Up the next morning bright and early and we headed to the outlet of Lake 33. We had a great view of our objective for the day, the nice round peak in the middle of the image. The plan was simple, drop down this valley, go up and over the small ridge in front of the peak, drop into the next drainage, then head up to the saddle on the right of the peak, voila! Mike Tyson had a great quote, “Everybody has a plan until they get hit”
The first part of the plan went fairly well, drop into the valley….. then, the trip up and over the first ridge was a slide alder beat down. No images from that section as we were swimming uphill in the brush and nastiness! At least we were now looking down at the last basin, the peak is behind the crooked tree. Up next… drop as little as possible then hit the ridge center image and press up the ridge to the peak.
Here is a slightly different view. John is center image and that is Mount Horrendous above. Make sure you check out our climb of that mountain from last year: https://davefaitlemonde.com/2019/07/07/mount-horrendous-and-the-spear-valley-county-idaho-day-1-and-2/ For now, we will skirt in the trees under the cliffs and up the shoot just left of Mount Horrendous.
Here is the shoot looking back down. That is John in four wheel drive mode. We had to take turns going up to avoid kicking rocks down on each other. If only pictures could relate the steepness. It was full on pucker!
Summit!!! Once on the ridge, the last 400 feet of vertical was pretty straight forward and it even had this nice summit rock for John to scurry up.
View from the top.
Snow! After spending a few emotional moments at the top talking about John’s accomplishment of bagging ALL the peaks in this area. We had lunch and formulated our return to camp which did not include Slide Alder City! We decided to retrace our path from last year around the east flank of The Spear and Mount Horrendous. Although longer, we both agreed that the effort would likely be easier.
This is the view dropping down the shoulder of Fitsum Peak looking back at Mount Horrendous. Mount Heinous is off it’s left shoulder, barely visible.
After almost 9 hours, we were back at camp with a peaceful easy feeling!!! We were a little tired! Ya’ll come back now!
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