
Trip Report
Basic Rock Climb - Ingalls Peak/East Peak/Southwest Face
Beautifull approach, challenging gullies to an enjoyable 2 pitch climb
- Sat, Sep 21, 2024
- Basic Rock Climb - Ingalls Peak/East Peak/Southwest Face
- Ingalls Peak/South Ridge
- Climbing
- Successful
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- Road suitable for all vehicles
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The Esmeralda Basin TH is quite popular, so parking might be sparce in the Summer/Fall
The trail to Ingall's Lake is strait forward and enjoyable, and if you leave early in the morning, you can avoid the crowds. At Ingalls Lake you can filter water if needed before heading up the climber's approach.
From the Lake we a party of 4 followed the climbers routes up towards Ingalls Peek, keeping to the large granite slab in lieu of the chossy main gully. At approximately 7000ft you turn north towards the obvious main gully between Ingalls East and Ingalls. although I poured over as many "East Peek" trip reports, I couldn't find any decent beta on which gully was the best to scramble up to the large chockstone, that marks the beginning of the actual climb.
Avoiding the larger and most direct gully seemed obvious as it looked like a Chossy dangerous scramble. There are 2 other sub gullies further up the hill that seemed to be the standard. (But which one)? we ultimately chose the higher of the two, and in reflection this was a mistake, it quickly turned into class 5 terrain that we had to protect after a ramp petered out into a dangerous step over.
Red line was our route
Blue would have been the preferred approach gully
Both of these gullies ultimately lead to the same upper scramble to the base of the route at the notch. But the lower gully "blue" would be my suggestion.
After our lower mt shenanigans, we made the chockstone at the notch, marking the beginning of the easy 5th class slab climbing to the summit. There is a register at top with a fun little scramble to the true summit, we protected this with a handline.
Gear to .75 but most of the cracks were fingertip deep taking smaller cams and maybe a handful of nuts was all we needed.
Rapping off the summit was pretty strait forward with ample rappel stations for protection. 70m strongly recommended.
departure: 6 Am
summit 3PM
return to TH 10:45Pm
Long day