Climb: Prussik Peak-West Ridge
Date of Climb: 6/14/2004
Trip Report:
Ok, so it's a little late, but I was rather in a hurry to pack for the next trip so I didn't post this earlier. Oh, and now I'm on my next trip, after travelling through Germany, Slovenia, Serbia, Romania, and Turkey I've just arrived in Kygyzstan and am headed towards to Karavshin Valley for some REAL rock soon, so this'll be a short report.
On Sunday, June 14th or so I heade out with HBM (non CC.comer) for a nice little climb up Prussik. We hit the ranger station in the early morning and got permits without any problem, but after hitting the store to buy food and whatnot we didn't get hiking till 12:00.
We carried some beers up to hide in the creek for the hike down and left them about 2 mi in under snow creek wall and kept moving. The trail had a few trees across in spots (that magically dissappeared when we headed down the next day) and we didn't hit any snow till after upper snow lake. We camped up at the first high lake we hit and made a nice dinner, then crawled into the bivy sacks. We were a bit worried about the goats chewing on our pack straps for the salt so we hung our gear up in a dead tree out of their reach.
We woke up rather late and had a leisurely breakfast and finally hit the bottom of the west ridge around 10:30 if I remember right. The climbing was pretty straight forward and mostly scambly. I led the 5.7 slab part and HBM did the final 5.6 summit block. We ended up doing it in 3 roped pitches with a bit of scrambling between 2 and 3. The weather was great and the views were pretty nice. I think it was around 1:30 at the top.
We snapped some pictures, had some lunch, and then headed down. Three raps got us to about 2 minutes below where we had started. We headed back down, retrieved the gear from the tree, and made the long hike out. The beers were great when we got to them.
It was a great climb and a fun time, but I kept lookin at the south face cause that's where I wanna be. It looks like it could be a nice nice thin seam aid line up on the left of the south face too, but maybe I'm making stuff up. Next time I do that appraoch I'm going in for several days to do a bunch of routes up there.
Gear Notes:
We had a small rack, one set of nuts, 4 cams (or maybe 5), and 3 hexes. We also took ice axes which were handy in the morning on the icy snow, and for some glisading back down from Prussik pass.
Approach Notes:
Trail was good, still lots of snow past there in the enchantment lakes though, most lakes still mostly frozen up there.
He's at a very slow internet cafe in Turkey! 
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