Bashful Peak (8005')
by Mark Norquist, Scree 7/88

Story of the Bashful Climbers.  On September 12-14 Rich Brown and I climbed the NW couloir on Bashful Peak. We were overdue returning and were the subject of a subsequent search operation by State Parks. Later that week an article appeared in the Anchorage Times in which State Parks Director Neil Johannsen made some grossly unfair and untrue statements about us. The story was refuted in a later issue, but I thought the climbing community deserved to hear the full story.

On Saturday Sept. 12 Rich and I departed from Anchorage under somewhat gloomy skies following the old Alaskan philosophy "ya gotta go anyway, it might get nice." We biked to the end of Lake Eklutna, stashed the bikes near the East Fork bridge, and hiked back the two or so miles to the foot of Bashful. We then proceeded to bushwack our way up to 3000 ft. where we set up camp on one of the long morraine ridges on the north side of the mountain. Note: the proper approach through the vegetable level is by going just to the left of the biggest waterfall coming down. There are a couple of lightly used trails going back to this point. We unfortunately went up on the right side of the waterfall and were confronted with a typical Alaskan bush nightmare steep slopes covered with alders and devils club and infested with gremlins that would pull you backwards.

Up at our 3000-ft. camp it snowed on us fairly hard for a couple of hours that evening. The next morning was gray and foggy, but it was light overhead and calm and we were pretty sure we'd be in some nice weather after we climbed a couple thousand feet. We filled our water bottles at a pond in the middle of the morraine and headed toward the small glacier at the bottom of the NW face of the mountain at 9 am. Having been in this bowl two summers previous we were able to walk directly to the base of the NW couloir. The glacier is at 4000 feet, the entrance to the couloir a couple hundred feet higher. The route would exit at a saddle at the base of the summit cone at about 7700 feet, so we had 3500 feet of steep couloir ahead of us.

The cone up to the neck of the couloir was covered with week-old avalanche rubble from early season snow. Enough snow had come down the gully to fill the crevasse at the entrance to the gully. Gingerly we stepped across and things rapidly got steeper. I recalled looking at photos I had taken from Bold thinking that the bottom thousand feet of the couloir looked like possibly the steepest part of the climb, and indeed many of the steeper parts were. We front-pointed our way over numerous 70-deg ice bulges. Most of the crux spots were conveniently provided with large piles of soft snow at the bottom, and we felt no real need to belay. It was a great time, free climbing steep ice using just piolet and crampons! The conditions varied from soft snow to glacial ice. At 5000 feet we climbed out of the cloud layer and had clear blue all the way.

Somewhere between 6000 and 6500 the couloir narrowed down to nothingness and it was time for a course correction. In studying my photos I had noticed that there was a series of connecting snow fields to the left of the couloir - this was, in fact, the way the couloir was originally climbed by Art Davidson (1965) as I would later learn. However I have always had a pechant for diretissima, and as we traversed left we entered smaller gullies that seemed to continue up, so that's the way we went.

Soon came the spot where I needed my one belay. Climbing ahead of Rich, traversing over to the next gully in the chain, I opted to follow a ledge on the near side of the gully, rather than descend into the gully proper. The ledge got narrower and narrower and hey! I couldn't