Livingstone Warms Up | First Winter Ascent ‘Navigator Wall’, Mt. Slesse

Tom Livingstone and Marc-Andre Leclerc are currently in the Cascade Range, Canada, in preparation for a massive new project later this month. With time on their sides, the duo has already made waves with the first Winter ascent of ‘Navigator Wall’. Here’s a short summary from Tom Livingstone:

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“I’m out in the Cascade range in Canada for a month, climbing with Marc-Andre Leclerc. The main aim is a new route on Mt. Slesse, which is a huge alpine wall perfect for a winter ascent. We are waiting for the good weather so we can go for the ‘Mega Proj.’ In the meantime we checked out the mountain and did this Navigator Wall route as a warm up.”

“I arrived in Canada late on the 1st January. I was super jet-lagged but the weather was perfect for a day, so we skied up to the Mt. Slesse area and camped. As temperatures were surprisingly warm (only a few degrees below freezing) we decided to make the first winter ascent of a classic summer route called Navigator Wall. It’s given 6b and is all on trad gear.”

“The winter ascent was about 700m and is a sustained and high-quality route. The climbing was steep, on predominately good rock, and was either dry-tooling, mixed or ice. There were some steep corners, icy slabs, rocky overhangs and everything in between. We climbed some parts in crampons but with bare hands, which was cool. The wall was in the sunshine for about an hour in the morning, but then went into the shade. This made the bare-hands climbing quite problematic at times.”

“I don’t know about the grade – the crux was somewhere in the region of three pitches of Scottish tech 8 or 9. The rock was at times sub-optimal (and I’ve climbed on the Lleyn and in the Canadian Rockies a bit); there were some quite serious run-outs too. There were also a bunch of Scottish tech 7, a few hundred metres of easier climbing, and a hundred metres of snow climbing at the start.”

“There was some variation to the summer line at the top – we missed out the two final headwall pitches as it was dark, we only wanted a warm-up experience, and it would be more logical to follow the scrambly terrain up and left. So we did.”

“This was a fun warm-up and hopefully we’ll get some better weather soon, to go for the Mega Proj.”

“The weather looks mixed for the next week so we’ll go ice climbing and skiing. It’s a super fun area with lots of potential and a small but psyched scene.”

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