Griffin hit me up wanting to do some sort of alpine venture. I could only do a day trip, so suggested we climb Dogtooth Peak, since it's an easy day trip. I had climbed the peak twice before, once as a first ascent with Kevin, and a second time I climbed the NE arete with Trevor (although we were actually trying to climb Lookout, but went up the wrong thing!). This time I proposed we climb "Lookout"
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| Overlay of routes on Dogtooth peak. |
I met up with Griffin at the Cliff Lake parking lot at 7am and we headed off. With all the snow melt the normally tame creek crossing required taking our shoes off and wading through knee deep water. Cold on the feet!
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| A little wet |
After a quick easy 2.5 hour hike we found ourselves at the base of the tower. We didn't really look at the topo or beta very carefully and sort of thought we were looking at the correct route so scrambled up a couple hundred feet to what we thought was the start of the climb.
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| scrambling up to the 5th class terrain |
We roped and racked up, and then I spied a bolt on the face directly above us. At that point I was fairly certain we were not on the correct route! Anyway, I headed up anyways, I figured it didn't really matter much. After a rope stretching easy pitch, I found a bolted anchor with chain! Definitely we were not on Lookout!
We swing leads and continued up, finding a bolted anchor station every 60 meters. The climbing was easy, but became progressively harder and more interesting as we went higher.
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| Griffin approaching the top of P4 |
Griffin led the last pitch, he headed out and then found the crux above. A steep off-width type flake loomed above to gain a ledge. He decided to break up the last pitch and belayed me up off a gear anchor so we could look at the last bit togher. With a big cam (#5 or 6) it would be protect-able, but all we had with us was a #4.
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| Heading out on the last pitch |
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| Offwidth flake crux |
Griffin pull through the crux without any gear (bold!), I'm glad I didn't have to lead that one! After that it was easy cruising to the saddle below the summit. We scrambled up to the summit, and then headed back to the car for some ice cold beer!
After some sleuthing on old ST posts, I believe we climbed the route "Gin and Juice" (5.9, 5 pitches, FA Matt Schutz and Julie Tran, 9/2017). Enjoyable climb, now I just need to back one more time and actually climb "Lookout"
