Natural Line: Bart Lake

On March 5th Jason Nelson and I hopped a helicopter to Bart Lake. Bart Lake is a massive void in the earth located just above the boundary waters of the Taku River just South of Juneau Alaska. We were drawn by rumors of massive unclimbed lines of water ice. Bart Lake surpassed all expectations. We landed around noon set up camp and trotted off to have a run at a 700ft large flow of pretty mellow ice.

At this point Jason and I had never shared a rope. He had been up in 2009 and visited the Mendenhall Towers with Blake Herrington whom I'd encouraged to come up the year prior while in Indian Creek. Are you still with me? If not return to Bart Lake. As I said the climbing was very moderate, WI4-. On the second pitch Jason climbed past the end of the ropes and I had to begin simuling behind him. We topped out well before dark and had a smooth series of rappels back to the lake. A great start, we communicated and climbed well together dubbing our line Large Marge 700ft WI4-

Our objective the second day was a much steeper mega classic waterfall line some 5oft right of Large Marge. Having found our comfort level and developed some trust we decided to solo the first two pitches and get on with the business of the upper headwall. Smiling laughing and joking we soloed the first 400ish feet in something like 15 or 20 minutes even with my crampon falling off near the first roped pitch. We led the upper headwall in two fantastic pitches of dead vertical plastic water ice. Again, we finished before dark calling this thinner far more sexy line Pin Up Girl 800ft WI5. Our descent did not go off as smoothly as we rappelled through the Southeast Alaskan Jungle. We agreed the next line would be descended via a smooth line of v-threads....

Right behind camp there was a magnificent thin line of ice. Our first estimate had the line somewhere around the 5000ft mark... thats right 5000ft... it was that badass. On the third day we trudged up the hill to give it a go having decided it was much shorter something like 600ft. Jason was up from Arizona and I had just spent 29 days and nights underground at work on Prince of Whales Island. The sun hit the wall later in the afternoon so we both decided that it would be a good idea to start much later in the day given the shorter height of the climb. If you haven't noticed from the excess periods things didn't quite go as planned.

The first two pitches consisted of vertical extremely difficult insecure snice and got us to what we had guessed to be our first belay from below. The ice turned to plastic but the wall did not relent at all for 2 more pitches up to the headwall where the "steep" ice began. 2 more 70m rope stretching pitches took us to the top of the wall just in time for a beautiful Alaskan sunset and a suprisingly smooth 1000ft v-thread rappel in the dark. This was the by far the best piece of ice I have ever been on. I have never seen or even heard of anything so big and sustained. It was a fantastic experience. We named our climb Milagro De Plata 1000ft WI6 after our smooth sipping tequila back in camp.

I've added a few pictures, but most of the media from this climb is in video and I'll have that up whenever I learn how to edit video, download music and figure out how to put it on the internet. Jason and I have one more week of climbing to do first. I just wanted to put up some stoke. Later!