So I’ve done absolutely no climbing since April due to torn cartilage in my wrist. Big bummer. Got the word from the doc that I could take my wrist splint off and ease back into doing stuff again. Perfect!

So what do I go and do? Hell … let’s go to the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range. That sounds like a grand idea (not so smart are you Scott?). Anyhow, myself and six other dudes went back into the wilderness to get a good dose of scare-the-crap-out-of-yourself.

Brendan, Luke, Travers, Mike and I were climbing; Ryan and Dan were only there to fish. It was a good crew, although Brendan was sick going in, had to bail on the first climbing day and ended up giving most of us his mung by the end of the trip.

Our main objective was the uber classic East Ridge of Wolf’s Head (5.6 grade III). It’s also one of the 50 classic climbs of North America, which also makes it one of the 50 most crowded climbs of North America. A couple years ago my good friend Shane and I tried to climb this and got stormed off the route, my apologies Shane for going back without you.

Anyhow, the route was … exciting. The climbing wasn’t technically hard at all. I mean it’s only 5.6 right? Standing on a ledge that’s three feet off the ground is easy, but how about standing on a ledge that’s about 1,000 feet off the ground? Is it easy anymore? So the route was nauseatingly exposed the entire way, I can’t really explain how exposed it was to make people really understand. Sometimes it made you sick to your stomach.

It starts off by scrambling up some high grassy ledges with a few 5.4 moves until you reach the saddle of the ridge. Immediately upon arriving at the saddle, the edge promptly drops 1,000 feet or more to a basin on the other side. And this edge is no slope, it’s nearly a vertical drop to the basin floor!

The route from the saddle to summit is only about a 400 foot gain (Wolf’s Head tops out at just over 12,000 feet), but there are nine to 10 pitches on the route, which means there’s a lot of traversing and the traversing involved lots of 5.6 slab traversing. There were tiny ledges on steep walls with no handholds and barely any protection, hand traverses with little or no feet on steep walls. Plus the volumous chasm gaping below.

This does funny things to the human psyche. To put it this way, after the lower 30 slab, we were all like “man that was crazy, wow, pretty exposed” kinda laughing about it. Later the only thing coming from our mouths in very dark somber tones was “umm, that was f**ked up.…”

We started out making fun of the leader when they were taking such a long time to lead a pitch, “dude, whatsa matter, 5.6 sketching you out! Ha, hurry up.”

That was until we followed the line, no more laughing. We were all a bunch of sissies. So we traversed in and out of the towers on Wolf’s Head, marveling at the huge exposure, the friction traverses, the narrow slots and not so graceful chimneys. I’d explain the route more in detail, but I think my brain is trying to erase the details to somehow prevent future nightmares. We finally had made it to the summit tower, the views were incredible, we were all stoked.

The descent was a long one: six rappels and a bit of down climbing, but nowhere near as bad as most route descriptions had warned, nor as scary as the climb itself.

When we made it back to camp, we all stared at the spikey granite ridge while Ryan cooked us up the fish he caught.

The next day we went to Pingora and climbed the K cracks on the southeast face which goes at 5.7-5.8, a pretty non-committal route but damn good climbing. Nowhere near as heady as the 5.6 traverses though. Unfortunately a storm rolled in and cut our climbing day short so we went back down to camp and hung out, stared at Wolf’s Head some more and talked about more routes we wanted to do.

Next day, we packed up our belongings and made the 10 mile hike back out. Back at the trailhead we managed to pack us six guys and all our gear in the my not-so-big truck and started the three hour journey back to Jackson.

You can get more pics and info on Wolf’s head (as well as other climbing routes in the Cirque) on www.summitpost.org.