Flake or Death

Mon 12 Aug 13: Umanatsiaq/Ikerasak Mountain – Flake or Death

While Ian and Tom were climbing a big new face on the mainland, Jacob and Peter made various attempts to get up the somewhat loose rock-faces of Ikerasak Mountain. We were initially attracted by a couple of overhanging cracks in the tallest part of the east face, but the approach looked horrendously chossy so we went a bit further along to another buttress. The rock here still looked pretty loose but there was less of it! Jacob proceeded to lead a very run-out pitch of about 5b up the initial slab. The first piece of gear was 30m up and a joke. The climbing on this pitch was accompanied by occasional whimpers and comments such as, “Why are we trying to climb this face again?”, “The whole mountain looks like it might fall down,” “Should have gone to Iffley,” etc.

We continued with trepidation up a chossy crack, then Jacob got about 15m up the third pitch before snapping off a foothold, ripping a runner and falling 20m to below the belay. Thoroughly unimpressed by the quality of the rock and with a badly sprained ankle, he decided it was time to go down. The fall had provided us with a nicely stuck Rock 2 to abseil off, but the second ab looked to be more of an issue due to the total blankness of the lower slab and the shortness of our ropes (51m and 52m respectively, after a certain incident with falling rocks on the Horn). Fortunately Jacob found a nut placement from which we could just about reach the floor and we abbed down and ran away from the big chossy mountain, thankful to be still alive.

Jacob on Umanatsiaq/Ikerasak Mountain

Two days later after various base camp activities such as washing , fire making, swimming etc., we had recovered sufficiently to try again. This time we selected a line up the small face left of the south arête, which looked as loose as the rest of the mountain but shorter. The following route description should accurately describe our experiences on this climb:

Flake or Death, XS 5b, 200m

Follows an obvious right-facing corner in the wall left of the south ridge of Ikerasak Mountain. The rock quality varies from loose to extremely loose.

Scramble up scree and chossy ledges to a belay below the big loose corner.

P1 Try to convince your partner that the rock above will be less loose than it looks, then climb a crack to the right of the corner to belay in its base. Believe it or not, this is actually the best rock on the route (45m, 5a).

P2 Climb the nasty loose gully to the next ledge (30m).

P3 Take one look at the vertical perched boulders above and run away leftwards into another corner of reddish (loose) rock (traverse 5b, OK rock, high runner on right). Climb this and its left arête, avoiding hanging death flakes, to a shit belay (40m).

P4 Traverse right around the arête back into the main corner. Climb its shattered left wall, trying to send the choss down rightwards away from your mate’s belay (45m).

P5 Traverse right and up a pile of – guess what! – loose blocks, to a ledge (30m). From here, scramble leftwards and up to the summit.

Jacob & Peter