[TR] Yak Peak - Yak Check 6/28/2008

[marc_leclerc]

Trip: Yak Peak - Yak Check

 

Date: 6/28/2008

 

Trip Report:

After making some last minute plans to do Yak, Reinhard picked me up in Agassiz at 6:00 on Friday Evening. We drove up highway #5 to the rest stop area below Yak Peak and hiked into the base of the climb. We set up a bivi right near the bottom of the route and hung out at camp then slept until 5:00 Saturday morning. We packed up and put our stuff we didn't need down near the trail where we would be coming back. We racked up and did the quick scramble to the base of the big dihedral that makes up the first three pitches of the route. As Dru points out in his "opinionated description' on Bivouac.com it is easier to go left and up to the base of Reality Check and traverse right to the base of Yak Crack to begin the climb. The first three pitches were all easy 5.6 up a cool crack just left of the dihedral. I led the first two pitches and Reinhard led the third up to lunch ledge. After lunch ledge the climbing starts getting a bit more serious with less protection and slightly trickier climbing and routefinding. I led up pitch 4 placing tiny gear behind small flakes and clipping a fixed pin near the top, pitch 5 was an easy 5.8 which involved getting over some overlaps then climbing crumbling flakes to a belay just left of some cool looking corners. Pitch 6 was evil, definitely the most serious pitch on the route. I started up by laybacking some really nice corners but then the rock starts getting crumbly and you have to pull some overlaps with 'oatmeal like' rock to the next belay. It didn't help that I had a lot of rope drag and needed a bathroom break. After pitch 6, however, the climbing became excellent again. Pitch 7 was my favourite, you get to layback underneath a flake, up the side, then back over the top before laybacking along a big flake and pulling over the top of the 'see through' flake and belaying. We walked over the top of the flake and then climbed a cool corner crack for a couple pitches and then I led the '5.10a' (read 5.9) face climb. It was fun but surprisingly easy, the only tricky moves are right near the second bolt and it is still pretty easy. The second '5.10a' pitch was barely more than a 5.8, but still fun. The last pitch was a fourth class scramble up the slab into the trees and top of the sub-summit. The descent is corniced snow at the moment so we rapped down near a gully on the right side of the east face and walked the snowy trail back to the base. I thought the route was excellent, the rock was good except for part of the 6th and maybe the end of the 5th pitch. The climbing was fun and pretty straight forward. The only bummer was that the 5.10 that I was stoked for was only 5.9- ... it was still lots of fun though! We took quite a long time on the route for a couple reasons, I led basically every pitch (except for pitch 3) so we didnt have the speed advantage of swinging leads and we just took it pretty slow as we got an early start.. a fast party could probably do it between 4-6 hours.. we took about 8 hours total. Dru's 'Opiniated description' on bivouac.com is a really good, detailed information source on the climb, bring it with you!

 

Approaching the mountain

 

Scrambling to the base of the route

 

 

The big dihedral, the route is over on the left, on the other side of the arete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

First three pitches

 

Reinhard at top of Pitch 3

 

My shadow, top of pitch 4

 

Looking up at pitch 5

 

Reinhard following pitch 4

 

At the top of Pitch 5

 

Me at the base of Pitch 6, im smiling because I have no idea what's waiting for me on Pitch 6

 

 

Me on pitch 6, still having fun at this point.

 

I didnt really get any pics on the upper section of the route unfortunately. But I got one pic.

 

Reinhard coming up pitch 11

 

The End

 

 

 

 

Gear Notes:

Lots of small/finger size peices and a couple larger cams, one set of stoppers is more than enough for this route.

 

Approach Notes:

Climbers trail form rest area.

[Braydon]

Nice...

[marc_leclerc]

Thanks Braydon.. its nice to know there's another climber on this board thats my age..

[gertlush]

Alpine select gives it 8-11 hours so seems pretty reasonable... course you can't trust everything Maclane puts in his guides

[marc_leclerc]

Alpine select gives it 8-11 hours so seems pretty reasonable... course you can't trust everything Maclane puts in his guides

 

11 hours! that seems like quite a long time for this.. If you ran into some routefinding errors or something that could happen tho.... its definitely a great climb tho!

[G-spotter]

First time I did it was with Don and we were pretty fast, I think 6 hrs round trip from car. Second time I did it in a party of 3 with Fern and Kellie and we took a more relaxed pace and it was more like 8. Plenty of people have had to bivi on top though! A time of 11 hours is not unexpected for parties new to alpine multipitch and route finding.

[marc_leclerc]

First time I did it was with Don and we were pretty fast, I think 6 hrs round trip from car. Second time I did it in a party of 3 with Fern and Kellie and we took a more relaxed pace and it was more like 8. Plenty of people have had to bivi on top though! A time of 11 hours is not unexpected for parties new to alpine multipitch and route finding.

 

lol.. its my first real alpine multipitch route... the most I have done is like 3 pitch cragging routes and easy low 5th stuff like Nesakwatch Spires and Rexford. If you just follow the most obvious lines of least resistance you just end up at the next belay... I think if someone relied on books and shit to keep them on track they would be more likely to get lost. But your 'opiniated description' is excellent.. It fell out of my pocket on pitch 7 but It would be hard to get lost on the final pitches cuz you just follow big corner cracks and bolts... I want to go back and do Speedway soon.. is speedway any harder than Yak Check? Y.C was all easy climbing but the rock was a little bit crappy for about a pitch or so and the pro is adequate. If your not confident at leading or the climb was at the limit if your abilities then it may be a bit scary but I dont think you would die or get too hurt if you fell in mostof those spots.... I heard that Speedway has some mega runouts on it though???

[Bogen]

Grats on your first big route!!!

 

I have been to yak 3 times, and been chased off 3 times.

 

The first time, (you were 2, Marc!) with only a blurry photocopied sheet from god knows where, we arrived at the base of the pillar and thought the off-width was the way to go. Since we had no gear that could protect in that big crack, and it seemed easy, we solo'd to the top of the pillar. Looking at it years later, I still can't believe we did that! We were gearing up on lunch ledge under perfect blue skies when a black cloud peaked its head into the valley down the west. When the valley was half full of clouds, we started down, and by the bottom of the pillar, we couldn't see where we had just been. There was a party about 4-5 pitches above us on Yak Crack, completely socked in, poor guys.

 

The next time I went, years later, we got there late on a Saturday and were turned off by the crowds on Yak Crack, so decided for a try at Reality Check. We took a brief, humbling stab at the crux slab pitch and went home. The next year, I went back to Reality Check, determined to do it, and fell just about the whole length of the crux pitch. I got a little excited at the end of it (keep your cool at all times, sigh) and lunged for the dish under the bolt that effectively ends the crux. It was full of gravel and off I went on a 50-60 foot slab fall. I ended up head down about 6 feet straight to the right of my partner, blood running up my forehead... (I was OK, just scraped up) There was a sling hanging right beside the dish that I could have gone for instead, but I didn't want to "cheat," lol.

 

I'll go back someday I suppose...

[northvanclimber]

nice TR. thanks for the great descriptions. think i'll have to go hit that route!

[G-spotter]

Speedway is much easier but very, very runout (25-30m between protection placements) and the crux pitches are sustained at the grade. In many places the bolts are so far apart that you cannot see the next one and have to guess as to the line. The easier pitches are more like roped hiking than climbing because the angle is so low. But it is very fast to climb it, 2 hours up is reasonable.

[marc_leclerc]

Thanks for the info! I wouldnt mind climbing that route soon. If you ever want to go there and do Speedway again let me know. It may be nice having someone thats done the route before with me so I dont get lost ...

[G-spotter]

Did it look dry?

[marc_leclerc]

yep.. everything except for SW gulley looked dry

[pinner]

Nice work! I climbed this last year as my first big multipitch/quasi-alpine route, and will agree that the "opinionated description" on Bivouac is fabulous. The only problem we had was the approach to the first pitch - we didn't find the "left facing corner" (if my memory serves me right), as there were several. We each tried a couple of things, and ended up soloing our own lines to the start. Also, my partner missed the first bolted belay, ran out 70 m and most of the gear, and belayed in the crack with two stacked nuts. We took 8 hours car to car, swinging leads, including a scramble to the summit and some poking around up top, and only moderately efficient rope management.

[marc_leclerc]

cool... I saw a couple guys up climbing the route last year and talked to them on the trail down.. thats when I decided to do the route