Hotseat: John Frieh
This Portland mountaineer specializes in first ascents.
NU
John Frieh’s foot was the first ever to leave a boot print on the upper northwestern ridge of the West Witches Tit.
The peak, which sits on Alaska’s Stikine Icecap, is one of eight successful first ascents that Frieh has made since 2009—often-dangerous climbs up routes that have never before been attempted. All the while, Frieh held a full-time job at
Intel, meaning he’d often leave early on a Friday to fly from Portland to Alaska, where he’d then hire a private pilot to drop him off on an isolated mountain far from the nearest town. He’d complete his climb, then return in time for work on Monday morning.
Happily, Frieh quit his job at Intel early this year and has a mysterious job “helping” a billionaire “with some things,” which he says allows him to have a more flexible schedule.
Frieh, 36, a Eugene native, started climbing when his parents signed him up for the Boy Scouts. Frieh steadily became more involved in climbing, eventually tackling peaks that took two days to travel to from Anchorage, a journey that required three different planes plus a six-hour drive.
Frieh and four other climbers will lead seminars as part of the
Portland Alpine Festival this week. The festival, hosted by
Mazamas, Oregon’s 120-year-old climbing club, includes film screenings, presentations from the five climbers on some of their most difficult ascents, and classes on climbing techniques and planning. WW talked to Frieh about the draw and dangers of first ascents.
WW: What’s it like to go somewhere no one else has ever been?
John Frieh: It’s pretty intimidating. The remoteness and the loneliness—you know when you go camping and you think the stars are a little brighter and you notice how quiet it can be when you’re not in the city? It’s a similar feeling for me, that reminder that if something does happen out here, it’s all on us. Maybe it’s fulfilling some childhood idea of maybe someday I can be an astronaut. But it’s definitely a unique feeling.
How do you plan for a first ascent?
A lot of it is just honestly standing below it and looking at it and trying to understand what you’re seeing. And that also comes from years of climbing smaller things that might look similar to what you see in Alaska. There’s a lot of strategy that you might try and put in place on the ground, but a lot of times it’s problem-solving in real time as you work your way up the mountain.
Have you been in situations you’ve been unprepared for?
Yeah. I’ve had some falls on mountains—which even though you use the ropes and the safety equipment, falling through the air with sharp objects attached to yourself—not recommended. I’ve had some routes that we thought we could get off the face a certain way. We got to where we thought we were going to get off the face, and it turned out it was actually pretty unsafe. So we had to find a different way off the mountain, and we had to climb through some pretty scary stuff. It worked out, obviously, but I had to start conserving food because I didn’t know how much longer it would take to get off the face. This last one in May, we were on the go for 36 hours without sleep. We stopped a couple times to melt water, but it was more or less continuous movement. We just barely made it back to camp and crawled into the helicopter as the weather was changing and got really lucky on that one. Because if not, we probably would have had to sit in there for like a week before he had been able to pick us up.
What is it about first ascents that’s so addicting?
I like that the most important muscle is probably the one in between my ears. I like to see: Am I capable of this? Can I deal with not only the physical stresses but maybe the mental challenge of it? That feeling, you might get it on routes that have been done before, but it’s greatest on first ascents.
- I imagine that climbing a mountain that can throw a bunch of curve balls at you is pretty humbling.
It’s pretty simple: Mountains can kill you. If anyone thinks otherwise, then they’re fooling themselves. People get all excited about their fitness like, “I can bench press this much.” Mountains don’t care how much you can bench press. You have to be very humble, or your climbing career will probably be very short.
