[TR] Mount Challenger - Easy Ridge / Perfect Pass 7/4/2015

[pugetgold]

Trip: Mount Challenger - Easy Ridge / Perfect Pass

 

Date: 7/4/2015

 

Trip Report:

Climbed Mount Challenger as a party of two over four days over this blistering hot weekend. Conditions are similar to JDT's trip report from 6/10/2015, but much less snow and water on Easy Ridge and Perfect Pass. Several tarns are still available on Easy Ridge, but they may not last long, as they are small (~50-100 ft2) and many others are completely dry. Plenty of water at Perfect pass, however.

 

From Perfect pass, we downclimbed to the glacier. From there, the glacier travel was very straight-forward. As JDT indicated, the bergschrund crossing is not a problem - there is still a very large snow bridge across it and the detour used by peter_mcb in his 7/29/2014 trip report is not needed.

 

Gear Notes:

Took two pickets, several small nuts, and a purple link cam. Used none of this.

 

Approach Notes:

Location of Chilliwack River crossing is easy to spot - as other posts have indicated, it is 5 minutes after you first spot the Chilliwack, at elevation 2850 ft, and is an obvious trail down to the river.

[WadeB]

Thanks for the trip report. I'm headed in for a similar trip in a few days and it was good to find out about the glacier conditions and ease of finding the climber's trail from the Chilliwack River. Did you guys scramble across at the imperfect impasse or did you descend about a 1000 feet below it to cross the gully and then re-ascend?

Edited July 6, 2015 by WadeB

[pugetgold]

We scrambled it, though ended up on some fairly sketch 4th / low 5th class ledges, as did another party we encountered en route. See if you can find the 3rd class ledge as advertised.

[JDT]

Do you have pictures of the impasse scramble? We took one look at it and thought it looked heinous, but maybe that was because of the foggy conditions we were in.

[jiri]

I was in the second party climbing Challenger over the weekend. Here is one picture taken on the way to Perfect Pass. The ledge we took felt pretty safe except 2-3 moves. Going back was a different story. It looked like the same ledge but felt a lot sketchier.

 

 

Note on getting to the Challenger Glacier. Going straight down from Perfect Pass looked nasty - loose steep scrambling with a moat problem at the bottom. We elected to go up the ridge and then doing a traverse onto the glacier crossing one rocky rib. It was very easy.

Edited July 7, 2015 by jiri

[JasonG]

I've never been through the impasse before, that is a great shot!