Wright Peak

July 26, 2018

Guides: Todd
Participants: Mike, Alda, John
Time: 6.5 hours

Today was an easy day. Wakeup was not until 07:00, so I got up a little earlier and took advantage of the shower facilities set up in camp, washing off most of the grime that had been accumulating for the last week or so. Our group of four departed camp at about 08:30, heading towards the prominent peak just north of Ledge. It does not have a name, so we have been calling "Wright" Peak to go along with Wrong and Erratum just to the west. We hiked across the meadow and climbed the moraine to a snow patch full of avalanche debris. A scramble through the forest brought us to a few rubbly pitches of belayed climbing, after which the terrain went back to hiking so we unroped and walked the rest of the way to the false summit. This gave us a good view of our objective. We went into short roping mode for the remainder of the climb, which for the most part was fairly easy scrambling with the occasional trickier move. What was constant was loose rocks everywhere, forcing us to be very careful not to drop them on each other. The top few pitches were nice clean rock, for some super exposed fourth class terrain. A final slab followed by an au-cheval ridge brought us to summit proper, just in time for lunch. We had a great view of camp, and looking over at un-named peak, we could see the climbers topping out on their summit for today was well. Just as we were packing up to leave, a big rockfall event was witnessed coming off of Ledge 3 which was an impressive sight. Rocks tumbled and struck a snow slope, causing big sprays into the air, causing more rocks to fall, all ending up in a huge plume of dust rising from the valley below. We climbed down the same way we went up, which went fairly slowly and had the occasional exciting moment as rocks were accidently dislodged and sent tumbling. We made it down safely to the col before the false summit where we de-roped and headed straight down a blocky, but somewat unstable talus slope. We climbed through the forest, where we followed a path of destruction of avalanche mangled trees, which brought us onto a long chute of debris covered snow. From there it was an easy hike back to camp for a mid-afternoon rest.

Wright Peak looks directly above camp, pictured here in the center, just north of Ledge.

Starting our scramble up the first bump, on our way to Wright in the back.

View of Wright from the false summit. Rock looks a lot nicer than it is.

Final stretch of ridge to the summit.

Success!

Looking over at Unnamed and Thumb Spires.

If you look carefully, you can see a figure standing on top of Unnamed.

Hiking the avalanche debris field on the descent.

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