Trip Report: Forbidden East Ridge

[stevenkalinowsk]

Friday's weather report convinced my wife and I that this wasn't the best weekend for Stuart's North Ridge, so we decided on a "relaxing" climb and chose the East Ridge of Forbidden. It was a great and satisfing climb, but not quite as relaxing as we expected. On the plus side, the scenery and exposure were awesome. On the negative side, the descent was unpleasant. We expected to find a defined ledge system to traverse, but instead wandered around on the face - sometimes going up, sometimes going down. The traverse was never really that hard, but it was stressful - it often looked like it might get hard. The rock was pretty loose; there were few good opportunities for placing gear or establishing belays. The only pleasant aspect of the descent was that the gully leading back up to the East Ridge was unmistakable. It was the first real gully we encountered on the face. In addition, we could easily recognize features on the ridge above us that indicated we were approaching the gully. It is probably worth mentioning that this East ledges descent route would be very unpleasant to most climbers if it was wet - we found it completely dry.

My wife and I are pretty much novice alpine climbers, and we may just have to get used to the quality of the rock on alpline climbs, but we were expecting more solid rock than we found. Not that it was bad, it just wasn't like Prussik. It was solid enough, though, for us to feel safe. The only real loose parts were on some of the traverses around the towers on the ridge. The technical crux of the route, a short pitch of 5.8 was solid. The lower part of that pitch was run out enough for me to wonder what I was getting myself into, but there were a couple of good placements (I used two small aliens) just before the short crux. We seemed to spend more time traversing than climbing on the ridge; the highlight of the climb was a couple sections of knife edged ridge. Neat stuff. Regarding the ideal rack for the climb. I am a pretty cautious climber, but if I was to repeat the climb I wouldn't bring more than a few cams, the small aliens listed above, and a set of nuts. I don't think I ever placed more than 4 pieces on any of the pitches - the climbing was either quite easy or the protection hard to find.

It took us 10 hours round trip from our campsite near the high toilet in Boston Basin.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this report.

-Steven