Trip Report
Basic Alpine Climb - The Tooth/South Face
The Pineapple Pass Couloir has large car-sized snow cornice-block small dog's tooth to the base of the climb. Route is snow-free but for a few patches on scramble pitches.
David Belding
- Tue, May 23, 2017
- Basic Alpine Climb - The Tooth/South Face
- The Tooth/South Face
- Climbing
- Successful
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- Road suitable for all vehicles
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Snow on trail, cornice obstacle in Pineapple Pass, small snow patches on route but otherwise snow-free on the rock. Avoided moats, tree-wells and creeks running below the snow. I expect the snow cornice will not last more than 2 weeks in the current warm temperatures and sun.
12.5 hours round trip due to a few slowdowns.
Left the Alpental upper parking lot around 6:00am and approached via the "Winter Trail". The winter trail is still passable- cut off some time by ascending Mushroom Couloir and traversing through the "Northwest Passage" to the NE corner of lower Great Scott Bowl. Ice axes were needed for self belay, trekking poles with snow baskets helped. We brought crampons and snowshoes but did not use either. Boot penetration in the snow was 3" in the morning and 12" or more on the descent in late afternoon.
The Pineapple Pass Couloir has snow all the way to the notch, and there is a large car-sized snow cornice-block in the notch that nearly blocks the pass, but it is passable on the right side through scrambling up an interesting snow and rock tunnel . We did a lot of self-belaying to get around the west side of the small dog's tooth to the base of the climb.
For the climb itself, nothing out of the ordinary but for a few small snow patches in the scramble pitches. Our party of 6 was the first on the route, started climbing at 9:30am, reached the summit by 1:15pm, and had a slow rappel due to some uphill traffic while setting up rappels to the base. Gathered gear and 2-rope rapped all the way to the north snow gully to avoid re-negotiating the cornice-block: roughly 10mins per climber-rappel. Glissaded a few times, then followed our melted-out tracks back out to the trail. Reached the cars by 6:30pm. Had burgers at NBBG in North Bend. A good time was had by all.