Cirque Traverse Report - Part Two

Continued from Part One.

After Pingora, you get up around 12,000 feet and stay there for most of the day, a fact that wasn't doing anything for our speed. Even still, we had plenty of daylight left and a full moon coming after that, so as long as we could will our legs to keep working, things were looking good. Here's Ari rapping off the Sharks Nose.



Yours truly on the summit of Block Tower. Block Tower sports an easy, if grovelly chimney, and would be the last of the technical peaks. After that, we had to rap into and ascend out of your garden variety loose death gulley, and then we'd put the climbing gear away and begin the enduro hiking festival™.



The Cirque



#10, South Watchtower(I think). With the sun going down, we would still have to hit Pylon Peak(to the right), drop down to a water source of questionable quality, then hike up Warrior I (in the sun on the left), and then across to the Warbonnet.



Ari hitting the Sending Sauce™, and me a little whacked out, but stoked. I have to plug the sweet Mountain Hardwear Transition Jacket. I'm not a gear geek, but Mountain Hardwear killed it with this one.




So, once the sun went down, the moon came up and we made it to the Warbonnet at about 11:30 on saturday night. Unfortunately in our stupor we got suckered onto a sub peak, and not the true summit and turned around when the climbing (in our tennies and no rope) got too hairball. We reluctantly decided that was good enough, and started the long walk (about 3.5 hours) back to the car. After going cross country through the wilderness we stumbled into the parking lot at 3:30 am, 23.5 hours after leaving (and 10 hrs slower than the record set by Dave Anderson!). It took a while (and a handful of vitamin I) for the pain in my knees and feet to recede before I realized how much fun that had just been.



p.s. Of course the whole point of this was to make it back to see Sonvolt and Alejandro Escovedo at Red Butte Gardens Sunday evening. It was a great show and the beers tasted especially good that night...

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