Cirque of the Towers - July 2 to 4, 2001
The East Ridge of Wolf's Head
The Northeast Face of Pingora
Photos courtesy of Gary Clark and NA Classics
After a wildly successful Wild Iris and Tetons trip the previous year, I was looking for something similar in 2001. However, this trip almost didn't even happen. Carol and I weren't too excited about Wild Iris, and we vacillated about going until Friday evening. Once we finally decided to go we quickly packed, and got an early start on Saturday morning.
We spent two half days clipping bolts. I severely tweaked my wrist the first day and was relegated to cheering and heckling on Sunday. Finally, at the end of the day I managed to grimace my way up a few pitches. It hurt badly, but I felt (hoped, really) that I'd be able to handle the easier climbing in the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range.
We drove from Wild Iris to the Big Sandy trailhead Sunday afternoon and evening. We got warmed up at cursing the guidebook author after wandering around nondescript dirt roads for a long time trying to figure out where we were. After finally getting back on track we reached the trailhead with enough daylight to pack up for a couple days in the Cirque of the Towers, and we got to sleep in the back of my truck.
An early alarm had us hiking in the dim morning light. We reached Big Sandy Lake after a couple hours of surprisingly gentle hiking. From there we had to head up over Jackass Pass, which proved somewhat more strenuous. Once over the pass, we set up camp at the first attractive location.
With the 8-mile approach with full packs behind us, we racked up and headed for our first route: The East Ridge of Wolf's Head Peak. After another hour of walking, we finally found ourselves roping up around noon. I led off on the initial easy pitches. After a bit of simulclimbing, I stopped and belayed Carol up to my stance. We did two more easy pitches and found ourselves on a large ledge system below the ridge proper.
After moving to the end of the ledge towards Pingora, I led a pitch up to the crest. Carol led a scramble to the start of the famous sidewalk in the sky. She seemed pretty anxious to turn over the lead at this point, which I didn't quite understand. I think this pitch would be much more comfortable to lead. I scrambled up and across the two-foot wide sidewalk, enjoying the several hundred feet of exposure down either side. At the end of the rope I belayed Carol over, and I think she actually enjoyed it.
We did a couple more pitches up to the summit ridge, and then the traversing began. We spent the next couple hours weaving in and around huge towers on the crest. We basically did it pitch by pitch because we didn't have a lot of info about the route and weren't into soloing anything. After a couple wildly exposed traverses and a very neat horizontal squeeze chimney, we reached the final step up to the summit around 5pm.
We didn't linger long, and soon rapped off the back and began the tricky descent. We did a total of four rappels interspersed with scrambling before we reached the ledge system that we followed for quite a ways to the descent notch. One additional short rappel put us back in hiking territory. After a loose descent down a scree gully into the Cirque, we did a couple fun glissades and eventually made it back to camp around 8pm. It was a truly long and exhausting day.
We didn't even bother setting an alarm for the next day, and woke up around 7am. We had to climb Pingora that day due to poor planning on our part and only packing enough food for 2 days and nights. We finally got hiking around 8am for what I figured would be a casual 1-hour approach to the start of the Northeast Face of Pingora. I was way off, and finally started leading the first pitch around 10am. We were already realizing that we didn't bring nearly enough water and that it was going to be a hot day.
Our route finding trouble began nearly immediately, as I got off route and had to backtrack to find the traverse to the start of the corner system we would follow for most of the route. The next few pitches went well – the climbing was excellent on super clean granite. I led through a neat small roof on the third pitch, and Carol led a pretty tough corner on another pitch. The famous grass clump pitch was distinctive and fun. After that pitch, the guidebook shows a full traversing pitch for the sixth lead. Carol led off looking to the right for the way to go. After a full pitch of heading up rather than traversing, she set a belay feeling thoroughly lost and frustrated. At this point we were supposed to be below the crux slot of the route. I led up into the unknown, and after another full pitch found the slot. We couldn't believe how amazingly inaccurate the guidebook was for such a popular and well-traveled route. We were seriously low on water by this point. As a result, we hardly ate anything, and were really dragging for pretty much the whole day.
Carol didn't want to lead the intimidating looking slot, so I headed up. It proved easy enough when jammed straight on, and after a short pitch I belayed Carol up. She led another short pitch. I then led a steep and wandering pitch. I had no real clue on where to go (the guidebook was no help), but I apparently did well with the route finding as I found the easy slot and belayed at the bottom of the chimney described in the guide. Carol led the chimney with minimal grunting, and I led one more short pitch to the summit.
We rapped into a large notch and scrambled to the main (west) summit. I was quite bummed that we forgot to bring a camera on this trip. However, it was kind of late and our main concern at that point was getting off that huge piece of rock before dark, as we neglected to bring any kind of flashlight. We finished our water with a couple swallows each, and got started trying to figure out the descent.
At this point the guidebook failed us once again. The guide describes the descent as starting from a notch east of the summit, so we returned to the huge notch between the two summits. We rappelled and did some scrambling and found another rappel. I started to suspect that we were very lost. Then our rope got stuck when we tried to pull it from the rappel. Carol very unhappily led up some steep loose ground to free the stuck rope.
Once we got back on our way, it was another 2 full-length rappels to some belayed downclimbing to a ledge system. It was obvious that we were heading towards Lonesome Lake, pretty much the opposite direction that we wanted. Once on the ledge system, we used a running belay, and I led off to the west hoping that we would be able to connect up with the shoulder of the mountain. I hoped that we would be able to find a rappel off the shoulder and back to familiar ground.
The ledge system was mostly easy, but had a couple fifth class sections. The first proved to be the key to the descent, as it was not obvious and connected us with the ledges heading to the shoulder. After one pitch and some additional simulclimbing, we were on the shoulder.
Carol immediately found a cairn, and went off scouting the route. It didn't feel right to me, so I poked around a little bit and found what looked like a trail heading down the shoulder more in the direction that we wanted to head. We followed it for a little, then discovered a steep ledge system that appeared to lead all the way to the ground. After a couple exposed steps that we carefully downclimbed, we walked down the improbable ramp to the ground and safety.
We reached ground just as it was officially totally dark. Luckily, the sky was mostly cloudless and the moon was full. The hike back to our camp still took about an hour, and we eventually reached it sometime after 10pm. We were too exhausted to contemplate cooking anything, so we each had a Powerbar for dinner and headed for our sleeping bags.
We slept in the next morning until the sun heated the tent to an unbearable temperature. Our first order of business was to cook the previous night's dinner of macaroni and cheese for breakfast. After that, all we had to do was pack up and hike 8 miles back to the truck. The hike out turned into something of a never-ending deathmarch, but we eventually made it, and declared the trip a stunning success.