Wolf Rock

Five of us set out to tackle the 900-foot monolith that is the mighty Wolf Rock. It juts out of the forest like a monstrous shark's tooth, just begging to be climbed.

The climb itself is about seven pitches of 5.7-5.9 rock. Pretty good quality rock, though loose in spots, and with mostly well-placed and trustworthy bolts and anchors. But... high. Really high. Really scary.

We got a bit of a late start, after the long drive down past Sweet Home. It must have been noon before we placed hands on the rock (note - I think at least some of the timestamps on the pictures are wrong).

I led the first pitch, based on what information we had in the guidebooks, but it turned into a double-pitch because I couldn't find the intermediate anchor. I had to bring up some more quick-draws on the rope because I didn't go up with enough. I did fall one time, pretty far up from my last protection, when I broke out some loose rock, but it was a gentle and uneventful fall. I couldn't find the second anchor either, so I set one up using a single bolt and webbing around a rock for redundancy.

Ty came up next, and I had to catch him twice. It took me a second, because I wasn't expecting him to fall (um, duh... but I had him). That started to unnerve me; I mean, I had faith in all my anchors and systems, and we were doing everything safely... weren't we? Wasn't I? I kept rechecking everything again and again, nervously. At 150 feet, there are no small mistakes.

We brought the other three up without incident, and Nathan led the next pitch, up to a tiny ledge with a good anchor. Ty followed, and then me, and at that point we decided we weren't going to continue further. It was nearing 4pm, sun was setting around 6, and I was just getting too freaked out. I hadn't had problems with heights before, but somewhere in there my instinct kicked in, and I was concerned that I wasn't in the right frame of mind to be setting up technical protection for my team.

We offered to Tyler and Peter, still at the anchor below, to climb that upper pitch, but they declined. I was happy to be setting up the rappel and even happier when all ten of our feet were back on the ground.

Second Attempt

Of course we couldn't let it go at that, so we went back a couple weeks later to give it another try. This time we went with just Ty, Nathan, and myself, to see if we could do better with a smaller team and less to worry about. Nathan did all the leading.

We started around noon, again later that we should have, but as the afternoon waned, we just kept pushing on. It looked like we would be topping out (at about 600 feet) right around dusk, and accoring to the beta we had, there was an easy trail down that we could easily negotiate in the dark.

All that went exactly like that. Exactly. We scrambled the last pitch with just a few rays of daylight left, and topped out to find... no trail. Just cliffs and steep gulleys. And we discovered that Ty had not brought a headlamp, and only prescription sunglasses, leaving him utterly blind.

There was no apparent good way down. We decided that the trail must be above, so we picked and scrambled our way up 400 feet or 4th-class rock, lighting Ty's way as best we could with our headlamps. When we couldn't get any further up, we still couldn't find a trail, and we figured the chances were good that we would be spending the night up there and finding the trail in the morning, so we made a few calls home.

Then we picked our way along the summit ridge toward the apparent real summit. It looked intimidating in the starlight, but there turned out to be good scrambling routes with no exposure. Still no trail. We found the summit, with a marker and a summit log. Still no trail.

We knew it went down one of these gulleys to the southwest, but which one? Any one of them could top out at a cliff, and no further passage. Several times we thought we had it, but then went to the next ridge and the next gulley looked better. Finally we found a cairn, and celebrated. Certainly this was our trail! It was... not much of a trail, but feet had been there before, so we started descending that gulley. Ty spent a good amount of the descent sliding on his butt to make sure he knew where the mountain was.

Before long we lost the trail. I'm not sure it really was a trail. That was some bullshit cairn, man. But now we were too far down the gulley to turn back, so we pressed on. Down was good.

Soon we came to a cliff we couldn't downclimb, but it wasn't too far. We slung a rope and rapped down it.

Then we found another, with a little waterfall. We rapped that one too.

Then we found another, also a waterfall, but this one was too far down to see the bottom in the dark. We tried to find a way around it, but couldn't. Finally we decided just to go for it, and making sure I was prepared to prusik back up the rope if necessary, I rapped off into the darkness.

I came to (of course, the knot at) the end of the rope, and there was a little ledge I could stand on, but nothing to anchor to. There was a small tree, but not big enough to trust your weight on. No more rope. But I managed to traverse over to the edge of the cliff, where it met the gulley, and it was not too steep, so I was able to detach from the rope and scramble down the last 30 or 40 feet.

From there, it turned to jungle. No more trail. No more clear mountainside terrain. Just dense bushwhacking, often with the only clear path right down the trickle of a stream. We fought through that for about an hour, finally finding the road we expected at the bottom. A short walk back to the car, and we were home free!

13 hours on the mountain, and almost had to spend the night. Now, that's what I call adventure! Ty didn't seem to think it was quite so fun.

My next plan is to find the trail and go up it from the bottom, so I'll know where to find it from the top. And I think starting a little earlier would be a good idea. But I don't think Wolf Rock has seen the last of my ugly mug!