Fri, Apr 27, 2007
|
With: | Matthew Holliman |
As a warmup to the big George Creek hike planned for the following day, Matthew and I intended to climb nearby Thor Peak via Stemwinder on the peak's south side. I had tried to do this same climb a year ago with Mark T. and Rick K., but we were stopped at the crux without any rock gear. We had mistakenly hoped that the 5.4 rating would allow us to solo the route, but what we found seemed a bit more difficult than that. We had backed down and climbed Thor by another route, but I still wanted a go at Stemwinder. This time around we would bring a short rope, harnesses, and some gear to get by the crux, hopefully not needing it much elsewhere. Our beta suggested there was a second short class 4 section, otherwise we were pretty confident that most of the route could be soloed to speed things up.
Matthew met me at
Whitney Portal at 7a as arranged, but he'd had no time to
pack up his gear earlier to get a quick start. I gave him little sympathy for
his lack of sleep the night before (I'd had my sleepless night a day earlier)
and waited patiently for him to get his act together. Normally I would have
been rather impatient for getting a late start, but I knew the day should be a
short one and there was little reason to believe we'd be pressed for time.
Shortly after 7:30a we were on our way out.
We took the old trail
that starts behind the Portal Store at the west end of
the road. Matthew had never been on this mostly forgotten variation and was
curious about it. The trail is somewhat shorter than the current one, and it
didn't take long to reach the main trail just past the junction with the
North Fork of Lone Pine Creek. We followed the Whitney Trail for a bit more
than an hour, with snow covering the trail only in a few places and not
proving much of an obstacle. We paused when we reached
Bighorn Park, the South
Face of Thor now in plain view and time for us to leave the trail. I pointed
out the dead tree marking the start of the route about a quarter of the way up
the face, but it was impossible to discern the mostly class 3 route from our
vantage.
We had some small trouble crossing the
Bighorn swamp, flush with runoff and the
willows putting up a nasty bit of resistance. Once on the other side things
went easier, and we took another hour to reach the start of the route. Along
the way we came to find that
the ledges had a good deal of snow on them still
from the latest storm just a week earlier. This would continue to be the case
as we climbed the route, providing a bit more spice to it than we had expected.
Even before we got to the crux we had some fun on
the ledge that approaches
it, featuring an awkward
chimney that neither of us able to scale with
our packs on. After climbing the chimney, I tossed a sling down to Matthew
to facilitate
the hauling of our packs. After Matthew tied a knot on my pack
I hauled it up, only to have it let go just as I had gotten it ten feet up in
the air. I gave a small shout of "Look out!" as it dropped directly on Matthew.
He deftly caught it without dropping it or losing his balance, to which I more
calmly replied, "Nice catch!" Afterwards, Matthew was sure to tie two (or
three) knots for pack hauling.
At the crux I gave Matthew the option to lead, which he accepted. While he
was changing into his climbing shoes, I used the extra time to flake the rope,
set up a belay off a convenient piton wedged in the rock, backed it up with
a cam, and placed the first piece of protection as high up the crux as I could
manage. I hadn't brought rock shoes myself, but my pack wasn't light either -
I had hauled snowshoes and poles along on the trip and would find them of
little use - mostly they proved to make pack-hauling a more difficult task.
After tying in and climbing the short distance to the start, Matthew found it
was a bit harder than it looked from just ten feet below. A few false starts
later and he was wedged
up higher, making a last struggle to get over the crux.
Once up, he set up a belay to allow me to follow. With the rope above me, it
was easier than I recalled on our soloing attempt, but then it's always
easier when there's a rope holding you safely from above. We both agreed it was
more like 5.6 than 5.4, but we won't be petitioning the guidebook authors to
change it.
We kept the rope tied on for the
next section that proved to be class 3 (but
with snow to keep it interesting), after which we decided to pack the rope away
to save time. We were a bit surprised to find
the climbing
quite sustained at a difficult
class 3,
tough enough to keep us vigilant and a bit nervous, not
hard enough to get out the rope again. An hour went by and it was noon when we
reached the notch just above the
detached pinnacle and the class 4 traverse to an
adjacent gully. We didn't look long at
the traverse,
essentially a friction
section over rough slabs, before pulling out the rope again. Should one slip
here, a fall would be fatal, with a short ramp leading to a dropoff of more than
100 feet. Even with a rope, a fall would pendulum the leader and be a messy
affair, so naturally I offered the lead to Matthew again, once again accepting.
He did a fine job of this section, walking gingerly out on the traverse,
calmly examining several options before choosing one he felt most comfortable
with. He then
climbed up
the gully another 30 feet or so before setting up
an anchor and belaying me across.
It was another 45 minutes of more sustained class 3 climbing (with yet more
snow) until we reached the final ramp
leading to the
East Slopes of Thor. It
was one of the finest (mostly) class 3 routes I could recall, and we both
found it highly enjoyable and recommendable. The East Slopes were mostly snow,
and from this point until just below the summit I used my snowshoes. The snow
was quite soft, and Matthew's postholing as he
followed my steps gave me some
satisfaction that I had not carried them in vain, but I was really just
trying to rationalize - it would have been better to leave them in the car for
the trouble they caused on the route and having that extra weight in my pack.
While still traversing across the East Slopes we spied two others heading down from the summit. As they were a good distance to our right and heading towards the NE Slopes, we waved to each other without conversing. After reading the summit register, we found that they were both Summitposters, one of them, Richard Piotrowski, had climbed in the Sierra Challenge the previous summer. It was just before 2p when we summited, with blue skies and absolutely gorgeous weather. In fact, the weather had been fine all day, some of the best I could recall and excellent for climbing. Without wind or chill, it gave a lazy feel to the climb and I never grew nervous about the time or how long we might have wasted as is often the case when using a rope. The summit register was less than a year old, the previous one having been removed as part of someone's (or some group's) general purge that has been going on for the past few years. It seems a fruitless task to remove the registers from Wilderness areas since new ones pop up at the same rate, and the only real effect is to deprive those that come after the privilege and enjoyment of reading the old entries.
After about twenty minutes we started down, with yet another climber on the
way up to the summit. Guessing my name without having met me before,
Eric G. introduced himself and commented that he planned
on joining us the next day for the hike up George Creek. I don't know if he had
known we were planning to climb Thor that day or whether it was just coincident,
but it was nice to run into him. Matthew and I followed
the steps of the first
climbers down to the edge of the NE Slopes. From there we
cut left
to drop down
virgin snow slopes for the longest possible snow descent off that side. We'd
hoped to be able to glissade, but the snow was too soft and unconsolidated to
make it safe, so we simply plunge stepped
our way down for more than 1,000ft.
Most of the snow had melted out along the route below
Lower Boy Scout Lake, or
at least along the variation that stays north of the creek that we followed.
This made for a pretty speedy descent through the
ledges and
willows and back down to the
Whitney Trail below.
Along the way we passed a half dozen climbers
on their way up to do Whitney's Mountaineers Route the next day. One of the
party was another Challenge participant from the previous summer, Cliff Agnocs,
who had recognized me first. Small world, it seems.
We found our way back to the cars by 4:30p,
making for an easy 9hr outing. After a few drinks at the trailhead, we drove
down to Lone Pine for dinner, then to Independence where we took a motel room
for the night - or at least that part of the night before we arose at 2:30a for
our George Creek Adventure...
Continued...
For more information see these SummitPost pages: Thor Peak
This page last updated: Thu May 10 16:34:04 2007
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