The Tooth/South Face - On Skis!

Trip Report

Stats: 7.6 miles, 2.8k gain, 11 hours car to car.

Our party of 6 arrived at 5:30am at the main Alpental parking lot, did a gear/beacon/group check and walked up to the winter source lake approach. The upper lot was closed with lots of construction activity. The approach to source lake was relatively straight forward, though the snow was firm and slick in spots making ski crampons helpful. After a short break we started our kick turns up lower great scott bowl around 7:30. 

Towards the top we diverged from the skin track to the west fork to avoid some very large creek holes below the skintrack. Steve expertly chopped out a ramp at the top of this divergence to lead us up to the basin and our first views of the objective. It looked like dry rock! The stoke was high. From there, it was easy skinning to the base of the first boot. 

We briefly considered booting up the smaller couloir near the exit rappel, but as we got closer it was clearly out. The top was near vertical thin snow. We also made the early decision to not do the exit rap because we didn’t think it would save time and it would add extra hazard with clear debris from the chute and the steeper snow transition point back onto skis on the east facing slope. We stashed the skis, popped out the axe, and started kicking in steps around 9:20.

The snow was already quite slushy, but boot supportable and we didn’t see any roller balls or avy activity as we’d been moving. We made it up to the pass, then slowly plunge stepped down the back side and booted back up to the base of the climb in about 30 minutes with relative ease. 

Most folks swapped into their rock shoes, but a couple of us wore mountaineering boots which was nice on the patch of snow on pitch 3, but it was definitely overkill. The sun was warm on the south face, the climbing itself went smooth (minus one stuck nut), the anchors appeared in good condition, and we all topped out just before 1pm.

One party caught up to us on the last pitch and we let them rap in front of us, and another arrived as we started our rap. We chose to do two double rope rappels to the base and just stowed the extra rope. This worked out fine, but in hindsight wasn’t the most efficient as the first two down had to wait for the rest of us, so they chose to use the spare rope to do 2 single rope raps and got down much faster. In hindsight, it would have been faster to have the first people down use their spare time to setup the next rappel that we could all utilize, something like 2 single raps first, then setting up the double rap. The rappel anchor at the top of pitch 2 had definite signs of fraying and wear, but there were enough redundant wraps that we decided it was safe. Overall it took us a little under 2 hours to rap.

We put our ski boots back on and retraced our steps back to our skis. The snow was still quite supportable which we were pleasantly surprised by given the temps. We started our descent a little after 4pm. The snow was hot, grabby mush, but good turns were had and I think we were all excited to be skinning and headed back to the car after a long 10 hours. I kicked off one small wet loose on the descent back into lower great scott bowl which was the only avy movement we saw during the day. It was mostly smooth sailing back to the trailhead, minus the dirty grabby snow on the out track. We finally got back to the cars at 5pm, debriefed, and celebrated our great day!

The general consensus from the team was that doing the tooth on skis was a neat unique experience, but it definitely added extra challenge. Faffing around with ski stuff, the extra transitions, the extra weight, soft snow travel and booting which all added extra time to the day.

• Timeline:
  • Trailhead Start: 6am
  • Ascent to base of climb: 3h 50m
  • Climbing Time: 3 hours
  • Summit Break: 30min
  • Rappel Time: 1.5 hours
  • Ski Time: 1h 10m
  • Trailhead End: 5pm
  • Total time 11h

Map