At 3:10 p.m. on March 11 Lonnie Dupre and Pascale Marceau became the first people to make a winter summit of Mount Wood, located in Yukon, Canada.
For Pascale, it was especially noteworthy because she became the first woman to ever make a successful climb of a subarctic peak.
On their blog post, Pascale wrote, “The beauty of such firsts lies in their unknowns. There is no standard route. There are no prescribed landing zones, and the condition of the glaciers is always changing.”
On their journey upward the duo encountered brutal winds and a scary, heavily crevassed terrain.
Originally Lonnie and Pascale were going to climb Mount Lucania, but after a reconnaissance flight over Mt. Wood, Mt. Steele and Mt. Lucania, the team decided to make an attempt at summiting Mount Wood, Canada’s sixth-tallest peak at 15,912 feet (4,850 meters).
A Cessna 206 flew Lonnie and Pascale to their basecamp on March 5. The next day they scouted a route that would take them along a ridge on the mountain’s east face. Communicating through his Global Star, March 6, Lonnie commented on the crevasses they had to avoid adding, “Dug in supplies, really excited about conditions and our progress.”
The next day Lonnie and Pascale had called to say they were able to carry their second load of supplies up to about 12,000 feet despite the numerous crevasses.
On Saturday, March 9, at their high camp, Pascale reported they were at “13,000 feet today. The wind was the story, super harrowing day.” They had to spread their gear across the tent to help anchor it in place as a fierce wind came at them in what Pascale estimated was 80 mph.
The last day of climbing Pascale and Lonnie crossed ice fields and endured extreme cold, spending 13 hours making their way to Mount Wood’s summit.
They started down on Tuesday, March 12, knowing the hardest part was over, but danger loomed ahead.
“The weather is bad, and the descent that we have ahead of us now is the most technical part of the climb,” Dupre reported from 11,000 feet.
Leave a Reply