Last year we had paid a first visit to Ericsson Crags, the last of the "official" CA 13ers I had left to climb. It was a success for all of us save Tom Becht who nearly had a fingertip severed, but we hadn't time for Crags #2 & #3 that year. I put "official" in quotes because it's based on a somewhat arbitrary prominence value of 300ft and a similarly arbitrary average method of calculating the prominence. This come down to an additional list of around a dozen 13er summits that might have 300ft of prominence based on more optimistic values for prominence. Ericsson Crag #2, with 262ft of average prominence, is one such summit and the reason for my wanting to return. Tom wanted to come back to actually climb one of the crags and the others were along for various reasons, but mostly I suspect because they enjoy my charming company - even though I really don't like backpacking. We had packed into East Lake the day before to set up camp and establish our starting point for the day's adventure.
Ericsson Crags are located just north of Mt. Ericsson and the
Kings-Kern Divide in SEKI National Park, about 3.5mi from our camp. Though it
makes for a short approach, the outing is far from trivial since less than a
mile of this is on trail and there's nearly 4,000ft of gain for the two crags. I
was rather cold in the morning as we 
started out just after 7a, most
of us wearing jackets. We followed 
the trail until it reaches the
second boulder field crossing, whereupon we followed a more obscure branch of
the trail that climbs 
up and left into the Harrison Creek drainage to
the east. An old
trail once went up this way and over Harrison Pass but it has been decades since
it was maintained and is hard to follow. We did a decent job of finding it in
various locations, but fortunately the cross-country is not so hard through the
forest here and can be managed with or without the old trail. It took us about
an hour to work our way from camp up through the forest until we reached the
granite slabs
above treeline on the west side of Ericsson Crags. The slabs give
out shortly, turning to 
boulders and talus as we aimed for the large,
obvious chute between Crags #2 and #3. Kristine had left us sometime
earlier, choosing
to climb Deerhorn Mtn and The Minster instead of Ericsson Crags, thus avoiding
the potential rockfall dangers with such a large group. The remaining six of us
were fairly close together as we started into the chute but would soon begin to
spread out.
The chute is 
long and steep and took us more than an hour to ascend.
The rock is loose, requiring great care to keep from knocking stuff down on each
other. Some of us had brought helmets for just this situation, but luckily no
serious rockfall would plague us today. There is a chockstone
lower in the chute that requires some 
class 4 scrambling to
surmount, or alternately as Tom found out,
it can be bypassed well to the left by exiting the chute about 100ft below the
chockstone and re-entering higher, above it. It wasn't at all clear from below
how one might reach either crag from this chute. With a focus on reaching Crag
#3 first, we kept 
surveying the terrain to the left but everything
seemed to rise to vertical cliffs above, leaving us little choice but to
continue ascending the chute and hoping something better would come along.
Near the top
we paused below the saddle between the two to consider a secondary chute
branching to the left just north of the saddle. This seemed to offer a way
around to the east side of the crag where we hoped to find something more
promising. I was happy to let Sean go ahead and survey the terrain, waiting with
Robert and Tom below. Robert thought this somewhat funny and perhaps unfair that
I would use Sean in such a fashion. My view was somewhat different - I knew Sean
could run circles around me on such terrain (to be honest, on any
terrain), and it was much like letting the dog run off leash to work off excess
energy. In any event, Sean didn't seem to mind one whit. It was sometime before
we heard from him, causing us to move into a small patch of sunlight filtering
into the chute, an effort to ward off the chill from being in the shade all
morning. Eventually I decided to climb up the alternate chute to see
what became of Sean, only to hear him shouting down from around the corner a
few minutes later. I couldn't make out what he said, but Robert had a more
direct line of sight from below and made out that the route would go. Up the
chute we all went. Iris and Scott were some distance below us in the main chute
at this point. We would lose track of them as we worked our way over to the east
side, figuring they'd have to find the way on their own.
The 
east side
turned out to work, but not without lots of 
class 4 scrambling
over exposed terrain. The route-finding was a bit tricky, but there were many
variations we came to find as the four of us took varying options, sometimes to
relieve a bottleneck, other times because the person in front was struggling
with a move or two. Sean led us up in 
the general direction
of the summit and was the first to reach it some minutes before the rest of us.
It was 10:30a by the time we had four of us on 
the summit, elated with
our success and the quality of the scrambling. An aluminum SRC register box had
been left by Jim Keating and Claude Fiddler (signing as Norman Claude)
in 1991 with a scant five pages of entries. More impressive were the
two scraps of 
older paper found
loosely in the back pages of the notebook from the earliest ascentionists. These
included Hervey Voge and Dave Brower from 1939 and several entries from
Fred Beckey and partners, 1972 & 1987. The views cover a large portion of the
SEKI Wilderness west of the Sierra Crest, with The Minster, West Spur and
Deerhorn Mtn to the north and northeast, Mt. Standford and Caltech to
the east, Mt. Ericsson and the other crags looming higher to
the south. We were 
atop the summit basking in the welcome
sunshine for about 20min before deciding to head
down, Scott and Iris nowhere in sight.
As we were 
descending back along the South Ridge, Scott and Iris
passed us
heading up. They were in fine spirits and seemed to enjoy their more casual
pace. Sean told them about the register we'd found and how the first
ascentionist had scratched his name on a sardine tin back in 1921. This had
Scott in particular rather excited for the summit visit. The four of us
continued down to 
the saddle between the two crags before
moving over to the
east side of Crag #2's North Ridge. We had passed a wide, semi-promising chute
on the west side of the ridge while ascending the main West Chute earlier, but
it looked to grow steep and cliffy at the headwall of the two branches we could
see above. From the summit of #3, we could see that an easier approach looked
to go up the east side of the North Ridge which is why we tried that first.
There were two separate chutes on that side and we had to traverse from one into
the other when the first became blocked, but the route worked quite
nicely at class 3 and we had a much easier time reaching #2 than we'd had
reaching #3. 
The summit has a sharply pointed 
summit block
that one can 
straddle, but it would take a very nervy move to try and
stand upon. There was a register composing a few scraps of paper in a small
glass jar with no lid, leaving the contents somewhat battered and aged. The
oldest scrap left by Voge and Brower on the same day in 1939, was
brittle and moldy, with little of it that could be read. There were
other pages more recent going back to the 1990s, these were in
a small plastic film cannister and kept in 
better shape. We left one
of our 
own registers after putting the others back as we found them,
protected as best we
could from the sun and weather. Scott & Iris were atop Crag #3 while we on #2.
We watched them descend not once, nor twice, but three separate times before
returning to the summit after descending a short distance. Their behavior was
completely inexplicable to us and we conjectured as to what they were doing.
Eventually they descended on the southwest side of 
the summit
before making
their way over to the South Ridge and the saddle between the two crags. Later
we learned that they had returned to the summit repeatedly because Scott was
insistent that they should be able to find the sardine tin. It had been lost in
transmission between Sean and Scott that the tin was only written about in
Voge & Brower's summit note, and didn't actually exist anymore. The tattered
note was on a thin yellow scrap of paper in the back pages of the register book
and they'd missed this completely. There was even some discussion upon reaching
the saddle and having this straightened out when they ran into Robert and Tom,
of going back up to have a look at it - it meant that much to Scott. But in the
end he decided he'd at least "held it in his hands" and would have to be
satisfied seeing the pictures we'd taken of the old entries.
We 
descended Crag #2 by 
the same route, nearly returning to
the saddle when Sean convinced me to take the alternate descent down the
East Chute. Robert had left
his poles at the base of the West Chute, so Tom decided to keep him company and
return that way (and subsequently ran into Scott & Iris). Though a longer return
overall because we'd have to go back around the north side of Ericsson Crags,
the East Chute offered a sandier, shorter descent that would avoid lots of the
tediousness of the West Chute. We found the East Chute terribly loose as well,
knocking lots of rock and debris down with us, but we did a good job of keeping
to opposite sides of the chute as we descended in tandem. We eventually emerged
from the chute and made our way around the northeast side of Crag #3 to reach
one of the officially unnamed 
Harrison Lakes. We 
stopped to
empty sand and pebbles from our shoes, then continued
descending the drainage around 
the north side of Crag #3.
There were vestiges of the trail that once went up here and
over Harrison Pass, but most of it has been erased by rockfall and brush. We
took
different routes, Sean to the south side, myself to the north, soon reuniting
lower down at the base of The Minster. Sean looked at me, looked at the Minster,
and sort of smiled with a "Should we?" look. I had to laugh because earlier I
had told him he was taking me down the East Chute to lure me to The Minster. At
the time he denied any such plan, but now that he was looking up at it, it
seemed almost a shame not to.
And so we did. It didn't look all that high above us.
I was pretty tired but it was
only 1p, so I agreed. I told Sean I'd be slow and he could feel free to go
ahead, but he was a good sport and dragged me along for the ride. We knew very
little about the feature. We knew Eric Su had climbed it, reporting it to be a
difficult scramble from the SE with at least three false pinnacles along the way
before he'd found the highest one at the western end of the castellated
ridgeline. We figured we could bypass two of these features initially by aiming
for a notch high above 
the steep slope we climbed. This turned out to
be insufficient as we found ourselves repeating the very same mistakes that had
befallen Eric. There were far more than three pinnacles, perhaps six or seven
all told. We took about half an hour to climb the initial slope, then another
half hour exploring 
the northeast side of the ridge in search of the
highest pinnacle.
Ahead of me, Sean climbed one such pinnacle to find it wasn't the highest,
suggesting I "stay low" as I continued on that side. We worked our way around
to what we thought was the north side of the highest pinnacle, only to find we
were still one pinnacle away when we had neared the top. Sean backed off of one
dicey move, commenting that he wasn't feeling all that brave today. I remember
asking him if he knew what The Minster was rated, but he had no more idea than
myself. A 
huge gap to the highest pinnacle with no
clear way across presented itself and we became despondent - we were ready to
admit we might not make it to the summit of this one. We retraced our way back
along the northeast side to a notch, figuring we should at least look and see if
there were any possibilities on the south side. Luckily, there were. a series
of fortunate breaks allowed us to 
traverse around on the south side
until we were perhaps 100ft 
under the highpoint. The remaining
distance up looked rather
hard and I balked, wanting to explore further around to the southwest and west.
Sean wasn't so sure the south side should be dismissed (in fact, we believe this
was the side Eric eventually climbed it from). While debating our options here,
we were surprised to see Kristine pop up above at the summit, quite
unexpectedly. We knew she had planned to do The Minster and Deerhorn, but had
expected her to do this one first. Had she been at The Minster all day, we
wondered? No, it turns out she did Deerhorn first, then went through much of the
same machinations we did before finding her way to the summit. She reported
having come up from the west side and that more or less settled it - Sean and I
headed off in the direction she pointed in order find the easier way up.
The west side had a very nice 
class 3 route,
intricate enough that a series of
ducks we found were most welcome. We thought these had been in place for some
time to mark the easiest route, but later found that Kristine had put them up
herself to help her on the way down. We 
crossed paths with her about
halfway along the ducked route before continuing to the very summit ourselves.
Like Crag #2, it had a very airy summit block that one person could
sit on, perhaps only a foot or two higher than the next pinnacle
to the east that we had
mistaken for the summit earlier. Finding no register here, we 
left one
before heading back down again. Once back down through the ducked section,
the 
route options open up and eventually dump one onto the sandy
Southwest Slope that conveniently goes down to the small unnamed lake in
the drainage below. After another round of 
emptying shoes
of debris, we continued down the drainage, eventually finding the use trail from
the early morning that
would help us back down to the regular trail on the east side of East Creek. It
would be 4p by the time we got 
back to camp where we found Robert,
Tom and Kristine relaxing.
After rinsing off in 
the creek, I put on just about all the clothes
I'd brought with me to ward off the chill and joined 
the others for
the 
dinner rituals. We
sat about the fireless campfire, boiling water, consuming snacks and
conjecturing about what would be keeping Scott & Iris away for so long. Most of
us guessed that they must have chosen to climb something else - most likely Peak
Corbel, but when they strolled
into camp after sunset hours later, they described having simply taken
their sweet time on returning. Seems that enjoying the High Country wilderness
experience took precedence over the charming company of the larger group. I made
some effort to talk the others into paying a visit to West Spur the next day
before leaving camp, but there was no one willing to sign up for that one.
Threatening to put it on next year's Challenge had no visible effect. Not
wanting to do it alone and be the last one to leave camp, I gave
up the idea. In the morning, Tom and I were the first ones to break camp around
7a, making our way back to Roads End in four and a half hours - a pretty stiff
pace for a couple of old guys. This would allow us to get home well before
sunset and enjoy dinner with our wives on Sunday evening. And another year's
worth of backpacking in the bag...