Seventeen years old and just graduated from high school - the only thing I knew for certain for the life ahead of me was that I had to go to Baffin Island. Inspired by an article in the Canadian Alpine Journal about climbers in the Sam Ford Fjord area, I envisioned myself putting up a big wall. It took me five years of gaining climbing experience and two years of wasting time in university to even attempt such a trip. In April of 1999, I worked out the final details sitting in the Brew Pub in Squamish, BC, with my two friends John Millar and Ben DeMenech.

Like most parties before us we used the help of Quillikkut Outfitters to get into our fjord of choice, the Gibbs Fjord, using snowmobiles and komotiks (sleds). Our first realization of the trip becoming a reality was when Lee, a Texan base jumper following us out to Gibbs Fjord, had his komotik fall apart. The high drone of the snowmobiles combined with the extremely rough ride resulted in us not noticing his disappearance. By the time we did he was far behind us, out of sight behind icebergs. John and Ilkoo, one of our guides, couldn't hear our shouts to stop and continued on. Jake, our other guide, stopped his machine, unhooked Ben's and my komotik, turned around to look for Lee, and then sped off with a high rev roar. After five minutes we could neither hear nor see any of our friends and we found ourselves standing in the middle of the arctic alone. "Freakin' crazy man," I whisper to Ben. "Why don't we hike out to that iceberg while we're waiting." Its takes us twice as long to get to it as we thought and we scramble up its sloping side. Ben stands like he's made a first ascent of a grand peak and I take a picture of him with our tiny komotik out on the ice in the background. "Beautiful..."

Lee had to go back to get help from Clyde River and Jake returned to continue with our journey to Gibbs Fjord. Other than this short delay, the 12-hour ride was uneventful until we reached the fjord. We drove up and down most of the fjord looking for a worthy wall to climb and finally picked one near the entrance. Tired and cold we started to unload our stuff when not five minutes later an American team showed up, pulled ahead of us and started to unload their gear. Since we had previously discussed our climbing objectives back in Clyde River with the Americans, this mix-up was quite unexpected. We had a brief discussion with the American climbers but they refused to compromise stating that they had made up 150 T-shirts with this wall printed on it. John to my surprise, and out of character, became somewhat aggravated. I told both Ben and John that I hadn't come all the way out here to argue over who "gets" what wall. So we spent the night, and the next day we headed off for a different objective.

Half an hour down the fjord a wall presented itself that we had not noticed before. Since we had been on the other side viewing these walls this one had not been immediately obvious. Now at the bottom looking up it truly was an impressive bit of rock. Five hundred feet of talus and steep slabs stood in front of about 3000 feet of vertical granite. The first section of the wall was vertical for a thousand feet and then a pillar began which took the climbing to overhanging with multiple roofs sticking out like the underside of a staircase for another two thousand. A crack split the pillar in two for most of its length and it was along this line that our dream became a reality.

Though John and I had done numerous walls together in the past, Ben and I had only climbed Atlantic Ocean Wall on El-Cap together as well as a couple of single pitches here and there. As a result he claimed every pitch he led in Baffin was the hardest aid-pitch he had ever done and they seemed to just get harder and harder during the climb. The granite was unlike anything I'd ever seen. The surface was gray and had large crystal quartz imbedded in it but the left or right facing corners were dark red. Most cracks were very shallow even though most of them were wide, they would just abruptly end flat in the back with tons of loose blocks and flakes jamming them. I truly believe the hardest aid climbing is on loose and shattered rock where lots of preparation is needed to even begin a placement and I found I was being schooled hard.

In six days we had base camp well established on the ice, all our wall gear and food hiked up the hour long 35 degree snow slog to the base, and six pitches fixed. We brought only five ropes so on day six we hauled all our gear to camp one and committed ourselves to the wall. We didn't bring a rifle, mostly because of laziness, so we were pumped to be off the ground and safe from polar bear attacks. Furthermore, every four days or so the hanging glacier nearby would release tons of ice to crash down beside our wall and out over the ice beside base camp. We kept far enough away from it so its only effect was psychological.

At the end of day five I had reached a blank section between two cracks side by side. I drilled a bolt ladder across this fifteen-foot gap and turned it into camp one using cams on either side to spread things out. After setting up wall camp on day six we noticed a very thin crack running across below us and came to the realization that the three of us and all our gear were bolted to a detached pillar.

The first pitch after the Panic Pillar bivy began with a large traverse. John was trying to get us over to the crack that split the pillar and a straight line to the top. He had placed numerous hooks when a sawed off pin he was on, hammered in disintegrating rock, blew out and sent him into a 30 foot pendulum directly into the portaledge at the belay. I got pulled flat into the ceiling of our diamond fly and John's feet ripped a two-foot hole through the side. Ben put John back on belay and I began the frustrating job of figuring out how to sew our fly back together, which had ripped at a pressure point directly above the door. Fortunately I managed to repair the hole. The next day I started the overhanging rock section of the wall. The pitch required 14 bird beaks with a hook traverse at the halfway point. The pitch seemed very similar to the overhanging triple cracks on the Shield except that the cracks were in seamed corners that grew from the rock like three rippled waves. I called the pitch, "That's The Way I Wanna Rock n Roll" after an AC/DC tune. I had brought nothing but AC/DC and some Everclear much to the misery of my friends. Ben had picked Dave Matthews Band and John had chosen Paul Simon to soothe their thoughts.

The next pitch was memorable for Ben. He pulled out around a roof to avoid its blankness and hooked and headed his way towards more difficulty. He had to eventually drill a bat hook but the rock unexpectedly shattered resulting in a ten-foot fall. He went back up after re-climbing the section and made it a few moves before his karma completely ran out. From below on the portaledge I could see him leave the wall in a seated position and begin to rag doll down the bumps he had aided over. After passing some hook moves and ripping a couple of beaks a .75 Camelot gets its sling cut by its own cable sending only a slight jolt to Ben's flight. After a couple more blown pieces a #4 Camelot prepares to take on his weight when its carabiner comes unclipped from the sewn side of a sports draw. What? Luckily a screamer rips its full length connected to a copper head and equalizes with a hybrid alien. I wish I was making this up. Ben finally came to a stop with bruises and karma level in check.

Since the wall faced north and the sun spun circles in the arctic sky it would only shine on the wall from about 5pm to 8pm in which time we climbed. With the addition of the fact that Ben and I worked graveyard security all winter to afford this trip it began to seem like a "Midnight Watch".

On pitch eleven I encounter some of the hardest loose climbing I've ever fucked with. Hooking and bird beaking around a corner I find a wall covered in inch thick-stacked squares with more shattered rock underneath. All I could do was try to hold a bunch of squares together with my hands as I hook between their crumbling edges. After 20 feet of this it abruptly ends and an amazing thin crack shoots up the middle of the corner. Three beaks, small blades, longer blades, lost arrows, and finally tcu's to the anchor, oh baby! Here we establish camp two.

From the ground we knew that the crack we were in would eventually turn into an offwidth. The crack ended up getting to big and Ben mumbles something down about passing his rock shoes up; up go his shoes, down come his plastics and all we can hear is silence and the occasional grunt for the next fifteen minutes. Ben manages to pull out an offwidth roof with freezing hands and feet and throws a cam in over the lip. Bitterly cold, he pleads for his boots back and drills a belay.

Pitch fourteen turns out to be a 50-foot roof and our wonderful crack line we've been following ends at its base. An incredible piece of architecture, I try to negotiate its puzzle and end up hooking out a hanging corner to gain the lip of the roof and find a deteriorating crack traversing around the face. Each pin I nail into it makes a perfect ringing noise but pulls right out by hand. Several moves later I see that the hanging corner is actually a suspended block pasted to the underside of the roof. What keeps me nailing this death block is the hope that if it did go it would fall away from me, and due to the steepness of the wall completely miss both Ben belaying me and John pitches below in Camp two. Halfway across the block a crack just happens to lead me directly over the last bit of the roof. Overtop I can see the crack widen to hand size and shoot off towards the summit. It doesn't get any better than this!

On the next pitch a storm blows in, but not until John is well into the pitch. I'm freezing at the belay as snow is being blown sideways and the whole fjord is choked with clouds. John finally feels like he's getting what he's been looking for and revels in the storm yelling out, "Now this is real climbing!" His pitch takes him up a thin seam to a ledge on the corner of the gigantic pillar that most of the route was on. Standing on top he has three choices; Either make a belay here and later down traverse a ledge to an offwidth on the main wall, keep going straight up a seam that's less then vertical or fire out the center of a tidal wave overhanging wall with a fractured splitter crack. John picks the craziest line just for fun and aids out the tidal wave. Upon cleaning the pitch I had no idea of where John went and as I peer around the corner and see the rope crazily arching out over my head through a roof all I can say is, "Fuckin' proud!" Swinging around in my aiders cleaning the wave in the blowing snow I knew this pitch had to be called "Proud to be Canadian".

Since we estimated that the summit was going to be farther away then we had ropes to fix close enough to, we needed to move camp higher to just under the 50-foot roof. After the storm most of the wall was plastered in snow except for a patch under the roof where we lay huddled on our ledge. The sun finally came out and we spent most of the day with the doors open soaking in sun, listening to Everclear and shoving chocolate in our faces. At this height we could see an obelix balancing on a ridge that arched away from us with spires similar in color to the Porcelain Wall in Yosemite towering behind. In the other direction the fjord opened out onto open ocean. We saw Scott Island supporting the Ships Prow standing at attention over icebergs akin to great white sailing ships at sea.

The most frustrating time of the trip for me was the second to last pitch. I initially thought that this pitch would reach the top. First I tried right of a massive leaning flake and found a flaring bottomless chimney with massive moving blocks. I tried left and found an even bigger chimney choked with spindrift. In between I hooked, bird beaked and came to a 20-foot blank section and decided I didn't want to drill so I down aided to the ledge. Going back right I decided to try for the main wall beside the pillar and had to step over a chasm splitting the feature we had been climbing for the last two weeks from the main wall. Here the face was shattered like the pitch before camp two. I was extremely pissed off and more aggravated. At times like these I figure its better to let it all out now instead of it getting me killed later, so I screamed and bashed my hammer into the rock. Pieces of stone fell into the gap I was stemming between and spun out towards the snow thousands of feet below. Ben patiently waited, knowing from our close kinship in climbing I'd become calm and reasonable soon. Closing my eyes I committed to the twisted rock. After gently moving from several body weight placements I felt like I was holding my breath until I made it to a pleasant and safe bird beak seam, "Oh baby how I love solid rock!"

Half a pitch from the top I run out of rope. John jugs up and brings an extra rope, summit goodies and hot chocolate. Ben dispatches with the last pitch, which is vertical immaculate rock for its entire length including the mantle onto the summit ridge. Over the top the mountain slopes away into talus and glacier and the ridge shoots to the top 200 feet away. We run up like little kids across a playground and dance around in the snow on top. The ridge drops off towards other peaks and we can see right over Jushua tower, a wall climbed the previous year. Beyond that lies the Cat's Eye Wall that two guys from Whistler had just ascended a week ago. Open frozen ocean beyond that and wherever you imagination will take you. A little hacky sacking, a picture or two and even some time for a little exploration before heading down.

We spent a night at camp 3, then 24 hours getting down which brought the total days to 25 climbing with 18 spent on the wall. Rappelling down I back-aided the overhanging pitches as Ben cleaned and John lowered the bags. Eventually we reached our traverse and Ben and I would hang at the end of our ropes and drill side by side a new rappel station. Kinda cool. In the knee-deep snow at the bottom we had to figure out how to get our six haul bags down the steep snow gullies to the ice. Ben and I started to hammer in a bolt to rap off on a boulder and John passed us kicking steps with a haul bag clipped to his harness. The haul bag somehow unclipped itself and cart-wheeled down the slope into the talus below. Everything blew out of the bag and somehow a large spray of something brown left a patch in the snow. John grabbed another bag and started down. Ben and I gave up on our slow rappel idea and followed John's lead. Halfway down Ben slipped on some ice and without an ice axe picked up some scary speed. All I can think about is please don't start to cartwheel. Ben managed to stay in a sitting position and John moved in to stop Ben's momentum. Ben gave a look like get the hell out of my way or you'll end up like me and John jumped away. Ben ended up using his butt as a brake on the talus slope and eventually a boulder stopped him and his haulbags. Scattered around Ben lay the contents of John's lost haul bag including a smashed thermos with remains of hot chocolate freezing in the snow. After a while Ben is fine enough to haul his own body down the remaining gully and John and I drag the six bags down the last slope. I'm so tired at this point I have to literally crawl through the snow dragging the two haulbags behind watching John steam past with unending energy.

After that long day a four-day storm hits and piles snow over the tents. Our battery was running low on our radio and it was not until after the storm that we contacted our guides in Clyde River to arrange a pick-up. But we can't complain since as we only had three days of storm on the wall and the rest perfectly sunny days. We spent the time mostly eating of course but also brainstorming a name for the peak. Mount Ursa Major, "Big Bear," out of respect for the polar bears who considerately left us alone.

Back in Clyde River we scheduled our flight to come the next day and without a shower for a month and a half we boarded the plane. In the air Ben gets hot, takes off his jacket and realizes that he can finally smell himself. The women in the seat in front of us states, "Yes, so can the rest of us!" She asks the stewardess to find her another seat, preferably as far away from us as possible. John starts to laugh and Ben and I can't help to either. Later to my delight we pass over the mythical Mt. Asgard and Mt. Thor. In the distance I saw an unclimbed wall that beckoned me, and I knew I wasn't finished with Baffin.

We would like to thank the generous support of the Canadian Himalayan Foundation, Mountain Equipment Co-op, and special thanks to George and Brigit Hanzel at Climb On Equipment, Squamish.