Re: Of Life and Rocks

Richard — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 19:59:06 GMT

**** you make me JEALOUS

Of Life and Rocks

Terra Dumont — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 20:34:16 GMT

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Of Life and Rocks

Telecom Tower – Double Cone – Single Cone Grand Traverse

Aaron Ferenci and Terra Dumont

November 9^th 2010

The Lake Alta Cirque is one of my favorite places for climbing, especially when I only have a day or don’t feel like an epic trip. Easy access, nice rock, beautiful views, it has it all. Aaron and I went for a day walk up to the saddle and both felt inspired to do the ridge, so decided to come back the next day and do it. I had already done the traverse once, the summer before, but was keen to do it again.

We packed a light rack (3 cams, 4 wires, 4 quick draws, some cord to rap off of and one half rope) just incase – last time I had done it without a rope, but with a bit more snow around things could be different. The first part of the ridge up until about half way up Double Cone is quite straightforward – easy though exposed scrambling. Then comes what I find to be the crux – a ~ 10 m vertical section that would be grade 15 or less, just very high up! After that there are a few more steep sections before toping out on Double Cone – with a view of Mt. Cook, Mt. Aspiring, Mt. Earnslaw, Mt. Tutuko…. We then dropped down then started up Single Cone. This involved crossing some soft, steep snow slopes, which Aaron found understandably interesting in his running shoes. We jumped back on rock as soon as possible, and finished scrambling to our next summit. We enjoyed a lovely lunch, before heading down. We tried down climbing, but given I’m not a strong down-climber and the slopes we where about to dismount on looked very avalanche prone, we went back up, found the rap anchors and rapped off. Once reaching stable snow slopes we pulled out my pack liner and enjoyed some quality tobogganing.

Terra :)

Trip Reports

Re: Of Life and Rocks

Of Life and Rocks