The snow is lava: A trip report of Mount Muir’s East buttress

When I found out I was moving to southern California from the flatlands of the Midwest I decide a great moving gift to myself would be a climb of the highest mountain in the lower 48, Mount Whitney. After doming some research and getting very confused, I ended up entering the Whitney trail overnight lottery, I didn’t win. But on checking the recreation.gov site after receiving my consolation email, I was amazed to see 2 overnight slots open when I refreshed the page for a Saturday over the memorial day weekend, I made the reservation immediately. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when I was interested in doing something more interesting than the class 1 trail, that I realized I needed a different permit(north fork of the pine creek) to camp at the base of the more technical routes to the Whitney summit. Thus I began searching for alternatives and found a 4th class route up Mount Muir.
Further research on this route yielded little more than a bunch of forum post complaining about getting off route and into easier 5th class terrain, so I decided to plan to climb with a light alpine rack, and pick my own adventure up the east buttress.

Day One: the hike to trail camp

After spending the day before playing in the Alabama Hills, and utilizing the free camping sites there, myself and Sarah packed up our bags, topped off our water bottles and drove up to the Whitney portal to start the hike to trail camp. We made trail camp in 6 hours, and realized that it would be wise in the future to invest in actual backpacking camping gear as opposed to carrying 60lbs packs webbing strapped car camping gear. We spent the rest of the afternoon explain to hikers that we had not seen the missing members of their respective parties, and watching the interesting methods of glaciaiding occurring on the snow field next to the still snow covered 99 switch backs.

Day Two: the climb

We woke up at 5:30 as soon as the sun broke the horizon and lit up the tent. Having spent the previous day watching the hikers returning down the snow field, and having seen the remaining snow to the base of the east buttress, we left the ice axes in the tent and set out across the talus with climbing gear, a liter of water each, and food.
The talus scrabbling was easy, and after 30mins we were at the base of the buttress and decided to gear up. However we decided to wait to rope up since it was suggested that all of the 5th class was after half way up. In hind sight pitching out the toe of the buttress would have been wise as the 4th class path was under the snow. Being early in the season, there was still significant amounts of snow in the gullies and being in climbing shoes we opted to stay dry and kept to the ridge crest.

After the initial scary free solo at the tow of the buttress, the climbing eased back to 4th class along the ridge line, and we made quick vertical progress until we reached a headwall.

The head wall appeared to have climbable options on all sides, but after seeing a rap sling on the south side of the ridge, and an attractive looking dihedral I went climbers left. The dihedral turned out to be of poor rock, but fortunately there was a good hand sized crack a few feet past it, which lead to the top of the headwall.

From here we stayed roped up mostly for convenience, and simul-climbed along the ridge until we found a chimney. Unsure if this was the chimney described that lead to the top of the first tower, and not wanting to post hole through snow, we deiced to pitch out the wall In front of us. In the spirit of avoiding the snow, I hopped across some exposed boulders to the wall, and climbed up under a roof, and then traversed left into the chimney. The chimney proper proved wet and icy, but the face just outside had plenty of cracks running at 45 degree angles and protected well, leading me to the top of the chimney and easier climbing until the ridgeline flattened out again. Form here we could see the wall and chimney described in the 5.7 variation.


As we approached the 5.7 variation, it became clear that we would be belaying in snow as the gully below the wall was still filled so we opted to do a short section of 55ish face climbing up a small buttress to the left, followed by 3 class scrabbling up to an alcove at the base of an icy off width. The scrabbling had brought us to roughly the same height as the top of the second tower, but had placed us on the wrong side as recommended for the 4th class route.

After a short lunch break we decided to try our luck with the off width and were rewarded as it narrowed into a hand crack in a dihedral after 40ft of climbing. After most of a rope length the dihedral ended with a traverse left under a roof, to a wide flat ledge at the base of a steep talus slope.
From this point we knew the summit was up and headed up the talus slope aiming for a weakness in the wall above us.

5.easy climbing through the weakness in the wall put us directly below the summit block after an interesting chimney squeeze and quick boulder problem to gain the summit from the east side, we signed the register, ate some candy and debated the decent. The original plan had been to walk over the mile and tag the summit of Whitney, but with some delays due to route finding, and a desire to eat non dehydrated food, we skipped Whitney and headed back down the 3rd class west approach of Muir to the hikers trail.
The trail went fast, and we found ourselves at the trail crest in less than 20 mins. From here we post holed out across were the trail should have and attempted to followed the somewhat exposed switchbacks down. After 2 switch backs, we decided that the snow field looked more fun, and very quickly descend the 1500 feet back to trail camp and got very wet in the process.
We made it back to our tent an hour after we left the summit, ate some more snacks, and drank the water we had left there, and proceeded to break down camp and pack up, while getting weird looks from passing hikers as our clothes laid on sunny rocks to dry. Personally I don’t think there is anything wrong with being in your underwear on top of a mountain.

The decent down the trail took about 3.5 hours, and we walked back through the portal just after dusk. To our disappointment, the portal store was closed, so we drove back to lone pine and had delicious elk burgers and milk shakes at the Mount Whitney restaurant.

Gear:
Cams one set 00-3in
One set of Nuts
Lots of slings
1 70m rope

Thoughts:
The East buttress is very much a “choose your own adventure” in terms of difficulty. The ridge is broken up often into roughly single rope pitch length section that often appears to have various paths to climb. The south face of the buttress tended to have the longest clean face sections, typically defined by their less than vertical nature and abundant crack systems. Staying on the south face of the east buttress could result in many more technical pitches then we did on the ridge line. I also agree with some of the comments I have seen in that an entirely 4th class route doesn’t exist unless you consider 5.easy to 5.4 to be 4th class.