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Golden Hour Wall

Fun climb, short approach, slabs with an occasional hand jam and finger cracks.

Barton Place Barton Place
May 31, 2025
  • Sat, May 31, 2025
  • Golden Hour Wall
  • Climbing
  • Successful
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • The approach is mostly on the well maintained CCC trail from the Middle Fork Trail Trail  head.  Follow the CCC trail for about .8 miles to a faint trail heading up hill from the main trail.  Follow the spur trail through beautiful forest up to the base of the climb.  There are several climbs/pitches accessible at the Golden Hour including  Solar Storm, Solar Storm Direct, and Velvet Elvis. We climbed Solar Storm and Velvet Elvis.  Both were fun and offered a variety of climbing.  Solar Storm is mostly a slab climb and Velvet Elvis is slabby as well with a couple of cracks and some horizontal dikes to leverage when setting gear.   The crack on the last pitch of Velvet Elvis takes gear well but is a little challenging to set as it is facing away from the climber and quite varied in width going up the wall.

    The climb is on a southern aspect, gets lots of sun and warms up quickly.  There were a couple of small seeps crossing the route, but were easily stepped over or around.  

    There are lots of bolts (>13  if you link pitches to get across the traverse) and I used most of the small pieces on my single rack on the 4th crack pitch on Velvet Elvis. We climbed with two teams of 2 on 70m ropes.  

We met in North Bend at 9 and carpooled from there. The hike out to the climb was easy and we were at the base in 25 minutes arriving around 10:30.  The thimble berries are starting to ripen up and we sampled a bunch on the way in.  There was one other group that had started climbing the first pitch when we arrived.  By the time we got geared up they had cleared the first pitch and we started climbing. The climbing was moderate and fun. Solar Slabs

The first pitch looks like a sidewalk going up the wall and is common to all three climbs.  We climbed up Solar Slabs first and then rappelled part way down to the traverse to Velvet Elvis. Then followed it over to the top (money) pitch of Velvet Elvis.  This pitch was the most fun/interesting climbing following a few disconnected crack up the wall with nice horizontal dikes to pull on and providing stable stances for setting gear.  It was a sunny day and we were quite warm by the time we reached the top of Velvet Elvis.

There are lots of rappel options and we did a double rope rappel from the top then  finishing our second rappel on a single 70 about 40' above the base and scrambling/downclimbing the short class 3-4 section. We were back down to the base around 1 pm (2.5 hrs to climb Solar Slab and Velvet Elvis).  This is a fun moderate area with a variety of climbing (slab, crack, bolted, and trad) and we enjoyed the day.