Trip Report - El Capitan of the Bitterroot - 6/30/22

After learning about Jonathan Marquis’ glacier drawing project - he’s working on visiting and drawing the 60 glaciers of Montana - I knew I wanted to meet him. After contacting him on Instagram, we met up for beers in MIssoula last week and decided to start scheming on trips together. A week later, we were waking up at 4:30 am at a trailhead.

El Capitan of the Bitterroot is an incredible mountain, and one of my favorites that I’ve climbed in Montana so far. 20 miles, 6500’ gain, and a lot of scrappy schwacking/snow/talus travel = everything I like. And I was so thankful to be out with Jonathan - it was fascinating to see how he works and how thoughtfully he portrays scenes. I hope we can get out more.

Trip Report:

After I groggily struggled out of my sleeping bag at 4:30 am, we set off up the trail just after dawn and found a ton of deadfall and trail flooding. We pushed through and made good time up to Little Rock Creek Lake, where I got my first glimpse of El Capitan - an intimidating cliff-covered face with a few snow-filled couloirs on the left flank.

We climbed the leftmost couloir.

We traveled offtrail up to the bench beneath El Capitan, and the couloirs kept looking increasingly intimidating. We headed up to suss things out and the snow was perfect for kicking steps, so we pushed up to the ridge.

From the ridge, we wandered up 1,700’ of talus and snow to the summit tower, which we accessed via a few high exposure moves.

The weather on the summit was perfect, and we hung up there for an hour. Jonathan worked on a sketch and I tried to grapple with the enormity of the view - mountains in all directions, some over one hundred miles away.

Soon enough it was time to descend and we headed back down (without my phone, which I seem to have left on the summit, and didn’t notice till several miles away). Downclimbing the couloir was pretty spicy but once down, we were rewarded with spectacular views and an icy swim in an iceberg-filled alpine lake.

Then we slogged all the way out before crushing a few beers at the trailhead. Another perfect day out.