Wyoming Trip

Matt, Mike, and I recently did some climbing out in Wyoming and a little in South Dakota as well. We had a great time mountaineering on the Grand Teton and rock climbing at Devil's Tower and the Needles.

We drove through the night for 16 hours to Grand Teton National Park. After we found a campsite at Jenny Lake, we unloaded the gear and prepared for climbing the following day. It was a good stop for a little acclimatization.

We woke up later than we wanted to the next day and didn't get to the trailhead until about 7AM. We hiked through forest on a nice trail for the first few hours until reaching the snow field in Garnet Canyon. We continued on until about 3PM and made camp just below the lower saddle. We went to bed around 5 or 6PM that night.

At 2AM we were up for an "alpine start" (pre-dawn). We climbed the Lower Saddle headwall and then traversed over to the Stettner Couloir. The climbing was excellent in the cold, hard snow. The Stettner, which is a mixed snow, ice, and rock climb, did not have as much ice in it as other years to our dismay.

We climbed out of the Stettner late in the morning and began the slog up the final snowfield to the summit. The sun had been beating on this part of the mountain all morning and the snow was very soft. It made climbing difficult and slow because we sink in, sometimes to our hips, after each step.

After a long, hard afternoon, we finally summitted and began the descent. Mike did a great job route-finding, and we located the rappel anchors to the Upper Saddle without much problem. However, the descent from the Upper Saddle to the Lower Saddle was more difficult and we ended up back in camp at about 10PM. It was quite a long day.

After a good night's sleep and a late wake-up, we headed down to the car. We found that rodents had chewed through some wiring and the car wouldn't start. It was towed to Jackson, where we spent an addition two days waiting for the repairs. It was a good rest, though.

We left Jackson and headed to Devil's Tower. We had planned to spend a day scouting and maybe doing some light climbing. When we got to the base of the route we were scouting, The Durrance Route, we decided to just climb it right then.

We had another group ahead of us on the route and ended up waiting at a few of the belay ledges. The climbing was great, though, and the route was easily protected with cams and nuts. We summitted at about 4PM after 6 hours on the route and descended. We made a quick camp-meal in the parking lot and decided to knock-out a drive to Custer State Park that evening.

The next morning we climbed a little in the Needles before it started raining. We climbed the well-known Needle's Eye formation, but were shut-down near the top and didn't summit. After two big successes (for us, at least) already, we didn't worry about it too much. We just viewed it as a reason to make another trip out to that area.

Climbing the snow ridge approaching the final snowfield.


The three summiteers.

Mike rappeling off of Devil's Tower.