North Bald Cap Climbing

North Bald Cap Climbing

Approaching the climb

Eric Gilbertson and Elliott Fray
Oct 7-8, 2012

I first spotted the enormous cliff on North Bald Cap during a Mahoosuc Traverse back in 2008, and vowed to one day climb it. North Bald Cap is a mountain in the Mahoosuc range near the NH-ME state border, and is kind of a secret climbing area. Apparently the first routes were climbed there just in the past few years. The cliff is similar in size to Whitehorse Ledge in North Conway, so there’s a lot of potential for new 5-6 pitch routes.

Elliott and I drove up Sunday morning to Berlin and then took Success Pond road to mile marker 5, before turning south on a rough gravel road. We parked where a big logging culvert had been removed, and loaded our packs to hike in to the cliff. Just then a big truck and car pulled up right behind us. The driver of the truck said he’d been climbing there the past few years, putting up new routes, and had never seen another climber there. I think he was as surprised to see us as we were to see him.

The route

We hiked in for about 15 minutes through an old logging clear-cut, then bushwacked to the cliff and took a snack brake next to a fun-looking climb. The other group of five climbers came up to the same spot and said this was a new route they were developing, but suggested another route just 50ft left called “October Sundae.” What better route could we hope to climb on a Sunday in October?

We moved over to October Sundae, and Elliott led the first pitch. We swung leads the whole way up for a total of six pitches of 5.5-5.7 climbing, topping out just at sunset. Someone had placed rappel anchors every 60m down, so we had no problem rappelling in the dark.

On the summit

We camped out at the base of the climb, and in the morning discovered that rain overnight had soaked the cliff and given the mountaintops a dusting of snow. The climbing was too slippery, so we instead bushwacked up to the summit of North Bald Cap. According to a small summit register on top we were the first ones to summit since last October, and the mountain averages only one ascent per year!

There was still some daylight left after bushwacking back, but the cliff was still wet, so we drove up Success Pond road a few miles and hiked into Mahoosuc Notch for fun. That evening we drove back to Intervale to get an early start the next morning on our next objective – Pinnacle Buttress on Mount Washington.

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