Ingalls Peak, South Ridge
Sunday, August 29, 2004.. With Alex M.
Alex was supposed to be home by 6:00 for a dinner party, so I swung by his place at around 5:00 AM, and we loaded up the Escort and headed east on I-90.
The first problem was taking the wrong exit: we took the Roslyn-Salmon la sac exit, and drove through Roslyn and a few miles onto the lake road before realizing out mistake. I blame Alex. He was navigating, reading the approach notes from the first Nelson volume, and in there, Mt. Daniel proceeds Ingalls, so he inadvertently started reading the Daniel approach information. I like to think that if I'd been navigating, I would have caught it, but maybe not.
Anyhow, by the time we caught the error and turned around, we lost about an hour. Took the Cle Elum exit, headed up the Tananum River road, up to the Longs Pass trailhead, where I'd last been in 1995, got into our boots and split up the gear, and headed up the trail.
It's interesting how, as soon as you get east of the rain shadow, the vegitation changes. Here on the Tananum road, the trees are all Ponderosa Pine; to the west it's solid Doug Fir and Cedar.
Our plan at this point was to do the S. ridge, three pitches of 5.4 climbing which I figured would take us rather less than an hour, then rap down and hit the east ridge, a stiffer 5.7 climb that would be more challenging for me.
View of Ingalls Peak from the pass. The south ridge of the north peak (the objective) is the left-hand ridge of the peak in the center of the photo; the south peak, which we climbed first, is the left-most peak. Despite the angle, it's not as high as the north peak.
Took about an hour and a half to get to Ingalls Pass, and headed down into the valley and followed the trail up to the base of the climb. We made it up the miserable scree following faint boot tracks to the base of the climb. It didn't look much like the photo from the book, and didn't look much like a clean 5.4 climb, and even the big rocks at the base didn't look like the "dog tooth crags" we'd seen from Ingalls Pass.
So, we dropped our packs at the base and headed up, trying to pick out a route that looked sort of clean and interesting. It was good practice putting in pro, I suppose, and a nice warmup and confidence-builder for Alex, but not very challenging climbing, very dirty with lots of scree and junk. I had left my rock shoes behind, climbing in my Salomon trail shoes, figuring it was "only 5.4" so I might as well give myself a little challenge.
Once at the top, we realized our error. We'd climbed the south ridge of SOUTH Ingalls Peak, not North Ingalls, which is the route we were looking for. From the summit, we looked down on the ridge, which looked exactly like Nelson's photo except that it was swarming with climbers. A guy we ran into on the summit of the s. peak said there was a party of eight Mountaineers and another party of five, and yet another Mountaineers party, which was supposed to be on Schuksan.
So, I bundled the rope into a pack coil and put it on, and we downclimbed the mountain and made it up to the base of the proper climb.
We waited a good half hour or more for our turn to start up, and my misgivings only increased. Though it's called a ridge, it's really a face -- a narrow face, but a face nonetheless, a flat slab of rock pitched about 20 degrees from vertical, with a couple cracks running through it, but no other features. THe crack everyone seemed to be climbing was a really thin one right up the middle. I didn't see how I'd be able to get up that crack, particularly with my wide, sloppy shoes, which were starting to feel more like clown shoes than climbing shoes.
So we sat there, chilly in the brisk wind, in my t-shirt and shorts, until it was our turn. I set up a belay for Alex and headed up.
By the time I was 2/3 up the first slab, I was in trouble. I couldn't edge with these shoes at all, the tread would just slip right off the feature, and when I tried a foot jam, my right ankle which I sprained two YEARS ago hurt like hell. There was no way I could put any weight on it.
I tried a couple more times, looking for handholds to make up for my inadequite footgear, but it was impossible. Finally I put in another cam and had Alex lower me down, completely defeated and my ankle hurting like hell. It was like there was a knife blade jammed in there between the ankle bones.
After giving it a rest, I headed up the wider crack to the left, which was much easier going, and got up above the pro I'd been lowered from, until I got to a good stance, and so I waited there until a member of the party behind us followed up the narrow crack (in leather boots!!!) and popped off my two cams on the thin crack. With the reduced rope drag, I was able to go further, until I ran out of slings at the lowest rapel anchor, and put in a belay anchor, and brought Alex up.
Alex did very well, coming up the crack and cleaning the gear as he came.
I did the next pitch even uglier, having to drag myself up the rapel rope of the Mountie group, since I simply could not do the climb in those damned shoes. I would have been better off in my plastic boots, I think. But we did the third pitch with no problem, and scrambled up to the summit, where we chatted with the two guys who'd come up with us (one guy was named Gordon) and then, after the obligatory summit photos, we did the rapel down.
We shared ropes: they rigged their rope for the first rapel, and took my rope down to rig the second, so we were able to "leapfrog" down. I think the time savings were a lot more for Alex and me than for them, but they were good sports about it.
Then, at the dogs tooth crags, we said goodbye to the other party, bundled my rope back into a pack coil, and headed back up the S. peak. By this time I hadn't had anything to drink for several hours, besides a few swallows of Alex's gatorade, and I really wanted some water to wash out my mouth. I was really looking forward to getting to our packs, in other words. Besides, the day was getting on, and we were clearly not going to be home anything like on time.
The s. peak isn't a difficult scramble up, and we managed to descend fairly easily, found our packs after some panicked searching, and headed off down the scree and slabs.
We ran into a couple of guys, probably father and son, who were camping there at the upper basin, a beautiful spot, like an oasis of green surrounded by dead read rocks. Then on, up over Ingalls Pass, and down the trail to the car, about twice as far, I'm sure, as we hiked up.
Alex had brought a couple of Fosters cans along, and although I don't care much for warm beer, it did a pretty nice job of setting my attitude. The drive was long, but okay, and I got home, after dropping off Alex, well after 11:00.
Geology notes: Ingalls Peak is peridotite. This is the same rock as North Twin, which is part of why I figured it'd so easy; the rock on North Twin was just a joy. However, Peridotite is a variety of Olivine, "which is a common mineral in the basalts... that make up the oceanic crust. It is found in all compositions between pure magnesium silicate (forsterite) and pure iron silicate (fayalite), and olivine composition is often given as a number from zero to 100, where 100 is pure fayalite. Forsterite is white and fayalite is dark brown, but olivine is usually green." (from http://geology.about.com/library/bl/images/blolivine.htm)
This is interesting because there were spots of whitish rock that I thought looked like chalk, and which seemed to erode out fairly readily, and a piece of which I picked up and took with me. Apparently that was forsterite. The rock on North Twin is apparently fayalite.
Anyhow, Olivine metamorphoses into serpentine, a greenish rock that's quite slippery -- the name comes from its resemblance to a serpent's skin, though to me it feels more like soap. The right side of the first slab was serpentine, and there was lots of serpentine scattered all over on the climb, treacherous and slippery, including right below the top rap station.
I'm surprised the route descriptions don't mention this: it seems to me like a much more difficult climb than 5.4, though perhaps with my rock shoes I wouldn't have thought so. Anyhow, the gelogic research afterwards was pretty fascinating; I feel like Ingalls would be a more interesting geology field trip than a climbing location. I wish I'd had Russ or Fred along, geologists who could have explained what we were seeing as we went along.
Part of what makes this interesting is that peridotite is a sea floor rock, but the Stuart range, a mile away, is a granite massif. Makes you believe in continental drift.
Equipment notes: Bring more slings than you think you'll need. I ran out more than once, and had to resort to the quickdraws I'd brought.
One good thing; this is the first two-summit day for me, the first time I've done two named summits in one day (three, if you count traversing back over s. Ingalls.) Also, my first experience with a "Mountie storm." They were nice enough people, perfectly friendly and considerate, and didn't seem to be particularly unsafe, but the idea of taking a group of eight people up a climb this small seems kind of ill-advised, and when there's three different groups of Mountaineers, along with the other people (like us) well, that's what makes a "cf."