Text and Photos by Jon Johnston

Jack and I approached the gate on the Meager Creek forest road near Pemberton, BC with a hacksaw in hand to cut the chain barring our passage if necessary. Yet someone else had beaten us to it, despite the fact that in the middle of the chain was a removable screw link neatly hidden behind the gate. So we continued down the road towards Plinth Peak, a 6,800’ vertical face that had been haunting my dreams since I first saw it almost a year before.
After about 10km in the truck, we hit the first deep drift of snow and began an 80km roundtrip sled-ride that traveled over about as much dirt as snow.

As we neared our predetermined camp, Jack stopped ahead of me, pointed to the ground, and said, “Those are the biggest cougar tracks I have ever seen.” And they were fresh.

   We hurried to build a huge fire and then parked our sleds around the tent like a wagon circle. Would the smell of gas ward off any hungry beasts? After sleeping for about two hours, we awoke at midnight and went for a quick noisy rip on the sleds—again using the sleds to scare away anything that might want to eat us. And then we began the long climb.

   The first two hours were in the trees and the concern of a cougar attack became a welcome distraction from the crevasses and icefall that was coming. At about 3:00 a.m., after some tricky route finding, we arrived at a large rock we dubbed the honey hole. It was our last somewhat protected position until the top. We knew we had to haul ass to get up and back down through the icefall before the sun warmed things too much, so we traded our skins for crampons and headed up into the darkness.
   This section of the climb was really eerie; it was pitch black and we were climbing through huge piles of debris that had fallen off the glacier in the previous few days. After about an hour, it started to get really steep as we entered the main couloir below the icefall. Our plan had been to stay in the chute, thereby avoiding the glacier all together. But as we approached the first crux, we found about a foot of loose snow on rock angled at about 60º. With the exposure below us, we decided to go around and follow the edge of the glacier.

   Fortunately we had a lot of pictures from a January recon mission and they had lined the coffee table at my place all winter. Even though we didn’t have them with us we had a good idea of our new route. There were three spines that linked up on the climbers right of the glacier and as we approached the first one it finally started getting light. Passing by the first two was uneventful, but in the hazy pre-dawn light the third one looked like it could get sketchy. As I approached the beginning of the third spine I knew that if we could get over it we had a really good shot at the summit. There was a convex roll onto the spine that we were afraid would be crevassed, but as I tentatively began climbing it I hit rock. At that point, Jack and I knew we had it.

   We took a quick break and watched the most beautiful sunrise either of us had ever seen from a small bench below the top face. After a few minutes, the reality of the situation caught up with us. We got moving although we were both beginning to feel a bit sluggish. The summit pitch, at 55º-plus and almost 2,000’ was some of the coolest climbing I have ever done. The conditions were perfect. Coast Range climbing at its





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