South Lookout Peak

Route: Via exposed ledge
Posted On: 8/18/2023, By: tdawg012
Info: Rain from last night softened things nicely. Doing this with dry hard-pan would be no bueno. After the 100ft or so descent from the ridge, I managed to avoid the scary gully and instead contoured around it with a little exposure on some slightly sloping ledges. There was enough room to feel secure here...maybe one class 3 move through a notch to the rib....I put a cairn or two for myself to mark this spot for my way down. I went up the infamous class 2+ rib to base of the summit. Class 4 as people say, nice holds. As always, check each hold on way up and down (the rib). No shame in butt scooting. With rain clouds all around I quickly reversed the route and found it slightly easier on the way down. I peeked at other possible routes on the way down the rib and they all looked spooky.. Take your time and enjoy if possible 

Route: East Face
Posted On: 6/28/2022, By: supranihilest
Info: TL;DR: summer conditions. We drove up to Clear Lake which is easy 4WD and requires moderate clearance. From there we took grass and scree northwest towards South Lookout's south summit, which is where the easy stuff ends and the route becomes serious. We did a descending traverse across scree and hardpan, losing about 100 feet or so as we made our way to the first rock rib below the summit. The dirt was mostly soft, we took advantage of the wet dirt around a couple of snow patches. Microspikes would be super helpful late season when the dirt has transitioned to hardpan, since a slip here might be unstoppable. We made our way towards but not all the way to a 15-foot spire at the bottom of the rib, rounding left around a corner and into a short gully. Scrambling began in earnest here. We climbed up the left wall of the gully on janky red rock, then made a few hairy, committing moves at about Class 3 onto more solid black rock covered in a layer of scree and dirt, which we did our best to scrape off by hand. This dirt layer covered almost everything on the route, and we cleaned going up and down. We then traversed right to the bottom of a Class 4 headwall with an obvious chimney-like feature, which was more solid and went at Class 4 for about 20 feet. Before topping out on the chimney we went a little more right up steep, loose, dirt covered ledges at Class 3. This part would be horrible to go down as it's exposed, downsloping, there's no real holds, and everything is loose and covered in dirt. I tried to buttscoot it on the way down and it was scary as hell. Once past this section there's about 100-150 feet of ascending on an easy but steep Class 2+ rib to the summit block. The summit block is actually quality rock, thankfully, and we climbed the obvious slabby dihedral at Class 4. Down climbing the summit block was a mix of facing in and out, descending the rib back to the top of the Class 4 headwall was easy, and instead of taking the scary route back down the downsloping, dirty Class 3 ledges we went a little to descender's left down more solid rock, then traversed on a 2-foot-wide ledge back to the top of the Class 4 chimney, which was easier to climb down facing out than climb up. The worst part of the climb was traversing back to the top of the short red gully because of the downsloping, dirt covered, trashy rock. Only like 15 feet but also scary. Down climbing the gully was easy and climbing back to the south summit and back to Clear Lake no problem.