Gannett Peak: Day 4 (The Climb)

Gannett Peak via the Glacier Trail
Shoshone National Forest
Day 4 (The Climb): 8/16/2006

The route we used to summit Gannett.

We crawled out of the tent at 2:30am to find clear, starry skies and no wind. It looked like a go. When I nudged Hope to get up she said, "I'm not going. Too many boulders. Didn't sleep at all." Fair enough I thought. So around 3:30am Dan and I put on our head lamps and hit the boulder field again. Maybe about a third of the way up, around 5:30am, I took this picture looking across the Dinwoody glacier where we had been the previous day.

Looking up at the Gooseneck pinnacle. The crux of this climb was going to be the Gooseneck Couloir. It's steep enough, but mostly it has a crack (bergschrund) at the base of it that makes it not a happy couloir to slide down.

Here's a profile of the crack we would need to cross and climb up to get on to the Gooseneck couloir. It's this kind of stuff that made me hire an exum guide. I don't really know squat about ropes, harnesses and technical climbing. It sure was good to have Dan along for this part.

Dan Starr, our Exum guide, leads the way up through the "bergschrund" or crack in the glacier at the base of the Gooseneck couloir.

After getting over the bergschrund, getting up the couloir wasn't so bad. Here's a couple of views looking down at the Gooseneck couloir and our camp in the Dinwoody drainage way below.

From the ridgeline hiking up Gannett, looking southwest you can see the Mammoth Glacier. It's huge... a genuine glacier by all definitions.

The summit.

Views from the top of Gannett. Looking North, then East and then West.

Shad on top of Wyoming. Pretty damn cool.

Looking North from the summit. The weather was crystal clear. No smoke, no wind, really awesome. You could see the Tetons. We must have spent over an hour lounging around on the summit it was so nice.

Talk about a view. We summitted around 9:30am. It took us about 5 1/2 hours to climb from camp.

Around 11:00am we decided to head down.

Going down the Gooseneck was a little more challenging for me then hiking up it. Dan belayed me all the way. Although I never slipped it was nice to know I was safe if I did.

Dan makes his way down the couloir and then down through the bergschrund. I'm on the other end of the rope.

Looking back up at the Gooseneck.

We arrived at camp around 3pm to happy Llamas and a happy Hope. Rapid Fire posed for a profile.

Dubois expressed his enthusiam about having to go to work again tomorrow.

Since there was still time left in the day, I decided to celebrate our successful climb by breaking out the splitboard and scoring some August turns.

Hard to beat a day where you can climb the highest peak in Wyoming and then get some turns in to boot- even if the turns were clumsy. Ha! Awesome stuff!

What a way to end an epic day!

Tally meets Tugboat.