In my youthful enthusiasm, which was usually overweening, I sometimes dragged unsuspecting friends into adventures they otherwise probably would have avoided. One such poor soul was Charlie Wah, my next-door neighbor at the La Veta Hotel in Gunnison. Charlie, like so many of us, had been attracted to go to college in Gunnison due to the town’s geography of being surrounded by mountains. Charlie was of the “I’m a relatively sane person who loves being in the mountains” persuasion rather than the “bonkers beyond all belief” persuasion of folks that I typically ran with. When I, in my enthusiasm, suggested that we climb the north face of Wetterhorn Peak, Charlie, in his innocence, agreed to come along for the ride.


Wetterhorn Peak is an interesting 14’er in the northern part of the San Juan Mountains in that it is composed top to bottom of densely welded tuff instead of the more typical choss interbedded with not choss volcanic stratigraphy that can characterize many San Juan peaks. The climbing underground in Gunnison had heard rumors of a 5.10 free climb put up by Jeff Lowe on either the north face or the west face of Wetterhorn (turns out it was the north face), we weren’t sure which but some of us were curious about it. Even the easy standard route on the south side has about 100 ft of interesting, steep scrambling on good rock just below the summit, so the thinking went that the north face should have more but harder of the same. Boy did that turn out to be true!


Over an early autumn weekend Charlie and I hiked in to the north side of Wetterhorn Peak to set up camp in order to get an early start on the climbing the following day. We easily scampered up the 4th class climbing on the lower couple of hundred feet before we had to rope up and take it seriously. We were making good time and all was right with the world.


By and by things got steep and we roped up for some moderately difficult climbing. Much of this middle section of the face was in the 5.7 range, which seemed like the happy place of difficulty while wearing mountain boots and route finding in new terrain. As we climbed higher the rock got steeper and the day slipped deeper into the afternoon hours. There is an obvious deep cleft in the middle of the north face that naturally leads into a dihedral in the upper portion of the face. That top dihedral looked quite challenging as it required climbing on small little gas cavities (lithophysae) on a very steep head wall. At the time I figured it would go at about 5.10 if one had good rock shoes, which we didn’t. As such, we stayed on a broken arête just to the right of this feature where the cracks appeared to be better and local dihedrals came and went. At one critical point our particular dihedral loomed over us in an overhanging bulge, presenting us with the crux of the whole climb.


I cannot speak for others, but at this point in my young climbing career, I was always happy to hem and haw, fiddle fart around, and doubt my-own-self when the climbing reach a personally intimidating level of difficulty on the smaller local crags. However, whenever I got to this mental crux in the higher mountains, with fewer degrees of freedom, I found that I just had to suck it up and get on with it without a lot of drama. This was just such a moment. The crux required moving up as high as possible in this rather ridiculously wide stem beneath the overhang and then just go for this (hopefully) bomber handhold lying just out of reach. The move having been made, the easier 5.8 crack above the overhang felt like a blessed deliverance. From there the climbing remained straight forward and eased up in difficulty to the summit.


Once past the crux pitch we rapidly completed the climb and with thankful hearts scrambled onto the summit. We paused for repast and performed the usual summit ceremonies.


We descended the standard route and dropped down to our camp to sleep the sleep of the truly tired. Charlie thanked me profusely for getting him up and safely back down the north face of the Wetterhorn, but I noticed that he never volunteered to go with me into the back country for further adventures. I learned from mutual friends that Charlie gave up mountaineering after this climb, although he remained an enthusiastic backpacker. One of his favorite places to backpack was the Lost Creek Wilderness in the Front Range. Years later I would learn for myself just how “on the edge of madness” backpacking into Lost Creek could be. Charlie, you actually were your own kind of bonkers beyond all belief after all.