Dogtooth Peak (10.302')- First ascent

Dogtooth peak is one of those obscure formations that has tickled my interest for some time. You can easily see it from various point at Courtright reservoir. From a distance the South face looks like it would be a fun adventure.

This past weekend, Kevin and I met up at Courtright with the plan to see what we could find on the face to climb. There are already 4 reported routes, 3 to the main summit, and 1 to the middle summit. 

We woke up at 5:30, and hit the trail by 6:30am. The hike is fairly far, maybe 5-6 miles, but its on a maintained trail (Cliff Like trail into the Dinkey Lakes wilderness) and is easy going. We were approaching the base of the mountain after about 3 hours of hiking

Approaching the East face of Dogtooth Peak

 The East face of the mountain looks quite impressive, fairly steep with featured golden granite, similar to what you find at Shuteye ridge. Apparently there are several undocumented routes up this face. In the future, this is where I think the higher quality, more interesting routes might go.

We traversed around the South side of the mountain towards the other summits. The first half of the South face looked interesting, but are short, maybe 2-3 pitches at most. There were a couple of nice looking cracks system that might be worth exploring in the future. 

The middle and main summits are much longer, ~1000 feet tall, but I was honestly a little bit disappointed with what we found.  The rock  looked like mostly low 5th class, with a series lower angled slabs and exfoliating granite flakes the main summit had a steeper, but crackless slabby face, which would likely require bolts for pro.

Looking up at the middle summit and the main summit to the right

We decided to climb a route on the middle tooth, far to the left of any known routes. We were aiming for what looked like a hand crack about half-way up.

We soloed up maybe 2 pitches worth of easy 4th class slabs, before putting on the rope and heading up for 2 full 60 meter pitches of low 5ht class climbing. This brought us to a big sandy ledge at the base of our hand crack. 

Low angle exfoliating slabs

 

Hand crack pitch

Keivn led the hand crack pitch, which was maybe 5.4-5.5, and then he led another easy 4th class/ low 5th class pitch above that. After that we sort of simul-solo-climbed maybe 80 meters to gain the summit ridge and unropped there. 

One of the interesting sub-peaks on Dogtooth

 We down-climbed form the middle summit, after climbing a false summit, we eventually found the easy 4th class route to the main summit of Dogtooth.

 

Almost to the top....

Summit!

We decided to call our route "Grant Submission" II,  5 pitches, 5.5.
named after my previous weeks hectic effort to get my NIH research grant submitted (thank goodness that's all done! )
Thanks Kevin, for letting me name the route! 

The climbing was fairly fun, very relaxing and super easy. It would for sure make a better way to tick the summit than the hikers route, and would be accessible to pretty much anyone with a rope and a single set of cams! I give our route 2 stars.

We hiked back to the trailhead, and were enjoying beer and chips+salsa by 3:30 PM. Not too bad

Well earned beer

We had a nice big fire that night, and camped on the East side of the lake. The next morning we had a lazy start, before rappelling into Helm's gorge to climb Power Dome. 

I led the first pitch of "A Lilttle Nukey" and then started up the second pitch, but completely lost my lead head. Its been a long time since I have frozen on lead, but I just was not feeling the 15-20 foot (albeit easy) runouts. I backed off the climb  and we rapped out, and did some cragging instead. 

I'm a little bummed I wussed out on Power Dome, I'm not sure what happened, but I basically had no psych for the climb. Maybe just tired. I'll have to go back and give it another shot. Ah well, they can't all be wins, sometimes its good to just trust your instincts.