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O'Malley Peak
by Don Hansen, Scree 6/92
On a nearly clear Saturday morning the three of us: Jonathan Rose, Joe Kurtak and Don Hansen left Glen Alps to climb O'Malley Peak. We crossed the south fork of Campbell Cr. and headed up the Little O'Malley notch on very firm hard snow. The sun was shining and Joe was hoping the snow would soften a bit for telemarking on the way down since he carried his skis to the base of the mountain.
After crossing the "football field" to the base of the mountain on approaching the bottom of the middle snow gully that we planned to ascend, we heard an animal howl from up on the ridge and saw a coyote near the top of the notch to the right of the gully. The coyote proceeded to the ridgeline and was silhouetted on the ridge with wisps of blowing snow from the then strong wind. The animal disappeared over the other side before we could get a good look through binoculars. As we climbed up the gully we ran into soft in contrast to the hard snow found on the sun-exposed O'Malley notch. Some of the wind gusts up the gully were very strong as they tried to knock us off our feet and snow blasted us near the top of the gully.
The snow was again hard on the southern backside of the ridge. Our stay on the summit was short as weather and increasing winds threatened from the east. On our way back down the ridge we spotted Peter Sennhauser telemarking on a lower slope on the south side of O'Malley. We were snow-blasted again as we descended the upper part of the gully but the wind subsided about halfway down. Upon reaching Little O'Malley notch on the way back we ran into Dan O'Haire and other mountaineers practicing crevasse rescue and self arrest techniques at the notch. By then the weather was sunny again and the snow had softened, with some "postholing" required before and after crossing Campbell Creek. We made it to the summit in about 3.5 hours or about 5 hours for the whole trip.
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