Build My Own FeedTrip report from Moonflower Buttress, Mount Hunter, Alaska
Eamonn Walsh sent us the following email description of his photo of Mark Westman leading Tamara's Traverse, high on the Moonflower Buttress of Alaska's Mount Hunter.
As anyone who has gone through Alaska’s Kahiltna International Basecamp (KIB) knows, Mount Hunter’s Moonflower Buttress sits front and centre. Every eye is drawn to it—if not for the enticing smears, then for the noise of the seracs constantly disgorging massive avalanches down its outer flanks.
Shortly after landing on the glacier, my partner, Mark Westman, and I were very happy to see that the route was actually in, because the year before the Moonflower was as bare of ice as El Capitan. After setting up basecamp, we packed our packs with four days of supplies, and then waited out the usual unsettled weather. We did not have to wait that long, however, before we started out early one morning.
We made good progress; the runnels on the first rock band were mostly snice with the odd bit of water ice here and there. We found the Prow to be well sniced up, which makes the climbing easier— but more runout—than when it is dry. It was while following this pitch that Mark dropped one of his tools. This may not seem like a big deal, except we were only nine pitches into it with up to 25 more to go, and one of those, a long horizontal traverse, Tamara’s Traverse, was coming up. We managed the Traverse without incident, but it was slow going. Later on we made a bivy below a rock outcrop partway up the first ice band. Soon after, the spindrift started and we realized it was not the best spot to bivy. We each had a sleeping bag and a bivy bag, and we had also brought along a guide’s tarp for a bit of extra protection against the elements. It looked like the weather was turning, so we slept in our boots just in case we needed to bail quickly and because we believed it would keep our feet warmer. That was the first time I had tried bivying with my boots on and the only thing it did was to cause me excruciating leg craps.
The next morning we descended. Rapping over the large roofs above Tamara’s Traverse, we were too far right and had to swing over to reach an ice runnel. By doing this, however, we severely damaged our lead line. Our 70-meter rope became a 60. We made it down soon after it started snowing and were on the glacier to observe the large spindrift avalanches cascading down the lower part of the face. We returned to camp with the feeling that we would not try again.
But as the saying goes, a good alpinist must have a poor memory. By the end of the following day, we had decided to try again. Mark rounded up a fresh set of tools and then we waited for our window.
—Eamonn Walsh
[Note: a few days later, Westman and Walsh headed back up the Moonflower Buttress and made a rapid, two-day ascent of this iconic Alaskan line. Due to weather and dangerous snow build-up, they did not summit Hunter, and spent a storm-ravaged day descending the wall.]
United States / English 
