Two Eras Collide When a Legendary Rockies Face is Rap Bolted
For 40 years the Windtower had just one terrifying route up its Northwest Face. Now it has three, each established in a vastly different style.
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August 2022. An undercurrent nips at my heels and the smell of fresh rockfall fills my nostrils. I’m on the wall I’ve longed dreamt of. The silty limestone is more shattered than I thought it would be, the exposure far more surreal. Fourteen hundred feet in one clean shot. But I’m with good friends, as I always knew I’d be, and their laughs and shouts shake off the somber mood of a shaded northwall in the Canadian Rockies. Over the course of the day we’ve dodged death blocks and felt dizzy with exposure. We participated in the forty-year lore of this face. It was exhausting.
So the question is: how exactly is my experience of this wall so different from my dreams?
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In 1988 Steve De Maio and Jeff Marshall clawed to the summit of the wildly overhanging Northwest Face of the Windtower (8,841ft) in Canmore, Alberta. Their 1,400-foot route on disintegrating rock, Iron Butterfly, received a heavy grade—A4 and 5.11—making it the only Grade VI in the valley. With each passing year the face’s reputation grew. Twenty-five-foot falls turned to 80. One pitch sprouted a life-saving hook. The reputation only grew when, after 20 years of inaction, two professional climbers took to the face and bailed, calling the wobbly, poorly protected line a death route. Another 20 years passed. To this day, Iron Butterfly remains unrepeated. And, until last summer, that necky weekend in 1988 produced the only established route on the Windtower’s most imposing face.
Unlike its old-school neighbor Iron Butterfly, the route my friends and I were on—the newly developed The 36th Chamber—was created top down with a liberally wielded power drill, and the line wandered around roofs, up corners, blank faces … wherever the rock seemed best. The bolted line was fixed with over a thousand feet of burly cord, and it was only because of this umbilical that I accepted an invitation to document a first free ascent. The Windtower’s Northwest Face was one of the Rockies’ most storied, and as a climber who cut his teeth in the range I had a morbid curiosity to experience that wall for myself.
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