Due to COVID, we chose to skip taking the boat and hike all the way in. But we first started off our morning with baked goods from the bakery, the fresh warm chocolate croissant was soooo good! The hike in is loooooong.

Once you get near the end of the lake, the views start to get pretty neat. The mountains around here are pretty crazy!

The water crossing was pretty easy to find, and it currently has a few flimsy logs that are tied together with a cord… they bend and sag as you cross, and I wonder when the cord will snap, but it worked both on the way in and out, no wet feet!

After the crossing, the trail finally starts to gain elevation, but by this time it was 10:50 AM and already starting to get hot. Heavy backpacks, hot weather, and decently high elevation made this a slow slog up to camp, but we had all day.

Near the end of the trail you get excellent views of the route, and we saw some climbers on the 3rd pitch.

The lakes are gorgeous and there’s tons of camping everywhere, on either side of the lakes.

The weird thing about this area is it actually doesn’t get cold at night. Down in the town it got to freezing overnight, but up here it was probably low 50’s.

Given the warm, nice temperature, we started off for the climb in the dark at 4:40 AM… We also didn’t want to be behind anyone.

We got to the base at 6:15 and Alexis started off P1 at 6:30.

P1 – 6:30 – Up the chimney to a nice ledge beneath a tougher looking chimney, seemed about 100′, 5.6

P2 – 7:00 – Up a tougher chimney, maybe 5.7, and then exit on left and find the 5.8 mantle, you can get a piece in about 4 feet below, have to commit to it, probably more of a mental crux. Then take an awkward corner crack for 10 feet past the tree (I might have pulled on one cam) and continue to a nice ledge with bolts at feet level. Seemed also 100′

P3 – 8:00 – Started far right in the corner where stuck cam is, kinda tricky, then you’ll find a ledge going left at the dead tree, you use the ledge’s hand jug holds to traverse over to the main crack splitting the wall. The crack is pretty well featured and pretty fun climbing up to the bolts. At around noon to 12:30, sunlight finally started to hit the start of P3.

P4 – 8:45 – Traverse is easy, good feet, used doubles and didn’t need to back clean, drag was fine. Once around the roof climbing was pretty fun I think. I belayed at the start of the 4th/3rd class valley to prevent worse rope drag, then we quickly did that section

P5 – 9:45 – Start up the corner (kinda tricky, seems like topo starts further left on the face), but then you’ll quickly notice it traverses left on some really good ledges and goes almost out to the arete before trending rightwards again on more fun easy terrain. Ends once you get to the top of the arete, no super great belay ledge.

P6 – Up the arete and then trend right following a crack on easiest seeming terrain, passing another stuck cam, to a really nice belay ledge (almost big enough for a tent).

P7 – 11:00 – Follow up the cracks near right side of the wall, eventually the cracks run out and theres a set of twin cracks on the right. I climbed to the left till I was about level with them and then make an airy move over right to them. They looked difficult to climb directly. Then there’s a roof you need to get over, with some #3 hand jams and not great feet and overall not great hands. It was nice to have two #3’s for this. Then I continued up till I reached some class 4 ledges and belayed, 195′.

P8 – 12:30 – Still some more low class 5 climbing till you reach a really nice huge flat rock indicating the top of the route. Probably 160′. It’s clear you can go no higher (idk how there’s easy 5th class climbing to summit).

12:55 PM – Top of route!

Some people seem to say you can scramble directly to the top, but that seems impossible. We traversed around the left on slabby rock till the terrain turned 3rd class and then followed the ridge up. You could probably take 4th-5th class terrain up after traversing only halfway.

The top is pretty impressive, with great views of the lakes!

For the descent, we chose the “third gully” which is a class 3 gully without any rappels. We accidently went down a little too far when we should have stayed skiiers left and had to hike back up some and then cross over. Once you enter the gully, it’s a quite narrow gully with cliffs on both sides. It’s pretty steep, I was being quite careful and slow, but it’s about the same as most descent gullies. The entire descent from the very top to camp took us 1 hour and 50 minutes. Without our mistake it would have been 1 hour and 30 minutes, and if we weren’t so slow and cautious on the descent gully it probably could have easily been only one hour.

The next morning we had the long slog out. But at least we went to the bakery when we got back!