Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

October 11, 2024

1707m

Snoqualmie Pass, WA

The Tooth does not boast over 100 m prominence but is one of the finest introductory climbs in the state of Washington. There is at least one easier (4th class) route but almost all ascents were done via the south face which involves 3 pitches of low 5th class climbing. My way of peak-bagging is to always take the easiest possible route but for once in a while I wouldn’t mind making an exception. Erica had the Friday available and the weather seemed to be decent. I however was recovering from some overuse foot injuries and the pain was still lingering even after resting for 4 days. Our choices were therefore limited. I debated whether we should join the hordes for some larch madness but Erica was more keen on climbing. The Tooth then made the most sense, and because the main purpose was to get Erica some climbing experience we would take the 5.4 south face instead of the lesser known north ridge “scramble” route.

I did some hasty research and found this article with overwhelmingly detailed “beta”. I had no patience in reading the words so I made Erica to do the homework. I did skim through some other sources of “beta” and also downloaded a set of GPX tracks, and I later learnt that Erica did actually read every single sentence in that aforementioned trip report, which I thought was more impressive than the climb itself. In any case if one wants to know every piece of details about this route then please check out that article. For the gears we would bring rock shoes, a 60 m half rope and a set of cams up to size 2. I did not bring a “single rack” as I thought the climb should be easy enough that I wouldn’t need to put in much pro, if any. It turned out to be harder than I thought and involved some thin moves with big exposure, but the amount of pro I brought was sufficient enough. I even managed to link the first two pitches into one full 60 m pitch. I made Erica to show up in White Rock at 9 pm on Thursday evening and we would car-camp as usual. We did find a much better trail-head to pitch the tent and drove the remaining few kilometers to the Snow Lake trail-head in the morning. The weather was supposed to be nice throughout the day so we woke up at 6 am and did the morning routine rather leisurely. The only reason to start earlier was to avoid the potential traffic congestion but I seriously needed some extra hours of sleep. The traffic situation was indeed bad but not terrible enough to jeopardize the mission.

Erica and I had recently scrambled Chair Peak and the approach of the two objectives shared the initial few kilometers. We covered this section faster than the previous trip that in about 35 minutes we had emerged out of the woods along that climber’s trail. This was where we left the path for Chair Peak’s scramble route a couple weeks ago, but this time we would traverse across the talus slope (even with some slight elevation loss) to pick up the path on the far side traversing back into the forest. The path was not the greatest but was fairly straightforward to follow, especially with multiple GPX tracks for reference. There’s very minimal bushwhacking involved. The trail eventually disappeared into some boulder fields in the “Great Scott Basin”. The grunt up to towards Pineapple Pass was definitely a slog but wasn’t as terrible as people made it sound like. We even missed the path and did the entire section off-route, and still made some decent time. While scrambling up the loose chimney between two unnamed pinnacles we came across multiple sets of ditched poles. We left ours there as well but we sadly knew that we wouldn’t be alone on the route. We then easily followed the “beta” working our way around the west side of a subsidiary pinnacle and scrambled some 3rd class ledges to the base of The Tooth’s south face. There were 6 climbers from the Mountaineers lining up for the climb.

The leader of the Mountaineer’s group had already started the climb so we would have to wait, but after 20 minutes or so I made the spontaneous decision to check out the tower behind us. I had absolutely no “beta” about this unnamed tower but it appeared like a scramble. The main purpose was to find a better vantage point to photoshoot these climbers but we ended up scrambling almost to the top of the tower. We did some 3rd class moves and scrambled past one rappel anchor. The final push to the summit involved some down-sloping and exposed 4th class moves that I didn’t quite feel comfortable soloing in just the trail shoes. It did seem rather fun so we down-climbed all the way back to the col, brought the rope and then this time I successfully led the final pitch to the top. There’s already an existing anchor on the very summit so I easily belayed Erica up. This anchor could not be used to rappel the exact same way (west face) that we went up, so I led the rappel off the north face onto an exposed ramp. Continuing rappelling along this ramp created some rope drags that made pulling the rope difficult, but not impossible. We then took our time scrambling back down into the notch and the other group-of-six had finally mostly finished their combined pitches 1 and 2. It had taken us 1 hour 45 minutes from the trail-head to the notch but the waiting took almost 2 hours, but this bonus tower was actually very fun and we were both glad to have done it.

It was eventually our turn to climb and we decided to do the same, combing the first two pitches into one long lead to save time. I thought a popular route in Washington rated 5.4 should mostly be a “scramble” but this one was definitely harder than I thought. Maybe it’s because I hadn’t done much rock climbing in the past two years but I felt the 5th class rating being very legit. There were numerous crux moves on near vertical terrain that made me pausing to look for a solution. I had considered to do the entire climb in trail runners but I was very glad to have brought (and used) the rock shoes. To me the hardest section was actually the first vertical step not far up from the bottom, and there’s another difficult thin leftwards traversing ledge on the supposed second pitch that felt very exposed. Because I wasn’t planning to lead a combined (full 60 m) pitch I did not bring enough gears. I ended up placing only two cams and clipped into one fixed cam, so essentially did the lead with some huge runouts. It took Erica a while to follow up and meanwhile another group-of-two had arrived at the bottom of the route.

The supposed 3rd pitch was class 3 scrambling so we coiled the rope to save some time. The group-of-six had already started their final pitch to the summit and we caught up to them at the bottom of it. There are quite a few ways of doing the 4th pitch and after evaluating our options I decided to wait for them and do the same way, the “not-the-farthest climber’s right” variation. This wasn’t that fun 5.5 flake that everyone talked about but I wasn’t in the mood of leading anything more difficult at this point. The climber’s right variation appeared insanely vertical but turned out to be rather straightforward with lots of positive holds, that I thought was considerably easier than the first pitch. The summit turned out to be a celebration party and we also formulated a plan to get off together as a big team.

There were 4 60 m ropes combined among the 8 of us here on the summit, and we would have to do exactly 4 30 m rappels, so the plan was to set up a rope ladder. My rope was used on the first rappel but I would also carry one of their ropes to set up the final, 4th rappel. The first of them coming down the ladder system would carry my 60 m rope so Erica and I could take off as soon as the first of them finished their rappels. The plan worked out excellently. There’s an option to do two additional rappels off the immediate gully/chimney east of the notch between The Tooth and the pinnacle we climbed, but there’s considerable amount of rockfall danger especially when there were climbers above. The best solution for us today was to simply reverse the scramble that we did, even though it’s more contrived. The talus slope in Great Scott Basin was definitely not “fun” but we made good time back to the trail, and then jogged most of the way back to the vehicle. Our round trip time was under 8 hours but almost 4.5 hours were “stopped time”. This was our 50th peak done together in less than 5 months so we had dinner in a better western restaurant in Bellevue to celebrate this feat. The traffic situation was heavy on the Friday afternoon but we still got back home at a reasonable time.