The Ascent Timeline: How 'Aim for the Bushes' Conquered Alaska's Formidable East Face

Breaking down the facts behind The Ascent Timeline: How 'Aim for the Bushes' Conquered Alaska's Formidable East Face—read on to discover the essential highlights.

Mount Dickey stands 9,834 feet above sea level, but its elevation statistic obscures its true scale. The mountain drops precipitously into the Great Gorge of the Ruth Glacier, creating one of the sheerest granite amphitheaters on the planet. Unlike the rounded, snow-covered ridges typical of coastal sub-polar peaks, Dickey's East Face is an uninterrupted monolithic sheet of coarse granodiorite, sliced by microscopic fissures and plastered in fleeting smears of rime ice.

Pioneering big-wall efforts here throughout the late twentieth century relied heavily on heavy capsule tactics. Teams spent weeks hauling hundreds of pounds of gear, fixing static lines, and drilling anchor stations to inch up the frozen stone. Even legendary routes like the 1974 Roberts-Rowell-Ward route or the 1988 classic The Great Gorge demanded protracted logistics.

Entering the Ruth Gorge today requires a different tactical mindset. Fast-moving storms from the Gulf of Alaska leave narrow windows of high atmospheric pressure. If a team spends three days fixing pitches to a lower ledge, an incoming cyclonic system will strip their ropes, load the upper bowls with avalanche debris, and shut down the mountain. The team targeting "Aim For the Bushes" recognized that their only margin of safety was velocity.