🏔️ Judgment Happens in the Couloir
A Mt. Stuart memory braided with a lesson in adaptive leadership
Some lessons don’t show up on the route topo.
They arrive in hindsight—when the summit’s behind you, the water’s gone, and the only thing left is to keep moving through a choice you wish you hadn’t made.
That’s how Mt. Stuart teaches—through exposure, ambiguity, and consequence. And it’s why this climb has stayed with me—not just as a test of endurance, but as a study in judgment, sensemaking, and the quiet reflection that follows when the cost is personal.
Mount Stuart holds its own.
It’s not the tallest peak in the Cascades, and it doesn’t have the most snow or the wildest approach—but it earns its reputation with scale, commitment, and consequence. The north ridge is one of Fifty Classic Climbs in North America—2,800 feet of alpine granite rising between hanging glaciers. From base to summit to base again, it demands over 5,300 feet of elevation gain and loss, with few easy exits.
I made the climb with a guide from the American Alpine Institute and a third climber who joined at the last minute. We hiked in light—no sleeping bags, no tents, just bivy sacks and resolve. Six dusty miles in unseasonable heat brought us to camp near Stuart Pass. It was dry. Windless. Dusty. A little uneasy.
Summit day started at 4:30 a.m. A short glacier crossing at sunrise with crampons and ice axes—carried all that way for just 30 minutes of use. The other climber turned back early, too slow to make the summit and return safely. That saved us hours.
The ridge was long—class III and IV terrain, punctuated by roped sections of 5.6 and 5.7 granite. We moved fast where we could, unroped much of it for speed. But even fast was slow. Knife-edge ridges dropped to the Stuart Glacier on one side and the Cliff Glacier on the other. Loose rock required testing every hold. At the Great Gendarme, we made a pendulum rappel, scrambled friction slabs, and kept climbing.
We hit the summit around 1:30 p.m.—dry-mouthed, worked, but thrilled. And then we had to get down.
Stuart’s summit is massive, and the descent lines aren’t marked. We aimed for the clean couloir, the one that "goes." But from the top, they all looked plausible. And there’s a pattern I’ve seen in leadership too: the more tired you are, the more right the easy path looks.
We picked the wrong one.
At first it felt right—loose but manageable. Then steeper. Then harder to reverse. Our water was gone. Too far down to turn around, no clear bypass in sight. We paused. Looked back. No good options. We kept moving.
That’s the thing about judgment: you rarely feel it when you get it right. You feel it when you didn’t slow down soon enough.
We finally spilled out into the basin above Ingalls Creek, staggered to the stream, filled our water bottles, and waited for the iodine to do its work. We drank liters on the spot. Then faced the long, hot 4-mile hike back to camp, arriving just before nightfall.
I drank nearly a gallon that evening—and didn’t pee until the next morning.
Sometimes, the hardest part of a climb isn’t the climbing. It’s the decision you didn’t realize you were making until you were too far in to undo it.
That descent didn’t just test our legs. It tested our ability to course-correct under pressure, without a clear map, when the margin for error was gone.
Good judgment isn’t always about choosing right. It’s about how you move when you’ve already chosen wrong.
And maybe the hardest capability of all isn’t speed or strength—it’s the ability to reflect while still walking. To keep learning while dehydrated, off-route, and uncertain.
The summit tested our focus. The couloir tested everything else.