Hamiltons East Face
The first descent of the east face.
Words Joe Collinson | Imagery Romain Sacchettini
On 6th November in a brief weather window we skied the first descent of the East face of Mt Hamilton, an 1800m continuous line cutting from the summit of the 3025m peak in the Malte Brun range.
The team of 5 consisted of Joe Collinson, Romain Sacchettini, George Millets, Clémence Cadario and Jordan Raymond.
A solid freeze made for fast travel up the standard West face route putting us on the summit at 8am.
Stepping into skis on the very top, the first section was firm and above huge exposure, requiring cautious turns. Once past the top ice cliffs, the line opened up a little into a 45 ramp which funneled us down towards the crux – a narrow gap through the rock band separating the upper and middle slopes.
From the photo we took from the heli it looked like you could just about sneak through, but with some flashes of grey visible there was a question about how much was snow and how much was ice. We found a narrow ribbon of snow cutting between ice bands, and after some high pressure steep jump turns with ice axe in hand we were onto the main face.
The difficulties behind us, we hooned down the rest of the face leapfrogging each other making big high speed turns through the rapidly softening corn, interspersed with some spicy and icy traverses across old avvy debris from the previous storm cycle.
Around an hour after leaving the summit we found the top of the exit couloir onto the Dixon glacier, stoked to have linked such a long complex line from summit to snow line without needing a rappel.
All that was left was the 5 hour moraine bash to get to the heli pick up.
