[TR] petit cheval / burgundy spire- f'ed up roue / NF 8/14/2005

[TrogdortheBurninator]

Climb: petit cheval / burgundy spire-f'ed up roue / NF

 

Date of Climb: 8/14/2005

 

Trip Report:

On saturday sjwages and I tried to climb the spontaniety arete on le petit cheval. Obviously I should have looked at some pictures of the route or reread some TR's, but instead in a rush I just printed out the NCMG topo and assumed we'd figure things out. The topo gives very limited approach info. The only spot that could be tricky is where the trail ascends a 10ft 3rd class cliff, but is not marked by cairns. Our major problem came with trying to find the large snag that marked the beginning of the route. Eventually we found a large cairn in the gully and figured we must be close, but still no "large snag". I scrambled up the ridge from the cairn until the terrain eased off to 2nd class. sjwages was in the gully still looking for the start. I'm sure if we would have looked at a photo of the route, we would have realized that I had scrambled the first 2 pitches of the route. Instead, I downclimbed 15 ft to the gully and we continued up trying to find a large snag. Eventually we found a very large snag with two large roofs above, not exactly as described in the topo, but pretty close. We climbed up 1.5 pitches of low fifth terrain, then set out simuling on 2nd/3rd class to move the belay (this seemed to follow the topo with some resemblance). When I came up to Sjwages, I just started laughing. He was on the summit. On the way down, I notice a not so large snag by the large cairn, as well as a not so large roof. That's when we realized the route started there. Neither of us had the motivation to climb again, so we headed down. Oh well, quite a waste of a day.

 

Sunday went much better, climbing the NF of Burgundy. This climb was super fun. There are a lot of different crack systems on the face, making route finding somewhat of a challenge. We were making pretty good time to the top of the 2nd 5.8 pitch, but that is when things got tricky. I would imagine the direct finish makes for a speedy (although supposedly runout) ascent, however we opted to try the west trending legde approach. Kearney describes a clean left facing corner crack, but the closest thing we found on initial investigation was a nice looking face finger crack. I decided to continue exploring further to the west to see if we were missing something. Around the corner, the west face dropped away abruptly and I decided we must have been in the right place. On closer inspection, the bottom 4 feet of this crack is an LFC. Above the finger crack I used my keen routefinding skills to follow one of the lichen scraped lines. Unfortunately, my first choice, after making a thin move out across the face, turned out be the rap route (long run out slab). I moved back right to the dirty 5.7 variation, where one poorly protected move eventually brought me to the end a belay. Next, I moved left on a flake system and entered the fun shallow corner crack left of a fixed rap anchor. I followed this until I had the choice of two wide cracks. The left crack did not appear to protect with the rack we brought, so I took the right hand chimney/offwidth. Pro in the crack was difficult, but a combination of chockstones and marginal placements sort of did the job. This crack was one of the most challenging 5.8s I have been on. I used a combination of jamming, chimeying, lie backing, and face climbing to eventually reach the top. Exhausted I brought up sjwages, we took obligatory summit photos on the very awesome summit block, then we began our descent down the face. We had one stuck rope, but it was pretty easy to climb back up and free it. Back to the packs, then down 4000ft of steep scree and trail and we were back at the car. I ate, then drank powerade and then redbull. Eventually we stopped for a short nap in marblemount, then switched drivers until arlington. I made the final push home from arlington. A long day on a really fun route.

 

Gear Notes:

Cams .4-3 camalaot +4.5 aircam(useless)

Small nuts from BD 4 to BD 9

 

Approach Notes:

Trail is easy to follow up to bench. Ascent of scree gully is well marked initially, but making the crossover to the main gully can be somewhat ambiguous. We ended up descending the entire main gully after missing the turn off.

[mec]

too bad you missed the good parts of spontaneity arete. For themost part, as soon as you get to the gully you can start the climb. The 'big' snag is hard to spot, and when I did it with Blake a couple months ago, we just ended up starting somewhere. It probably was not the real start, but it was fun. There are some real good pitches on that route.

 

Glad you had a good time on NF of Burgundy.

[Blake]

What MEC says is right, just start up and left of the gulley, and when you feel you are on terrain that you might want a rope on for, rope up. Pretty soon you'll recognize stuff from the topo, see cut branches, or run across rappel slings.

[Mr._Natural]

We started with a "birth experience" type chimney/tunnel at the toe of the butress proper, just above a large snag. painfully obvious.