A beautiful and moderate route up the First Creek Slabs. Once you step out onto the slab proper, its nothing but perfect climbing up a 600' crack, followed by easy face climbing and an exciting hand crack finish. Well worth doing!
Location
Start about 30 yards right of Rising Moons in an obvious gully that ends about 50' above the base of Rising Moons. Start up the dihedral on the right hand side of the gully before moving out left onto the slab near the bush on top of the buttress to your right.
This route allegedly benighted a young Joe Herbst early in his climbing career. Little is known about where the actual first ascent went up but it is believed to be close to what is described in the new Handren Guide.
The route was "rediscoved" by Larry and myself in 2006 and led to a flurry of new routes on the lower first creek slabs as well as the Labrynth wall above.
Jim Arnold and I climbed this route Saturday. The wall was ours, the only other party nearby was on Rising Moons. We climbed with twin 60 meter 8 mm ropes. It is important to set stations in the correct places. We set anchors at the ledge and tree at top of p1 instead of up the ramp on the right. Traversing up the ramp and setting pro before starting up the face creating lots of drag on the system.
Stations are not obvious and I felt that anchors we set were often 25 feet below where they should have been but we simply would have run out of rope. Despite these little wrinkles, the upper pitches on the wall are excellent. The long face prior to the final dihedral is a brilliant combination of rust and green lichen at a moderate grade.
We hit the summit around 4 pm. It is difficult to tell how to get to the descent gully. We did a thrash up to where I could see the snag Karsten described as a landmark and found the gully down. One of the gullies does not have rappel anchors and looked too dicey to scramble down. For expediency sake we set anchors at two rappel points with sewn webbing and biners for a rappel. Our hope is that future parties will let the stations remain to aid other climbers in making a safe descent.
To add a few things to Marc's summary. The climbing was generally very clean face climbing at a 5.4-5.5 grade. Gear can be had every 15 ft or more. The last pitch (the steeper crack) felt about 5.7 despite the recent guide supposedly saying it is 5.6.
Once on top we did thrash up from bushes etc until we found the dead snag and could easily climb up to the base of the upper wall. From there descend to the saddle. In the saddle is a large pine tree and a cairn makes the start of the descent. Down and right from the cairn a short ways is the first rappel (red sling off a small tree). A 200 ft rap leaves you at the second rap - red sling off a natural thread. Take this down another 200 ft. From there you can downclimb easily a short ways in an inset on the right. From there we set a new rap anchor off a wedged block with green sling. A 200 ft rap takes you down to the ledge with another rap anchor (blue sling off a tree). This new rap pulls pretty easily. Take the blue sling rap down another 200 ft or so. From here one can probably scramble down but since it was dark we set-up another rap off a dead tree that goes down 100-150 ft (over a fun hang and free rappel) and puts one on the terrace just to the right of Algae on Parade. This new rap also pulls quite easily.
This descent gully seems steeper and slicker than most and hopefully these 2 new raps will be deemed a worthy addition and left for future use.
Good route. Finding the start was not obvious. After climbing the pocketed face (cl. 3 - and way easier than it first looks), head to the far left side of the bush-covered area and locate a clean ledge below the big corner (~20' below a small pine). Climb the big corner ~30', then trend right along a featured slanting ramp. We belayed here, but next time will just simul-climb a bit in order to reach the good ledge 240' up. Also, as you climb straight up from the slanting ramp near the start, stay left. (I ended up in the middle of the face and had some exciting 5.7 moves to get back to the left...). After the good ledge near the left edge of the buttress, follow the crack. Maybe 450' of fun, easy, well-protected climbing. We simul-climbed this crack and set up a belay at a small ledge just below a varnished headwall. It might have been better to just keep going the 50' to the brushy ledge where you will step over to the face to the right. The next to last pitch is good face with limited pro. Stay right at the end and look for a short crack for the belay. The last handcrack is good, but a bit lichen-covered. Well-protected 5.7.
The new rap stations are great! We did this with a single 60m and felt fine about the downclimbing.
First Creek Slabs
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