Is Canada’s Hummingbird Ridge the Hardest “Classic” Climb?
Nearly 60 years after its first ascent—and 45 since its inclusion in “Fifty Classic Climbs of North America—the Hummingbird Ridge remains as fearsome as ever.
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There are harder and more technical mountain climbs in North America, but when you factor in logistics, seriousness, and overall length, it’s clear why the Hummingbird Ridge on Mount Logan’s South-Central Buttress (19,550ft) in Canada has repelled all suitors since its first ascent in 1965. At 12,000 feet long, the ridge is gigantic, and it’s riddled with complex snow formations that are equally terrifying and mind-numbing to surmount. One must be both a weight-conscious alpinist and a blue-collar worker to succeed—and wholly unbothered by severe objective hazards.
History
The Hummingbird Ridge was a mere consolation prize for Dick Long and Allen Steck. They were at the forefront of American mountaineering in the 1950s and ‘60s and were eager to test themselves on North America’s biggest peaks. “We had decided we were going to do a new ridge on Denali,” remembers Long, “but that rascal Cassin came over and did it.”
Long had first seen the Hummingbird Ridge while a member of the 1953 Mt. Logan-Cook expedition. Rising from the Seward Glacier to the summit of Mount Logan, the six-mile long ridge was festooned with foreboding cornices. Much of the initial “climbing” on the ridge was more of a technical, airy traverse than an actual skyward ascent, which made retreat possible but no faster than the ascent since rappelling was out of the question.
Steck and Long quickly realized the logistical difficulties of the ridge and organized a large team of six: two leaders fixing rope and four support climbers hauling loads. The first four team members were an easy choice. “[Jim] Wilson went because Steck and I went,” recalls Long. The three had been friends and climbing partners for a long time. John Evans was also an obvious pick, a good friend and a climber who’d proven himself many times in the Needles.
Steck chose Frank Coale, whom he had met at Berkeley and who had taught at the Palisades School of Mountaineering. The wild card was Paul Bacon, an Olympic-caliber downhill skier, and friends with Steck. Bacon was the least experienced of the bunch but eager for an adventure. Long hoped his downhill-skiing experience would have some crossover with remote alpine climbing. “He just thought it would be fun,” explains Long. “He was actually the least experienced but it didn’t matter. You know about downhill skiing; if you are racing, you wait until the skis are out of control and then point them further down the fall line!”
Armed with over 4,000 feet of 6.5mm static rope (repurposed from the boating industry), 15 gallons of fuel, and 30 days of food split into six 40-pound loads, they launched up the ridge in mid-July 1965.
On the ridge near Camp I, Steck had an encounter with the wayward Hummingbird, which gave the South Ridge its new name. In Steck’s 2017 autobiography, A Mountaineer’s Life, he wrote, “My little friend, you and I are both intruders on this lifeless ridge, I thought. We are now both engaged in a struggle with our environment, though mine appears the more absurd. Or is it really?”
The ridge was so narrow and heavily corniced that finding a campsite for three tents was difficult. Their second site, known as Cornice Camp, was particularly memorable because they spent hours digging out the side of a huge wave of snow to create a platform. “We thought it was OK,” remembers Long. “It turned out that we made ourselves a very comfortable wind barrier.” The team didn’t realize that they had cracked the bottom of the cornice, which overhung the mountain. Bad weather pinned the team there for seven days. The day they finally moved on, the entire tent site fell off the mountain just hours after leaving the camp. “We thought it was funny, but we were very glad that it didn’t happen when we were there,” said Long. “We just shook our heads,” Long said. “Everybody thought it was absolutely ridiculously funny that we weren’t there.”
Soon came the crux of the ridge: a severely corniced section that sprouted so many fins and tunnels and double-cornices of unstable snow that their one and only snow shovel was required to make forward progress. They carefully cleared away any snow of dubious stability and slowly continued on. “I was load carrying on the Shovel Traverse one day and I could see the other guy’s footprints on the snow,” remembers Long. “I didn’t like the looks of that, but I knew my rope was there.” Long plunged through the cornice so violently that he bent his pack frame, but the thin rope held, and he pulled himself back up on the ridge and kept climbing.
The overwhelming nature of the ridge provided constant uncertainty. Retreat was always a topic of discussion, especially after each person in the six-man team took a cornice whipper. “We always thought we could get down,” explains Long. “The problem was that you weren’t going to do it in a day or two.” Eventually, the fastest way off the ridge was by continuing up. “We knew from photographs that the first three or 4,000 feet, and the Shovel Traverse, were going to be a problem,” he recalls. “Then the rest of it was going to be a slog. Once we got across that we knew it was just a matter of time.”
After 33 days of climbing, traversing, falling, shoveling, and suffering, they reached the summit of Mount Logan. They had been on meager rations for the final two days and happily gorged on the cache they’d previously left at the King’s Trench on the opposite side of the mountain. “Ten days of food. Boy, when we got there, we ate!” Long says.
The Hummingbird Ridge Today
The significance of the Hummingbird Ridge ascent would not become apparent for two decades. In 1978, the legendary American climber Mugs Stump led an expedition that retreated after 10 days on the ridge. In 1987, Canadian Catherine Freer and South African Dave Cheesmond disappeared on the ridge. Their tent was spotted hanging from a rope in the area of the Shovel Traverse, but no one knows exactly what happened to this highly accomplished pair.
In 1991, Dave Nettle and Geoff Creighton finally climbed the ridge via the so-called Thunderbird Variation. They bypassed the initial ridge and the Shovel Traverse, joining the ridge proper at 14,000 feet. It was a landmark achievement over eight intense days, in true alpine style, which pushed the two to their limits. In his article about the climb for the 1991 American Alpine Journal, Nettle doesn’t sugarcoat their situation. “Much of the relief and sense of accomplishment I felt was overshadowed by the magnitude of what still lay ahead. Our food was gone and we were virtually out of fuel. With 13,000 feet of unknown ridge to descend and 30 miles of glacier to travel, there was no doubt that we were on the threshold of an epic. A wave of anxiety washed over me as I watched Geoff slump over his axe in exhaustion. Even the summit view was distressing. Instead of a spectacular panorama, desolate wilderness seemed to mock our success on the Hummingbird and promised hardship ahead.” On the descent, they stumbled upon a food cache left by Dick Long and his crew during the 1953 Mount Logan-Cook Expedition—five years before Nettle was born!—which undoubtedly saved their lives.
In 2014, Mark Smiley attempted the Hummingbird Ridge as part of his quest with his wife, Janelle, to climb all the routes chronicled in the book “The Fifty Classic Climbs of North America,” co-authored by Steck. Climbing alpine style with Reiner Thoni and Jedi Porter, they bypassed the majority of the initial ridge climbed by the 1965 expedition. “We climbed ice runnels for about 4,000 feet with hanging rock, cornices, and seracs,” recalls Smiley. “Once on the ridge we traversed up and across, and a little down, over two days. Cornices broke immediately when touched. I fell through one, which really shook me up.” The team camped under a vertical ice wall just under the “Snow Dome” before the start of the Shovel Traverse proper. They never got to tackle the infamous feature as the snow conditions were just too unstable, and the fear factor was pegged.
Why does Smiley think the 1965 party succeeded? “First, because they are hard as nails,” he said. But also because they employed expedition-style tactics on a gigantic objective. “Their style got the job done.”
Nearly 60 years after the first ascent, the original route on the Hummingbird Ridge remains unrepeated. “You know there is such a thing as safety in numbers,” said Long. “When you are with two, you have to carry everything yourselves. You have to lead everything yourselves. And there is no backup. You realize that our climb only got done because the guys could carry whatever you needed—tents, food. If there are only two of you, you are weighed down such that your progress goes way down. You increase the actual time needed by having a small group.”
What makes the Hummingbird Ridge a classic?
Steve Roper describes the criteria he and Steck used for inclusion in their iconic book. “We wanted something that was beautiful from afar. A ‘Matterhorn equivalent.’ It needed an interesting climbing history. And the actual climbing was good.” Those criteria clearly apply to the Hummingbird Ridge: by volume, Mount Logan is the largest mountain in the world. And it offers a Himalayan scale of climbing but within North America.
When will the original line see a second ascent? Can a small team climb the route in alpine style? We won’t pretend to know. But, whoever goes up on the route next, Dick Long summarizes the character of the route perfectly: “You had to be careful but it wasn’t daring by today’s standards. Everyday it was hard work.”
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