Trip Report
The Tooth/South Face
Hiked summer trail. Snowing in the morning, sunny in the afternoon. Cold climb.
Brian Starlin
- Sat, Jun 2, 2018
- The Tooth/South Face
- Climbing
- Successful
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- Road suitable for all vehicles
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Snowing in the morning. Trees dusted with snow. Slightly damp on the rock, but climbable. Spots of snow patches on the trail until about halfway up to the Snow Lk junction, and then pretty solidly snow covered all the way. Deep snow up into the basin and up to the notch in the ridge just south of the Tooth. Did not use crampons, but did carry axes up the steep snow.
Weather was totally socked in and we hiked up into a cloud where it was snowing lightly. It snowed enough to cover the trees and put a couple millimeters on the rock ledges. We debated turning around but one pair of climbers in front of us said it was good.
It was cold! Leaders led in rock shoes with socks and followers wore boots to keep their feet warm. That worked great! They even wore light gloves while climbing. It warmed up later, but not early on.
This was the first climb for 3 members of Agosta-Starlin SIG. Ana, Jill, and Erika did great on everything.
The snow finger into the notch that you cross was getting very skinny and deep at the top. We downclimbed a couple steps into the moat to reach the dirt ledges leading to the notch. After the notch, there was mostly snow on the traverse over to the scramble gully that leads to the base of the climb, but that scramble was all rock (and a light dusting of snow).
The snow had stopped just before we started climbing and we had good rock. A little bit of mud on the shoes caused some stress on lead, but not bad at all.
We ended up going from the top of P2 (ledge of trees below the scrambly section) to the summit in one long pitch over the ledges and up the flake, but only because we kept our ropes straight and used long runners on pro across the ledges.
I was at one of the first trees above P2, and I got to the summit tree with about 5m of rope left. It's a push, but i remember doing that the last time I climbed as well. If you climb P2 and belay at one of the higher trees, you can push all the way to the summit with a 3rd pitch. We did 4 rappels, to avoid any possibility of getting a rope stuck on a double-rap. It takes extra time to single-rap each pitch, but a stuck rope is worse.
We double-rappeled from the base into the east gully, even though we knew a hike around would be faster. There was still a good snow finger in that gully to rap onto, and it gave the participants experience with a double-rap and also a very interesting rappel into a rocky, angular, and crooked gully.