Ferrite Peak

July 25, 2018

Guides: Todd, Tim
Participants: Mike, Mary Ann, Alan, Natalie
Time: 13 hours

Early breakfast call today as the objectives were further from camp. After yet another fantastic meal, our party of six was hiking up Gobi Pass at 06:30. About ten minutes I realized (fortunately) that I had left my lunch in the kitchen tent. I ran back to fetch it while the others continued, and managed to catch up to them with some fast scree scrambling. We took a quick break upon reaching the summit of the pass and then hiked down into the next valley, following the crest of a knife edge moraine. Some grassy sidehilling followed with a few boulder field crossings and we came to the base of the mountain, where a vegetated ramp was selected to attempt at gaining the ridge crest. Short roping and a few easy climbing pitches had us unbelievably tangled in trees where no further progress could be made. We down climbed a few pitches and then tried another option, but ended up getting treed out again. Frustrated, we gave up on this front entirely, got back off the mountain onto a steep snow slope which we climbed until we found a rubble filled gulley which went cleanly, if you can call loose shite clean, all the way to the ridge line via short-roping. The ridge line was fantastic climbing though and we ran up several lovely pitches of this. Unfortunately, due to all the farting around earlier, the day was now getting quite late, so after reaching a small notch in the ridge we decided to bail from here. A short down climb of the face was made to reach a good place for our first rappel anchor. Tim fixed a single 60 meter rope and rapped off to the find the next station, while I coached the others down to my position as Todd belayed from above. Once everyone was down we re-rigged the rappel with both 60m ropes and I was sent down first to deal with the tangle resulting from this rope toss. I came down, spent some time getting the rope unstuck from several trees, and finally reached Tim... almost. I ran out of rope on one side a mere two meters above the station. Tim coached me through jamming the stopper knot on one side while feeding through a single strand through the rappel device (after removing the backup prussic) to even out the ends. This brought me to the station, however both ropes were now fully stretched taut so we had to bust out some dancing moves to allow myself to unrig from the rappel so I could down climb onto the anchor. The rest of the crew followed, all having some fun getting off rappel at the end, but eventually we were all down. Todd then lowered us one 30 meter pitch further into a snow moat which was climbed out of by step kicking and then we all began the long hike back to camp. A huge boulder field made for some tricky travelling, after which a bit of a nasty bushwhack route through a band of trees was made. Once out of this mess however, Tim picked a really nice line back up to Gobi pass which used a lot of low angle snow patches. This made for some easy travel, which was good as we were all getting tired. Finally we crested the pass, and mercifully, camp appeared, after which all that was left was the steep hike down. I hung back with Mary Ann as she was really beginning to slow, but no matter what was happening, she always had a bright smile on her face. We arrived back at camp after 13 hours on the go, diving immediately into a tasty supper from the kitchen staff.

Gobi Pass, looking over at Vistamount.