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Le Petit Cheval/Spontaneity Arête

A fun successful climb as a party of 3. Fixed hand lines are in sorry shape as of 7/31/2016.

Brian Baker Brian Baker
August 01, 2016
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • We lucked out and found our way down from the road to the creek to a log crossing relatively quick.  We got unlucky and lost track of the "trail" and bush whacked quite a bit up the other side of the valley to where the terrain steepens and the approach scrambling starts.  The key is to find a creek bed where the brush is kept at bay when on the approach.  I'd suggest not trending left as we did once out of the trees.  The two hand lines are in bad shape.  There are lots of knots isolating core shots.  Unfortunately, you kind of have to trust them until someone replaces them.  If some kind soul was to replace the hand lines that would be a great service.  We trusted them on the way up, but decided to rappel on the way down.  The route itself was in great shape.

One of our climbers was sick, and we decided to proceed as a team of 3.  Our aproximate car-to-car time (as a party of three) was 13 hours 30 minutes.  Our climbing pace was decent, but the belay transitions of course took longer as a party of 3.  We used two single ropes to add to the fun and led in blocks to minimize the time untieing to switch leaders.  Each leader got a couple of good pitches in.  I got the Goldie Crack pitch, and it was awesome.  Lots of work to get it though!  

i'd suggest this climb as a good Grade III intro climb.  The 5.7 climbing isn't sustained, and the somewhat painful approach/descent is good for the soul.  

We never figured out the start to pitch 4 as in the guidebooks  (5.7 bulging hand crack) and instead did the 5.8+ finger lieback variation just a bit up the gulley right below the "bear hug" feature.  It felt a good degree harder than any other moves on the route.