winter hats and sat down
on our packs. The clouds swirled close, making it feel as though we were in
a snug room with billowing walls and, simultaneously, a dimensionless void,
fluid and infinite. I’d forgotten my lunch at home but Craig had biscuits and
bacon and a chunk of horseradish cheddar. We agreed that a nip from a bottle of brandy, “Admiral” or otherwise, would’ve hit the spot. For a half hour
we snacked and talked: about peaks we’d climbed, about our long friendship
in the mountains, about the face of the land, how it’s always changing,
always shifting and morphing, and yet, somehow, always staying true to
itself, always retaining its original identity. As the writer Edward Hoagland
says of the natural world: “Flux itself is balance of a kind.”
Staring out into the soupy, dreamy gray, our teeth beginning to chatter,
we agreed that the Trap Dike really is a classic. It’s durable, a scramble for
the ages. We went silent, no need to state the obvious—that the Trap Dike
is, and will forever be, steep and difficult of ascent.
If You Go
First off, ask yourself, “Should I go?”
People have died on this route. It’s a great
introduction to alpine scrambling but must
not be taken lightly.
If you feel prepared, wait for a clear, dry
week in summer or fall. The dike is shadowy
and stays damp long after rain. The slabs are
less fun, and less safe, when wet.
Consider bringing a mountaineering helmet, rope, harness and light climbing rack.
Proper climbing shoes are overkill, but an
approach sneaker with a sticky rubber sole
can be a big help. Clunky hiking boots aren’t
the best, but they’ll get the job done.
Don’t worry too much about “staying on
route.” The route is the dike and the slides
out right. Beyond that, it’s open to interpretation. Do recognize, though, that the earlier you
exit the dike the steeper and more exposed
the slide climbing.
Don’t descend the dike! It’s dangerous
and you might kick rocks down onto the heads
of other climbers. From the summit of Mount
Colden, descend on marked trails, either to
Lake Colden or Marcy Dam.
m
call a “bad step.” It’s a nearly vertical pitch, maybe 30 feet
high. The frozen waterfall we’d hoped to climb was rotten
and soft—dangerous mush—so we roped up and ascended
the rock to the right with bare red hands and crampons on
our feet. Many parties don’t use a rope on the Trap Dike, but
if they do, the bad step is where it comes out of the pack. We
pulled over the lip into the upper dike, stowed the rope, continued another 15 minutes through easier terrain with lower
walls, then worked our way out onto the windy, crusty slabs.
The slabs, though not all that steep, are massively exposed.
With a thousand-foot drop at our heels we kicked steps and
plunged ice axes in fading light. The sun was down when we
reached the summit and started for the car via the regular
ridgeline trail.
Craig and I returned to the Trap Dike last year. Neither of
us had been back since our initial winter climb. In the interim, the route had undergone some changes, or so we’d heard.
When Tropical Storm Irene raged through the Northeast, in the
fall of 2011, it triggered a landslide high on Mount Colden’s
west face. I checked some aerial photos on the Internet, and
sure enough, the dike had received a scouring. Stunted spruce
trees, mats of soil, pebbles and boulders—who knows how
many thousands of pounds of debris were funneled into the
dike and spit out the bottom? The photos showed a fan of
rubble and broken branches where a wooded slope once led
from the lake up into the mouth of the dike. We wondered
how the route had changed. Would it still be a classic? Would
our hands and feet recognize it? Would Ebenezer Emmons?
The Saturday of the hike was rainy. We moved fast to stay
warm, charging through deep mud, passing other folks on
the trail: 10 bedraggled kids with an adult chaperon in tow,
a trio of middle-aged men wearing garbage-bag ponchos,
French Canadian women smelling of shampoo. The sky was
a thick, low cloud tangling the forest canopy.
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