"We got ready to shiver
and shake all night"
difficulty ahead. It is quite easy to climb yourself into a cul-de-sac. We did this once; I was leading! The climbing became so severe that to proceed would have meant hours and hours of 5th and 6th class climbing, with no assurance that it would end in a route to the summit. A fifty-foot back-track got us out of this one, however, and we found another route that took us to a point approximately 800 feet vertically above the end of the snow tongue from where we had taken off. So far, we had had moderately severe 4th and 5th class climbing and were now about a hundred feet to the right of the chimneys on a high-angle snowfield. It stretched about fifty feet up and down and probably covered a ledge underneath some twenty feet wide. We decided to stay out of the chimneys because of the rock-fall danger, and also because they looked real rugged. The face ahead of us was almost overhanging for two to three hundred feet-too much too late! Later in the year with dry rock and a party of strong climbers, a direct assault on the chimneys might succeed. But now our only choices were to give up and go back down, or traverse to the right on the snowfield, hoping that it would not avalanche, and look for a break in the cliff. We traversed cautiously, and about three hundred feet to the right found a route on up. Short 5th class pitches were mixed in with easy 4th. We kept going until 8:30 p.m., and then began looking for a place large enough for four of us to spend the night sitting up in our planned bivouac. We used our ice	axes to cut away some of the snow on a ledge and made a platform approximately four feet wide and seven feet long. We coiled our climbing ropes for use as insulation between us and the snow. It's an easy thing to stumble off a small platform like the one we were on, especially when you are tired and stiff from the cold. So the first thing we did was to place a piton in the rock at our backs and each of us tied into it. We then changed into our dry socks, put on extra clothing, and got ready to shiver and shake all night. Surprisingly enough, you can sleep an hour or so at a stretch, even if your teeth are ready to fall out from chattering so hard. It got considerably below freezing, as we were about 12,500 feet elevation, higher than all the other mountains as far as we could see. At 4:30 a.m., we were on our way again. The morning sun was welcome. After a few pitches of easy rock work, we came to a long, steep snow gully that led directly to the summit rim. Step kicking became plain old hard work, but at 7:30 a.m., we were on top. A first ascent of the Northeast Face, with half of Nevada and part of Utah before us. However, now that the first ascent of Wheeler's main face has been made, future climbing parties will probably spend more time developing new and increasingly difficult routes. When blanketed by winter snows, the Northeast Face offers a real mountaineering challenge in route finding and high-angle rock climbing under adverse conditions. Good piton cracks are scarce and the more or less continuous rock-falls add to the hazards. In early summer, or in the fall, it may be possible to push a route directly up the chimneys, but I'm sure it would take two or three days to do so, and it would requite a strong rock climbing party. I'm tempted to go back again myself to take a look at this possibility. All in all, I was impressed by the grandeur of the scenery as you approach the north cirque, and as you enter it you cannot help but realize that here is a real mountain. The surprising thing is that it has remained so little known for so many years.

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