7/4/2024 Route: Southeast Ridge from Peak Four Posted On: 7/7/2024, By: supranihilest Info: The traverse from Four to the Heisspitz is very time consuming and tedious with lots of scrambling. There are no easy descents. Make sure you have the time and weather. From Four we attempted to scramble the ridge and realized we were just wasting too much time, so we descended to the south side of the ridge and traversed more grassy ledges. This was still very time consuming and took a lot of route finding to get the easiest line. Soon after leaving Four's summit, as the ridge descends to the saddle, we were forced to scramble down Class 3 ledges to avoid the Class 5 ridge direct. We continued scrambling at Class 3 over the next series of ridge bumps and down to the next major saddle. At this saddle we scrambled up the final Class 3 to the narrow southeast ridge. The ridge rises precipitously and narrows quite dramatically. Sustained Class 3 with two short sections of Class 4 directly up the ridge led to the summit. The rock on the ridge is solid and exposure is high but the scrambling is fun and never too hard. We also scrambled over to the west summit which entailed some Class 2+ down climbing to the mini-saddle in between, then traversing and climbing on Class 2+ ledges up the north side to the second summit. From each one the other appeared higher and LiDAR apparently only found a one foot difference so it's prudent to tag both. We scrambled back to the east summit before making our descent. From the east summit we carefully scrambled down the southeast ridge again, then scrambled over the points labeled 13,085 and 13,206 on Forest Service maps. This is the saddle directly west of Peak Four. A steep but reasonable gully descends from here all the way to the creek. While steep, junky, and overall unpleasant it looked from below like it was a lot better than other options closer to the Heisspitz, and near the bottom we were able to escape into the forest which wasn't an option farther west. This descent deposited us right at our camp meadow as well. The gully farther west would drop one at Jagged Cabin. Beware the rabbit living in the camping meadow, it shredded both of my packs, the handle on my trekking pole, and several of my companion's tent guy-lines. |
