Trip Report - Granite Peak, MT - 8/26-28/22

The last weekend before my second year of grad school, I headed out to climb Granite Peak with Zac and Kate. Due to some weather in the forecast, we climbed via the Huckleberry approach, which required a fair amount more talus but provided a much more sheltered camp. We were thankful for that call when we got walloped by a huge series of storms on summit day and ended up hiding underneath a series of boulders to avoid getting too wrecked! All in all, Granite’s a phenomenal peak and ended up being a great way to kick off a new year of school.

I’m not writing up a full trip report - there’s enough beta out there on this peak - but here are some photos!

Trip Report - Guiding 6 days on the Southern Yosemite High Route with Andrew Skurka Adventures

After years of reading Andrew Skurka’s blog and making attempts on his high routes, I’m now one of his guides. This was my first trip, and while wildfire smoke forced us to bail off the route early, I had a wonderful time out.

Here are some of my favorite shots from the trip.

Trip Report - Complete Exum Ridge on Grand Teton - 7/2-4/22

Climbing The Grand by the numbers

• ~7,500’ of gain

• around 16 miles traveled

• 13 pitches of climbing

• 50 hours spent in the park

• 30 hours spent moving

Big takeaways from the trip

• If the entire party isn’t certain they want to continue, bail! (We had a pretty easy time with our decision to bail, but we watched another group get pretty ugly about it. Not what climbing is supposed to be about.)

• Traveling with a party of three is wonderful when everyone’s skillsets complement. I was super thankful to be up there with Zac and Kika, I would have had a very rough time on the crux pitch of the Lower Exum.

• Sufferfests don’t have to be bad when everyone keeps laughing the whole way through!

The Trip

On the Friday before the 4th, the forecast showed thunderstorms across all of Montana, Idaho and Washington so Zac, Kika and I decided at 5 pm to drive down to the Tetons and see if we could get a permit for the Grand. 12 hours later we were on our way.

After a six hours drive, we were lucky enough to pull a permit (though I couldn’t find parking at the ranger station). We headed up to Moraine Camp, where we got hit by a thunderstorm thankfully just after getting our pyramid set up.

Slogging up with heavy packs

Kika tries to figure out how to make her cheesy tuna

On Sunday morning, we got moving at 4 am and scrambled up to the base of the Lower Exum.

Trying to figure out exactly where the route is, just as the sun is beginning to come up.

The winds were whipping, but at belays we hunkered down in little nooks until the sun finally got high enough to warm us up.

Zac leading pitch 1

The Lower Exum was burly and definitely took us more time than we’d expected, especially trying to crawl through chimneys and up offwidths with packs full of crampons and ice axes, which we’d been told we would need for the descent.

If you look closely, you can see Zac leading on the left.

Chilly belays even in the sun

Kika leading just right of center!

Once we were on the Upper Exum, the climbing got a lot easier, but we ran into a ton of other parties and got slowed down pretty badly. We scrambled everything we could and roped up for ~6 pitches. I was stoked to lead the Friction Pitch and V-Pitch, both of which were super fun.

The Golden Staircase

Scrambling through the Wind Tunnel

Looking back down the route from just below the V-Pitch

After finishing all the climbing, we made the decision to bail about 100’ short of the summit to make sure we’d have time to descend safely.

We made it back to the lower saddle by sunset and were starting to relax (only had 800’ more to descend) when we saw a sign from the guides saying “a massive landslide took out the standard descent” and that they had put in a separate rappel.

We found the new rappel and lowered onto steep snow in the dark. It would have been a manageable situation with just our group, but three other groups were trying to descend too. We wrangled a mega-rappel (tying multiple ropes together with loops to help pass the knots) and it took 2 hours to get five of us down with all the shenanigans. Shoutout to Kyle and Alexa though for keeping things fun!

Ended up leaving our setup for the next groups to descend and retrieved it the next morning.

With all the nonsense, we got back to camp at just after midnight - 20 hours after beginning. A very long day.

Looking back up at Exum Ridge (the center-right skyline).

Rapping into the dark.

Standing on a snow ledge for hours.

On our third day, we relaxed a bit before hiking out and heading back home! It was hard to leave such a beautiful place after just three days, but I’m so glad we went.

View of the Tetons on the skyline two hours into the drive home!

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.

Trip Report - North Ridge of Canyon Peak (MT) - 6/26/22

There’s not enough out there about this route, it deserves a lot more attention!

I drove out of Missoula early with Zac and Kika on what turned out to be a perfect summer day. Despite a mixup on who was bringing what, we turned out to have enough gear to give it a go.

After a long approach up to Canyon Lake, we got our first big views of Canyon Peak. It looks far away from the dam, but we skirted the north side of the lake and got up to the col, where we transitioned to scrambling gear.

Some unnecessary but aesthetic scrambling.

Getting up there!

The climb itself is straightforward, though it helps if both your partners are super strong climbers. We scrambled up the first few hundred feet on class 3 and 4 terrain before roping up on a doubled up twin and leading two pitches that probably went at 5.4 or so. The route stays near the true north ridge, but wanders left occasionally.

Starting to be pretty airy.

It’s steeper on the other side…

We crested a false summit and unroped, traversing to the summit with huge dropoffs. On the summit, we found a ton of ladybugs up there - there must have been thousands, swarming in piles. I’d never seen anything like it.

Ladybugs literally everywhere on the summit. Kinda gross honestly.

After an involved rappel/steep snow experience on the south face, we popped through a weakness in the southeast ridge and looped back to Canyon Lake, where we took a dip in the refreshingly chilly water before slogging back out to the car.

A perfect (but very long) day!