part of car2car hell for sdmrt. caltopo map
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Drove up Friday night with Elise and met up with Brian and Erin at Four Jefferey Campground at around 11pm. They had met up with the rest of the team before we arrived and the plan was to get up and leave for the North fork trail head by 5am.
We arrived at the trail head and started hiking by six. We had 7 SDMRT members and carried some extra webbing, 2 ropes, helmets and harnesses, but not any pro.
We cruised up to Piute pass in about 2 and a half hours, This was a super pleasant hike past lots of nice terrain, lakes, meadows and more. The trail is very well maintained with 2 log stream crossings as well as dozens of rock steps/water bars.
From the pass, we initially stayed on the trail heading down to summit lake for bee-lining for Mt Humphreys across the bowl. This area was a LOT nicer than i expected; there was lots of grassy sections as well as firm footing and nice rolling terrain. I guess i'd gotten used to walking on moraines and really loose talus. We took a break for water at one of the tarns near the peak. At this point one of our team members was ill and threw up, after a short discussion he and Adam decided to stay and rest and then head down when able.
We decided that we needed to set a turn around time that would give us a shot at the peak, but that we absolutely needed to get back on the trail by dark (e.g. it would be really hard to find the trail in the dark). We decided that we had to be off the summit (or headed down by 4pm), which would give us time to get back to the trail/piute pass by 8 (sunset), and then back to the trailhead at 10:30-11.
The remaining 5 of us headed to the peak, once at the peak, we traversed over talus (no more gentle rolling meadow) to the left most ramp (as indicated in beta from summitpost) and started up. A couple hundred feet up the chute, we ran into a giant chock stone that was filling the entire chute, and as indicated in the beta, headed up a side gully to the left. From this we were able to re-join the gully up higher, and continued on. Can't remember anything exceptional or tricky about the rest of this until the notch, it was just regular talus/scree in a gully. At the notch I saw that there were a couple of climbers descending, so took a break while waiting for them to be off the route.
One of the team members decided that he didn't want to try the upcoming 3rd/4th sections and elected to stay at the notch. This left 4 of us for the summit, we climbed unroped (but brought a ~120' static 8mm) past the first 4th class section as marked on summitpost. Around this corner however, we had a little issue, the line drawn on the beta we had seemed to indicate that the route was up this steep left leaning ramp (towards an anvil shaped split rock) as opposed to an easier arete (which i had initially decided seemed easiest). We decided to stick with the image, and i went up the ramp, however by going up this, i ended up under the anvil shaped rock, and would have needed to pull around it (v2 at least). I actually thought about this, and almost attempted it a couple times, but eventually decided to go back down.
Being a little sketched out now, i elected to lead on the rope and check out the arete before we bailed. Luckily it turned out to be the correct route, I built an anchor with a large piece of webbing and belayed the rest of the group up. From here, we walked to the top (we summited ~330), there was a lot of exposure, but nothing particularly difficult.
On the descent, we choose to rap, and were able to descend past both 4th class sections in 2 ~60ft raps off of previously placed gear (webbing + pitons). There was a LOT of gear left in on this face, and as such i felt fine using it instead of adding to it. Besides the two rap stations that we used, there were at least 4 other places where someone had left webbing behind and apparently rapped off it. I felt best in using the spots that we did as it made a more direct line to safer terrain, and the anchors (including the pitons) seemed solid. as we had 4 climbers, we rappelled simultaneously in pairs.
On the descent, instead of leaving the way we came, we stayed more to the left (beta provided by the other 2 climbers). I think the quality of the descent was essentially the same (aka crappy), but it led us out slightly closer to the trail that we wanted to find before dark. Here I made a slight navigational error (i had read people went too far west an overcompensated i guess) and went too far east while descending, this led to probably an extra 20 minutes of hiking on the rim of the basin towards the trail. Our time estimates from before worked out pretty much as I had called it. We were on the trail about 20 minutes before sunset, and as such had all the navigationally challenging stuff out of the way before dark.
From the trail we cruised back (trail felt interminable) to the north lake trailhead, and were out before 1030.
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