Tranquility Tower Rock Climbing

Tranquility Tower looms over the valley as you drive upriver around the corner from French Gulch. It’s the tower with the smooth, dark-gray north face high above the river just past Mother’s Day Wall. As you approach from the south, however, it looks short and uninspiring, broken by ledges and lots of mahogany bushes. This aspect changes as you cross the divide and drop onto the east and north faces of the tower. 12 sport routes have been developed in three sectors:

Sunny Side: From the narrow pass you encounter this east-facing area first as you drop down the gully. It’s a smooth gray slab with five routes. It faces east and gets sun from early morning through mid-late afternoon depending on the time of year. When the sun is low in late Oct-Nov, belays in the gully are in the shadow of the tower to the south. It can be chilly.

Northeast Face: Continuing around the tower from Sunny Side you drop in elevation a bit and cross over a bedrock spur. The narrow northeast face has three routes, including the prominent arete on the right side that demarcates the east and north faces of the tower. It gets sun early and goes into the shade earlier in the afternoon than the neighboring Sunny Side area.

North Face: Continue around from the northeast face onto ledges below the imposing north face where you will find four long sport routes perched high above the river. This face is in the shade all day all year.

The 2024 Durkee Fire thoroughly incinerated a thick stand of mountain mahogany that filled the gully below Sunny Side and the northeast face and torched the large Douglas-fir that was a prominent feature on the north face ledge. Heat generated by the mahogany scorched the lower part Sunny Side slab, blistering the smooth rock. You can see where many thin flakes exfoliated from the surface, especially the three routes on the right side, from Fried over to Rack’em & Crack’em. The same thing happened on parts of the South Face of French Gulch Buttress during a 2015 fire. Luckily this doesn’t affect the climbing too much. Hand and foot holds are largely intact but peeling flakes could be a factor in places. Be aware.