Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 22, 2025

4199m

Jackson, WY

Grand Teton doesn’t need much introductory as it’s one of the icons in western North America that every climber should have at least thought about the Tetons at some point. This is also in one of the larger America’s national parks with zillions of tourists visiting, so standing on top of Grand Teton would earn bragging rights not just among your friends in the mountaineering circle but also in your mom, dad and co-workers who may or may not have anything to do with climbing. Contrary to most American climbers this was actually not one of my “goals” as I worked my way through this mountaineering game, as I’ve only seriously thought about the Grand in the last few years, and by that point the standard route, Owen-Spalding rated at 5.4 could no longer be considered a “challenge” anymore. I was aware of the harder routes but I generally do not seek additional challenges by making a peak harder than it absolutely needs. For once in a while I would climb a tough objective but that is usually on a peak that has no easier way to the top. In the case of Grand Teton I would simply day-trip it via the Owen-Spalding in a light-and-fast fashion and as a result, finding the right partner had started to become a challenge. The rock climbers would not prefer doing it this way but it was still a “climb”, meaning I would also not climb it with a scrambler without climbing experience.

Luckily for me Erica had expressed interest in making Grand Teton happen sooner than later and she has the fitness and skills to be my ideal day-tripping partner. Erica also has indefinite flexibility in time (being a student) and I simply do NOT work in the summer, so we could pull the trigger as soon as spotting a weather window. This eventually happened in the second half of July but we needed several acclimatization objectives and the forecast could change with short notice. The acclimatization objectives turned out to be Borah Peak and Diamond Peak in Idaho but the forecasted window also deteriorated. I consulted with various forecasting sites for at least 100 times during the course of several days and determined for us that the Tuesday’s window was still viable. It was not ideal but we could make it work. There’s no way to know if the overnight precipitation would be in the form of rain or snow up at 4200 m so we had to throw in crampons at the very last minute. The crampons turned out to be training weight, of course. In terms of the gears we would carry one 30-m rope and a small rack of cams and nuts (also because of the unknown route condition). Most climbers would call this route a “scramble” so I anticipated not having to use any of those gears, but we did end up using the rope for a short step on the descent. These granite routes in the U.S. are generally considered “sandbagged” by us Canadian mountaineers and I have to agree with that. A scrambler from BC or Alberta without any rock climbing experience would be absolutely terrified on this route, so treat it as a proper alpine climb unless you are a veteran rock climber or have already climbed this peak before. I personally would say the 5.4 rating was “right on”.

Erica and I spent some hours in the city of Jackson for WiFi, shopping and packing and by 10:30 pm we left the McDonald’s and drove to the trail-head. The park’s gate was already empty but the trail-head was busy. Multiple cars pulled in after midnight and I assumed those guys had opted to start hiking right away. Erica and I woke up at 2:30 am and started the day at 3:10 am, the last of the Tuesday’s gang on Grand Teton. There was some rain overnight so we didn’t take the crampons out of the pack, and the rain did not fully stop until 5 am in the morning. We had to hike through periods of rain but the temperature was warm enough that I told Erica that there wouldn’t be any form of snow on the upper route, and I was correct. The approach was unnecessarily long and annoying, especially in the dark with rain and humidity. I hiked most of the way up shirtless and I was still sweating like a pig. After entering Garnet Canyon we encountered a field of car-sized boulders and I assumed that’s a result of a recent-ish rock slide, as we still couldn’t find the trail on the descent (with daylight). The trail reappeared on the other side of this boulder field and our next stop was the Garnet Meadows camp. The skyline was getting brighter finally, but we still needed to use the head-lamps for next half an hour’s grunt up towards the top of Spalding Falls. There are many ways of doing this stage and we simply plodded behind a party-of-four and the route we took was considerably climber’s right than the GPX track I downloaded. I started to notice the absence of cairns on this mountain. I felt that was amusing for such a popular climb.

Our first “real” break was actually the moraine camp and it felt literally like eternity to plod to this stage. We talked to the people camping there and to my surprise, they opted to start their day later than us. We also loaded up the water bottles as this was the last source of running water. Rumours were that there’s water source at the Lower Saddle but we didn’t find anything obvious and didn’t bother to look for them. The day was getting cold and windy so Erica donned her pants and I donned my first layer of puffer. Going up towards the headwall/fixed line was tedious with more boulder-hopping, but the scrambling up through the headwall was not too bad. I did not touch the fixed rope at all but Erica unfortunately had to do this scramble twice as she somehow dropped her trekking pole after completing the crux moves. There was still substantial amount of plodding to the Lower Saddle where we took the next long break. We were unfortunately still in the shades with bitterly cold winds howling around and would be in the shades until literally 3 meters from the very summit of this mountain. This was downright unpleasant.

It was then an easy ascent to the “black dike” where we ditched one trekking pole each. The scramble up and left around the next band of rocks was also straightforward and then we picked our own way up through the “Brigg’s slabs”. I knew the easiest way would be threading through the “needle” but I decided to reserve that for the return. For the way up I wanted the most efficient way possible, and that was to scramble straight up the class 3/4 slabs to the next bench ahead. We ignored the “black rock chimney” variation and went climber’s left and dealt with fair amount of loose rocks, and it was generally an unpleasant plod to the Upper Saddle where we ditched a bunch of other gears and donned more layers. It was getting very cold and the windchill felt like below freezing.

The route was not very busy on this day probably because of the unfavourable forecasts. The forecast on Meteoblue was stating thunderstorms starting at 10 am, and the models on windy.com was staying fair amount of precipitation overnight, and the NOAA model said the snow level was 300 m below the summit. If one’s willing to take the combination of the worst case scenarios then this was simply not a “climbable day”, but we didn’t have an extra day to work things around so must make a gamble on the weather. The NOAA freezing level was already wrong and we were hoping the Meteoblue was also wrong, but I could see clouds building up so we must hurry up. The one step getting onto the “belly roll” wasn’t too bad and neither was the “belly roll” nor the “crawl”. The hardest part of this first serious of infamous moves was the hand traverse to get into the second entry of the Double Chimney. The 5.4 climbing through this chimney felt legit as the tunnel variation was still plugged with snow and ice. Taking the open-V variation we had to deal with a few difficult moves on polished rocks. Then onto the “cat walk” we passed one guided group going for the Owen’s Chimney. The guide was assuring me that the chimney was “easy” with lots of jugs but we also didn’t want to be stuck behind them. The cat-walk was wet as usual, but not covered in verglass (thankfully). There’s one difficult step on down-sloping and wet rocks that made us pausing for a bit, but afterwards the cat-walk was fairly easy.

By the time we entered the Sergeant Chimney we had fully passed that guided group and caught up to the next guided group. These guides were moving their clients fairly fast, that by free soloing the entire route we were only marginally faster than them. The “hidden exit” of the Sergeant was tougher than I thought with two difficult steps that required some actual climbing moves, and plenty of exposure afterwards. There’s also one crack climbing stretch that felt like legit 5.4 and all these made us worrying about the down-climbing, but we had to focus one step at a time. The route above the Sergeant Chimney was also quite long and confusing but at this point we simply opted to follow the guided party so that I could have a bit of a mental break from decision making. The whole lot of 3rd class terrain later we arrived at the summit, and thankfully the summit itself was in the sun and wasn’t that unpleasantly cold.

Due to the concern of thunderstorms we didn’t linger too long up there and started the descent before the guided groups. We made quick work down to the top of the Sergeant and then down-climbed a series of difficult steps. Erica was having a hard time on the second-to-last step whereas I simply couldn’t figure out the moves on the last step (as I couldn’t see anything and the footholds were polished as hell). After struggling for at least 5 minutes we gave up. There’s a big boulder in the middle of the hidden exit’s chimney so we slung the rope around the block and made a very short rappel. This was the only rope work we did for the entire trip. The mental crux was that wet and down-sloping exit step from the “cat walk”. I could totally understand why the guides prefer the Owen’s Chimney as that should be the safer, albeit technically harder variation. The guides wouldn’t have to do the “cat walk” on the descent neither as with one or two 60 m ropes they could make the standard overhanging rappel. We only had one 30 m rope so must aim to down-climb everything. The double chimney wasn’t actually too bad and neither was the hand traverse, the crawl nor the belly roll. We were briefly caught in some traffic jams at the “crawl” but only got delayed by about 10 minutes. I don’t think that party (on their way up) would be able to make the summit.

We kept descending from the upper saddle until finding a sunny spot to take a much needed break. I had opted to leave all of my food behind for the technical climb so I was very hungry at this point. The descent to the lower saddle was mostly class 2/3 scrambling so we made very quick work down, passing every single party on the way. We had left one trekking pole (each) somewhere around the black dike and it took us a while to find them. Thankfully we didn’t have to backtrack. There’s not much worth noting about the rest of the boring slog except for the final portion. At one point I was starting to have some weird dreams and then I tripped, almost injuring my foot again. It’s time to take a break so we sat down, and in no time I was falling asleep. I needed a second nap after completing those sets of switchbacks and I was plodding literally like a zombie afterwards. The day-after-day push and the fact I had to lead the entire climb (up and down) had pushed me to the limit. We got caught in a massive group of hikers with kids and did the final 2 km of plodding at a much slower pace as we simply couldn’t pass them. There were a few bears near the trail so we didn’t mind for the added safety. Our round trip time was just under 13 hours but the moving time was only 8.5 hours. We were definitely moving efficiently throughout the day but we did take a shit ton loads of breaks, both on the way up (transitions) and on the way down (tiredness). After getting into the hot car we quickly drove out of the park, taking several tourists stops along the way as this was our first time seeing the Tetons in daytime. We then pushed homewards all the way to within an hour’s driving from Twin Falls and called it a day at 11 pm.