The Tooth Obsession

It was our fourth spring on the Root Canal Glacier. After climbing "Ham and Eggs", we became obsessed with the idea of making a new route on the magnificent South face of the Mooses Tooth. Unfortunately, most of the Mooses Tooth rock, while looking like perfectly solid Yosemite-style granite, is actually very rotten and deteriorated. Often, a cam placed in the crack can be easily pulled out with a handful of rock crumbs and sand. Scary.

Nevertheless, we kept coming back to the Mooses Tooth again and again, in hope to find something climbable and with reasonable protection. The idea to make a new route on the Mooses Tooth came in April 2004, when we returned from the "The White Russian", our new route on the Bears Tooth. Using the 'scope, we spotted a long dike of perfect granite going up the wall right in the middle between "Shaken, Not Stirred" and "Ham and Eggs".

On April 27th, 2004, Aleksey Shuruyev, Taras Mytropan, and Sergei Matusevich made the first attempt to climb the new route. Unfortunately, the weather turned bad very soon and we had to go down after only 3 pitches. Still, we were very excited, because now we knew for sure that the dike is really there and it can be climbed.

Next day, April 28th, was our last day in the base camp, but Aleksey and Sergey decided to scout out few more pitches. This time we did 5 pitches in total, and went down with a strong resolution to come back and finish the route next year.

Our 2005 Mooses Tooth expedition Aleksey started with another attempt, this time in pair with Dmitriy Shirokov. They did 9 pitches in one day, and had to rappel down because they were not prepared to spend a night on the wall in Alaskan cold. It took them 6 hours to get down through whiteout blizzard conditions.

After six days of snow storm, we came back to the route again, now in a bigger team: Aleksey Shuruyev, Sergei Matusevich, Dmitriy Shirokov, and Katya Vorotnikova. At 4:30AM on April 28th, 2005 we left our base camp, and after nine pitches of perfect rock climbing, at 8 PM we reached a nice snow ledge where all four of us could sit through the night. On the next day we climbed the wall up and to the right, and after 3 more pitches traversing and using one big pendulum, we reached the steep snow and ice couloir, that led us to the wet and ice-filled chimney, similar to the "Ham and Eggs" crux. The pitch after the chimney was much easier, and after finishing it, we found ourselves on the top of the summit crest. From that point, we walked to the top of the Ham and Eggs couloir, and at 9PM, started rappelling down to the base camp. It took us 9 hours to complete 18 rappels (mostly on Munter hitch knots, because Aleksey and Katya had managed to drop 3 out of 4 ATCs that we had). :-)

Finally, at 6AM we returned to our base camp, where Ilya Tatar (the youngest member of our team) met us with hot fries, steak, and wine to celebrate the success. At 9AM Paul Roderic (the owner of Talkeetna Air Taxi: the friendliest air service ever) came to bring us back to the civilization.

Right side of the face between Ham and Eggs and Shaken Not Stirred. Start below curving orange dike. Once on the ridge traverse to Ham and Eggs col and rapell.

Cams (couple big ones), stoppers, maybe 5 ice screws, snow pickets. We placed 2 bolts on 2 belays.