A beautiful (and painful) adventure up the South East Face of Whorl. A surprising success despite misdirection and patellar bruises.
Starting out in the morning, from twin lakes
Trail, and view back to twin lakes
Hello, snow!
I wonder what this is! Impressive and enticing!
Despite some ominous clouds, no thunder or bad weather materialized (yay!)
Around here we discovered that we were, in fact, scaling the wrong pass, and the one we wanted was off in the distance seen in the previous photograph.
Living on the wild side, not filtering the water before drinking!
Somewhere right between these two photographs, when we were about to enter chute #1, I fell on some third class climbing. My foot slipped on a step, and I’m profusely thankful to the shrubby pine tree that provided a nice hand hold to avoid the 20ft fall. My knee, however, was not so lucky as it slammed in to a rock. At first I thought I had shattered my patella (dramatic, I know), but after a minute or two of whimpering I felt the patella, and although sore, it was fully intact.
I found I could limp, and could limp out myself vs. calling a rescue. Since we were so very close to our end goal, and just entering the really cool climbing, Erik graciously (and eagerly) volunteered to scout ahead to access the climbing difficulty. Knowing I’m a puppy who would follow someone who walks away, and resist a direct attempt to convince me to go on… he started upward. I couldn’t help but to follow, limping up chute #1 with tears of pain slightly overshadowed by the amazing climbing and terrain.
Some of the amazing natural sidewalks and natural passageways that allowed us to wiggle through amazing, and intimidating terrain
Tiny Erik on a false summit, oops another misdirection!
Finally at the top! Never thought it would happen. What is that? You mean now I have to go down too?
On our way down. Here is the famous chockstone that blocks chute #3. You can see Erik coming out through the unlikely tunnel that allows access to the peak.
Looking down chute #3
Erik walking off in the sunset. Our decent *only* took about 7 hours thanks to my bum knee!
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