After arriving late at Yellowstone I found Jason and Chantal without any problems. The next morning we woke up early and drove 1.5 hrs down to the Jenny Lake Campground in Grand Teton National Park. We wanted to camp there for a night before setting off on our climb. We claimed a campsite and then visited the rangers office to reserve a camping permit for the next 2 nights on the mountain.
Just a bit of background, I met Jason and Chantal in Yoho National park in the Canadian Rockies in august of 2009. I was heading up to the abbott’s pass hut and so were they. I was not really equipped to climb any of the nearby peaks, but Jason asked if I would be interested in going up with him the next day since Chantal was not feeling up to it. I borrowed her harness, and we had a great day climbing the mountain. Jason and are the same age, but he has been rock climbing and mountaineering for about 15 years, he a great teacher and very patient with a newbie like me. He and Chantal are originally from Montreal, but currently living in Victoria, BC.
We spent the afternoon shopping, preparing and packing gear, and cooking a great dinner on the open fire. After dinner Jason went over some climbing basics with me, and how we planned on climbing with two ropes. He would lead each pitch with two 8.6 mm ropes, then he would belay me up first and Chantal 2nd. I would clean any gear off that I could, and Chantal would get the rest. We also reviewed the basics of rappelling, and he taught me to make a climber’s heist instead of using a prussic as a failsafe when rappelling.
The next morning we woke up and finished packing our gear and camp up. Since I had the biggest pack and was supposedly in the best shape I got volunteered for the largest load. My pack had my own 3 person tent (Jason and Chantal had their own, I think in the future I will invest in a decent bivy sack), the food canister with most of the food, 4L of water, and one of the ropes, in addition to my own camping gear, clothes, and climbing gear. My pack weighed around 70lbs! Jason’s weighed just over 50, so he was not much better off. We started from the parking lot at Lupine Meadows at 6700ft. We had to hike up to 10,800 ft to the Moraines campground, the 2nd highest campground. It took about 5-6 hours to make the journey. Luckily the weather was clear and sunny, and warm. In fact once we arrived in the late afternoon I decided to work on my suntan while setting up camp. The Moraine is a very rocky area, but we were able to find some pre-built campsites. After dinner, and spending an enormous amount of time pumping filtering water from a very silty stream, we went to bed.
The next day we woke up to clear skies at 4:30AM. We quickly ate breakfast and setoff for the lower saddle. We had to use our crampons and ice axes to ascend the very steep snowfield up to the lower saddle, once there however we stashed this gear amongst the rocks along with about 16 other sets of gear. It seems that everyone had the same idea as us and there were already lots of people ahead of us. Our plan was to take the Upper Exum ridge, many people do the full Exum however this involves some 5.8 and 5.7 pitches, which are probably a bit much for a beginner climber. So we scrambled our way up the backside of the mountain, crawled through the Eye of the Needle and arrived at Wallstreet after around 2 or 3 hours. This is where we had to rope up for the first time. Wallstreet is actually sort of a 3 ft wide ramp along a cliff face with a significant drop, nothing really serious except one place where you have to step across ledge with a 1000 ft drop, hence the rope. Next we ascended the Golden Staircase. From there we unroped for a bit of scrambling, and then continued the climb. We climbed several more pitches, fortunately we were only passed by 2 groups during our entire climb, mostly because we were 3 people and not 2, and the fact that I am bit of a slow and nervous climber. The last group that passed us was a father /son team that asked to join us for the rapelling portion of the climb so that they could use our twin ropes instead of their single. They passed just below the summit and pointed out how we could get up there. We quickly scrambled up the last part of the climb, across a small snowfield and then sat up on the summit enjoying the 360 deg clear panorama. Jason was pretty happy that our 2nd mountaineering experience together was another success. It was amazing, we could see all the mountains to the west of us and to the east down into the valley and the rest of the park. We did not linger though because the other s were already setting up the first rappel and were waiting on us.
We made two long rappels down the mountain, one was about 50m, the other probably about 45m and overhung so a portion of it left you dangling in the air. Pretty cool, I really liked that, and reminded myself to try that some more in the future. We then had about a 2 hr scramble back down the mountain the way we came up. We finally got back to camp around 6 pm, made dinner and slept like rocks. Everyone was real happy with the day. That night a storm blew in and it rained on and off, but we awoke to skies that were clearing up. So we packed up camp and hiked back to the cars.
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| 360 Panorama from the top of Grand Teton |
Friday morning after a run, I met with sally a couchsurfer I met the night before. We headed to the international district for some Thai food and a visit to the Asian supermarket. Sally told me about how she has been travelling for 2 ½ years. Visiting South America, sailing in the Caribbean and the United States. The Rose, sally and I headed to the Red Hook Brewery for a tour and tasting. That night Brian and I made final preparations for the trip.
