Basic Rock Climb - Kangaroo Temple/North Face

Links to resources

• Mountaineers beta https://youtu.be/b_HIWUJui2k?si=WnMCJ9nUoWavYl6M&t=1003 (Kangaroo Temple starts at 16:41)
• Mountain project https://www.mountainproject.com/route/109059579/north-face 
• Gpx track for this trip https://www.gaiagps.com/map/?loc=13.5/-120.6347/48.5109&pubLink=lBMXWt7SQZ0gbCvPaV7sbdEJ&trackId=c3cc6774-d28b-47a2-9162-621ba4af7268 

Approach

• When leaving the parking lot, there is a path through/beside the trees in the far right (facing away from Highway 20), don’t attempt to bushwhack straight through the trees like we did. Probably wasted 5 mins here just trying to leave the parking lot.
• 0-1mi is fairly chill, mostly pathfinding alternately through boulder fields and trees
• 1-1.6mi is the climb to Kangaroo Pass. Similar to the yellowjacket tower approach, fairly steep and plenty of loose rock. At about 1.4mi there’s a pond which is the last water on the route.
• Once you get to the top of Kangaroo Pass, there’s a bit of scrambling (trend left) and a one move to get down a boulder which is a hassle for short people. Beyond that, 1.6-2.1mi is mainly chill, traverse a flat-ish climbers trail until you get to another gully with even looser rock.
• 2.1-2.3mi scramble the gully. I don’t think there are any really good paths here, just try not to kick down loose rock. You’ll see a pillar in between two peaks, aim for the right side of the pillar, that’s the base of the climb. Kangaroo Temple is the peak on the right.
• At the base of the climb, there’s a flat-ish section with a couple of dead trees where you can hang your bags so mountain goats don’t get them, and some webbing w/ a quicklink if you want to rap the gully (more on this later).

Climb

• P1: is long and uses up the whole 60m rope. Has a couple of sections of interesting climbing but mainly feels like roped scrambling. The fixed piton now also has a stuck red cam directly below it. Ends at the bolted anchors for R2 (bolts have a bunch of webbing and rap rings on them). Pics below are what it looks like from the base of the climb.

• P2: kind of a nothing pitch. Traverse climbers right around a corner, sling the tree if you want (this is the only pro worth placing on the whole pitch), do a single move up some stacked boulders (harder for short people), then go 10ft up a rock ramp and that’s the end of the pitch. Build a gear anchor here. 
• P3: Step around the airy blind corner, traverse a slabby ledge. There’s a step down move at the end of the ledge. Then you will see 2 possible cracks, climbers left felt harder to me so I went up the center one. This pitch has the most interesting climbing of the route, I placed more pro here than the entirety of P1. Center crack leads to a tree in a sort of 4ft wide gap between rocks. Belay from the tree.
• From here, unrope and scramble to the top. Mostly gently sloped slab on grippy rock, then one final VB boulder problem to the summit area.

Rappels

• Still not sure what the best way to get to the R1 anchor is. Finding it was a mission. This pic (taken from the summit area where we were chilling) is the best way I can explain it. Daryl and Chris did most of the exploring, they said the downscramble involved a big step down that felt too exposed. (Looking at mountainproject comments, it seems like the optional P4 which we didn't do leads to the R1 anchor so that’s another option.)

• R1: head basically straight down to the bolts (end of P1)
• R2: rap down to the rock that was halfway through P1
• R3: from the slung rock down to the P1 belay where you hung your bags
• Optional R4 uses the tree with the webbing+quicklink here to rap the gully, however we downscrambled it because the mounties video said rapping the gully was a bad time. Not sure downscrambling made it any safer/faster, but also personally I hate downscrambling...

Overall timing

• 7:25am left trailhead
• 10:30am base of climb
• 10:50am first team started climbing
• 2:00pm all 3 teams at the summit
• 2:20pm (probably) is when we started looking for the R1 anchor
• 3:30pm started setting up rappels
• 6pm finished rappelling and started descending
• 8:30pm back at cars

Overall 13 hours c2c, could easily have shaved off 1hr by knowing where the R1 anchors were. We also let a simul-climbing pair climb through us which probably added a few mins (not much) to our day.