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If you can walk up there without waking up the choss, you also might as well also tag the bonus unclimbed gendarme, climber's left of the Rooster Comb

Oh, the toe looks just fine, just walk down there and go up.

We contemplated checking out the toe, but it looked very steep as far as we could see from the east and we were running out of daylight. It would remove some of the toughest route finding and technical climbing on the route, but who knows what it would add. Maybe some canyoneering around that waterfall at the base. Damn am I curious what it looks like from below. The whole ridge is ripe for untouched pinnacles and variations on Wayne’s original line. We were focused on following his steps as closely as we could, so the venture to the toe seemed like an over-reach for us. However, I see the beauty in connecting his line to the toe. It may just add a thousand feet of vertical bushwhacking and an even more gnarly approach. But hey, some people are still into that kind of adventure!! Thanks for the kudos, John. I’ll say it again, what an incredible ridge!!

Trip: Pickets - Picket High Route (Stettatle -> Wiley) Trip Date: 07/04/2024 Trip Report: Wyatt, Anthony, and I joined forces once again for a 4th of July Epic. We went for the Pickets this year, completing a south to north high route from Stetattle Ridge, through McMillan Cirque, to Luna Col, and out Wiley Ridge over 4 days. We summited Outrigger, Fury, Luna, Big Beaver, and a few other bumps along the way. For those curious, Outrigger is climbable from the south. We couldn't find any real info on this, but we found a bypass of the vertical section, climbing some low 5th around to the right. Wiley Ridge was incredibly pleasant and the bushwhack was short. Highly recommend this route. https://climberkyle.com/2024/07/04/pickets-high-route/ Gear Notes: Gaitered gore-tex trail runners, cycling out waterproof socks. Pink tri-cam for the knife edge on Outrigger. Approach Notes: We took the Pierce Mountain Trail up Sourdough since the main trail is closed due to the fire last year. Wiley to exit. Stay on the ridge between the two gullies on the descent, and it's not too bad with the exception of one cliff band at 4900 ft.

Outstanding!!!

Grinning ear to ear grinning while reading this. I must have seen you coming from East Fury while I was descending from Outrigger. I had no idea what an adventure you’d just had. Right?!

Wow! Amazing work, gents. Congrats! Thanks for all the work on an outstanding TR!

Bad to the fucking bone!

Awesome effort on the climb AND this awesome writeup. Respect!

Lion Tamer is the Acid Baby of the Idaho Selkirks. Do it! Bring a strong partner and all of your lichenous choss wrangling skills. Full report/photos here: Lion’s Head – Lion Tamer (III 5.10c) – SPOKALPINE

I had an incredible backpacking trip in the Selkirks earlier this month. Among other things, we climbed Twin Flakes on Harrison Peak. The South Face Standard and Keystone routes get all the attention on this peak, but the locals agree that Twin Flakes is the best route up there. Check it out! Full trip report with photos: https://spokalpine.com/2023/07/25/harrison-peak-twin-flakes-ii-5-8/ TR text: I had my first “vacation alpinism” trip of the season recently when Larissa and I backpacked up to Harrison Lake to climb some of that delicious Selkirks granite. Our first day was spent swimming, eating bread rolls, and questing up a few routes just above the lake. On July 2nd, we trekked over to Harrison Peak for Larissa’s first mountain climb: Twin Flakes! After a quick approach, I racked up and quested off onto the first pitch of Twin Flakes. Among hardcore Selkirks aficionados, this route has a reputation as the best route on Harrison Peak and I was excited to try it out! The typical Selkirks first pitch experience was in full effect: somewhat run out, ambiguous climbing is often required here to gain significant features. I found a comfortable belay and brought Larissa up. The second pitch is among the better alpine rock pitches that I’ve climbed in Idaho. Full commitment laybacking and stemming brought me up a perfect corner to a stance, before another interlude of attention-grabbing climbing. Excellent protection allowed me to enjoy the climbing and sunshine, despite some lichen-covered rock. This ain’t the Cascades… this route might only get climbed a time or two per year. The final pitch had some sweet face climbing before I found myself below the “rock cornice” mentioned in the Laird guidebook. Feeling the exposure, I traversed slightly right, placed two good cams under the overhang (safety first), and made a committing throw out right that allowed me to snag a secret hold and mantle onto a ledge. A few more meters of climbing brought me to the summit ridge. The walk off descent went quickly and brought us back to camp at the lake in time for a big dinner on the lake shore. The next day, we returned to Harrison Peak to repeat the South Face standard route [ Harrison Peak – South Face (II 5.7+) ]. The final pitch of the South Face is just as good as I remembered! Gear Notes: We brought doubles of .3-3, a single .2, and a set of nuts along with a single rope. Strategy Notes Harrison Peak is easily climbed car-to-car, but camping in this area is worth seeking out. The Beehive Five Traverse [ Beehive Five Traverse (III 5.4) ] is right in the neighborhood as well! We climbed one route per day on Harrison, but experienced teams could easily climb two or three in a day on this wall, stashing gear at the base of the Standard Route.

Trip: The Pickets - Himmelgeisterhorn - Wild Hair Crack Trip Date: 08/25/2017 Trip Report: Well, it would seem that I completely missed larch season this year as we were gone yanking on tufas in Greece and now ski season seems to be well on its way. It was another fine year of climbing, the hustle was put on in the spring to tie up some loose ends on larger Cascadian objectives which was immediately followed by a great deal of Mountain Loop cragging in Darrington and a lot of heavy packing and choss chucking to bolt a new route up by Mile High Club. Amongst all of that I did accomplish a long standing goal in the Pickets with my good buddy Imran, a tick of the Wild Hair Crack on Himmelgeisterhorn. Wild Hair Crack is a route that was established by Silas Wild, John Roper, and Russ Kroeker in 1981. For all the information you really need to know about the route and the hilarious story of it's conception go to John Roper's site Rhino Climbs. There's a lot of other great info there too if you look around a bit. Years ago, on a short and brutal traverse of the Pickets from the Chopping Block to Luna with the Running Dog we briefly stood in the notch of Otto-Himmel Col and gazed up slack jawed at the crack, knowing that we knew what it was but not being able to summon the name. Regardless, we figured we should probably come back and climb it and headed off down the Mustard Glacier to Frenzelspitz Camp where we immediately got smacked by a standard Picket thunderstorm on an otherwise bluebird day. A few years of shameless peakbagging had gone by since then as well as other trips into the Pickets but I had not yet focused up to get back to that beautiful piece of rock. Imran and I set a date early this year, weather window permitting and waited for the weekend to arrive. We've done so many trips together at this point that communication went as it often does these days, we knew which guy was in charge of what and which version he decided to show up with was completely up to him. Park and Ride time was decided upon and the supply of whiskey was double checked, the weather was looking bomber. Northgate, Arlington, Darrington, Marblemount, and Newhalem all in a row, we snapped pics of guidebook photos and headed up the trail just about 8AM. We made our way down into Crescent Creek Basin past the Chopping Block a little after noon passing one tent at the divide. The clouds had lifted as we made our way across the Barrier and now we suffered the sunny choss as we contoured around Crescent Creek and climbed up below Terror, making our camp at the obscenely beautiful promontory at 6300'. We gutted our packs, piled rocks over the important stuff and took advantage of our lightened feet by scrambling up the West Ridge of Terror, tagging the summit right at 5PM. Back at camp we rolled cigarettes, set up the tent and sipped Laphroaig telling jokes and watching the sunset. The next morning we dropped a little elevation right out of camp and then contoured old terminal moraines towards the hidden couloir that leads to Otto-Himmel Col. Last time I had been through here it was early season and we had just strolled to the top, this time it was a whole different animal. We predominantly stayed in the moat on the left stemming between ice and rock until being forced through a portal in the snow to the right side. Below the huge chockstone we scrambled up the rock on the left side and then back across smallish ledges right until back in the gulley above the chock. A few more feet of vert brought us to the Col and a bit of a breeze so we added some layers and got our gear on. I started up the righthand of the two large cracks and climbed for a ways until it appeared as though the rock might be of better quality over in the left crack. Imran was shouting at me to stay in the right side but I figured I'd go check out the other one at about half pitch. I liked what I saw so I continued up, I suppose following the right side is what is shown in Red Fred but both variations were climbed in the process of seeking the first ascent by Silas, Roper and Kroeker so I figured I'd split the difference on the first pitch. Both lines will take you to the base of the next pitch in a little alcove/cave below the offwidth chimney. If memory serves me there was a small slung chockstone here with what must have been some tasty cordage that a varmint had chewed through as well as some other old webbing that was in slightly better shape. I threw in a cam as backup and made an anchor to bring Imran up. Once he arrived all smiles as usual I set about getting my nerve up for the next lead. It looked big, slightly overhanging, and I could not see anywhere that took gear less than eight inches; 5.7? I'll bite. Up I went, the holds were...amazing! All the stances, everything was like a dream. I almost forgot about placing gear, which wouldn't have mattered anyways because unless you have a Big Bro or a length of 2X4 it doesn't matter until you are at least 20' out. The first placement is a small cam in a horizontal crack to the right of the crack, the next, about 5' higher is a bomber #1 or #2. The angle eases off after this and the pitch rambles up a ways nearing the ridge. Instead of heading over the ridge to the left we opted to continue up towards the subpoint angling slightly right to a weakness and chocked chimney just below the subpoint. I belayed Imran up while sitting on the chockstone and we unroped for the next bit of 3rd and 4th class terrain up and over the subpoint and across the ridge towards the true summit. There is a nice flat col before the final pitch up to the summit and we threw our packs down here and put the rope back on for safety sake. I placed a 0.5 or 0.75 in a feature to protect a bit of exposure but that was it. We had reached the top of the "Horn of the Sky Spirit" and the horizon was smoke free, giving us views for days. The summit is pretty small, we looked around for a summit register but could not locate one despite Jason and Tim reporting on it during their FA of Stonehenge. We hung out up there for quite a while but eventually decided we were hungry and we needed to figure out how to get down. We knew we didn't want to rappel the lower three pitches of the Wild Hair due to a lack of anchors for our single 70M rope (FA was with twin 50M ropes) and we didn't want to end up too far down the N face and have to come back up the Mustard Glacier. We had spotted a pretty nice looking anchor backed up with a nut and some fresh looking webbing just below the subpoint on the north aspect so we figured we'd start there. I ran the rope through, tied knots and chucked each half into the unknown. Looking down the face everything looked pretty ledgey but also decked out with areas of obviously loose rock so I exercised considerable caution keeping the rope free of debris. At about 25M I came upon a double piton anchor joined together with some old webbing but decided to try and angle off back towards a large boulder out right (skier's left), suspecting a possible anchor in that vicinity. I came up on the knots right as I touched on a ledge above the boulder, I unweighted the rope removed it from my belay device and scrambled around the boulder to find a nice looking rap anchor. Imran came down and we set the next rap angling hard back over the ridge towards Otto-Himmel Col. We found another anchor over the ridge and were able to rap into a small depression almost at level with the col with a slight ledge leading back to the col, I believe this is the depression and ledge described in the N. Face route description. Stoked to have made it back down on our single 70 with relative ease we rapped down past the chockstone and continued to rap most of the gulley on old suspect singlepoint anchors composed around sketchy rock or attached to jiggly pitons in jiggly rock. Eventually we emerged back in Crescent Creek Basin and rambled back to camp encountering a rather large and healthy set of mountain goats along the way. Somewhat begrudgingly we packed up camp and made our way back across the hot red choss to the Chopping Block where we set up camp for the night and encountered a curious Stoat for a split second before it went back to hunting down Pikas and other alpine morsels. Sunset was amazing in all directions and the nice view of Teebone Ridge had Fallen Angel stuck in my head for the rest of the trip but thanks to 4G service at the ridge I was able to scratch the media itch. In the morning we climbed the NE ridge of the Chopping Block staying generally on route but adding in a few short harder sections at the bottom and top for fun. Rapping this route with a single 70 is a bit of a rope stretcher and requires attention to detail. Finally, we packed up for good and headed down the Barrier gorging ourselves on blueberries the whole way back to Terror Creek. Another trip in the Pickets with a head full of ideas for the next time. I had the good fortune to talk to all the members of the first ascent team at this years Bulger Party and I think they got a kick out of the kids taking such pleasure in their route, it is a real gem! Thanks to Silas, Russ, and Roper for putting up the line! Okay, Pictures! Coming up the Barrier with clearing skies Crescent Creek choss heat. Terror! With Luna in the background. Camp life. Sunset from camp. Highly recommended accommodations at ca. 6300' Himmelgeisterhorn Starting up the right crack, the chimney of P2 can be seen above the left crack near the top of the rock in the picture. Imran climbing towards the top of P1, minimal gear was placed on ascent but lots of opportunities existed. Last Pitch Sky Spirit! Taking the ledge back to Otto-Himmel Col Super Crack! Late season gulley shenanigans. Sunset from Chopping Block camp. NE Ridge of the Chopping Block Picket Stoke! Gear Notes: Single rack of cams #00-#2, medium nuts, long runners, 70M rope, crampons, ice axe, whisky Approach Notes: Terror Creek to the Barrier to Crescent Creek Basin