The Tooth/South Face

Climb on Tue, Jul 29, 2014

Left TH at 6:00 am.

No TP in the bathrooms. Uneventful approach. No blank permits in the permit box. All the streams are running low. There is snow that is easily avoided on the boulder field from the trail to the basin. We dropped low to avoid it. The basin has patches of snow that are also easy to avoid. We did not bring crampons and didn't need them. We brought ice axes and used them on the descent to plunge step some of the softer snow. However it would have been easy to avoid the snow entirely. We lugged them all the way up there so why not use them? The snow tongue at pineapple pass is long gone.

Weather was near perfect. Very clear day with great views. A light breeze was fair compensation for the warmer temperatures.

The climbing was straightforward. The leaders all opted to not climb the catwalk and rather head directly up the flake with large left-facing handholds right below the notch with the rappel anchor. A little tough to protect but way fun even if it was super easy.

We saw some Grey Jays (aka Canada Jays or Whiskey Jacks) at the base of the climb. They took food from our hands readily. There was also a lone goat roaming above the base of our climb. It completely ignored us and apparently also our gear stashed at the base of the route.

We avoided the complications of a double-rope rappel and chose to single-rope rappel the route. This worked well. Even then we had a rope get stuck and had to lead up a block to free it. The anchor slings were in fair shape but show signs of aging. Wouldn't be a bad idea to bring some webbing to beef them up a bit.

Didn't see anyone until the very end of the day. Two climbers were heading up after getting a very late start on the climb. We ran into them at the bottom of the basin.

While returning to the cars we passed many hikers on their way up to the lake. Passed a couple with an amazingly beautiful baby girl with very rosy cheeks. Lots of dogs. About 2/3 of the dogs were not leashed by their owner.

Overall a great day on The Tooth!

RT 10 hours.