7/21  Time for the mountains to remind us how puny we really are.  We get some ice cream and drive to Grand Teton National Park.

Not wanting to pay $20 for a camp site, we explore the Bridger-Teton National Forest.  Driving down the Gros Ventre Road, we find even the forest service campsites cost money, so we detour down a dirt road looking for a primitive campsite.  This turns out to be a mistake.  The narrow, wet, dirt road gets steadily steeper.  Soon the Subaru is tobogganing out of control down the road. Luckily the road flattens just enough for us to stop about 100 yards before a steep drop.  There I perform a deft 27 point u-turn and with much tire spinning we manage to get back up to the main road.  Didn't even have to put on the chains.  After that experience, we throw down our stuff in a pullout and spend the night.

7/22  Rest day waiting for the weather to clear.  We sort, clean and repair gear.  We even have intermittent WiFi at Donnegan's.  We also move to a really beautiful campsite with a decent driveway.

7/23  Early start to climb Disappointment Peak.  Starting at the Lupine Meadows trailhead at 6500' around 6am, we hike to Amphitheater Lake at 9600' arriving around 8:40am.  From there we scramble to the start of the East Ridge of Disappointment (5.6, 5 pitches).  Here Guy leads the left variation of p1 starting around 9:15am.  With a bit of simulclimbing this takes us to a large ledge where we scramble 150' to the base of the next pitch.  I get this pitch which has a fun finish on a dihedral.  Guy gets p3 and I stretch the next pitch to the top of the technical climbing.  This last pitch is the best of the bunch.  It has a ceiling split by a hand crack, reminiscent of Shockley's Ceiling at the Gunks, which I have climbed at least a dozen times since first climbing it back in Sophomore year.

We untie around 12:15pm and begin the long scramble to the 11,618' summit which we reach around 2pm.  After taking some pictures we begin our descent.  Skipping a snow filled col, we leave some webbing and do a 60m rappel which gets us past all the tricky downclimbing and snow.  We reach Amphitheater Lake at 4pm, treat some water, and hike back to the trailhead.  We reach the car at 6:30pm.  The climbing on Disappointment is fun, but it is mostly a hiking day with over 11 miles and 5000' of elevation.  At least our time in the Sawtooths (8000' to 10000' elevation) and City of Rocks (5500' to 7000' elevation)  has us reasonably well acclimated.

7/24  We sleep late, rest and recuperate.  We also head to the Jenny Lake Ranger Station to get a bivy permit for the Grand Teton.  The only permit we can get is for the Meadows at 9300'.  This turns out to be a real problem when we attempt the climb.

We continue our series of British Gangster movies by watching Snatch.  We could finish the trilogy with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but I saw that back in Sophomore year and don't like to do repeats (except for Juno and Superbad which I'll watch over and over).

7/25  Well rested, we wake early to hike from the Lupine Meadows trailhead into Garnet Canyon and bivy at the base of the Grand.  We start hiking at 8am.  We are both listening to Phillip Pullman's The Subtle Knife on our MP3 players (having already finished the Golden Compass while driving) and the five mile hike passes quickly.  Too quickly.  We reach the Meadows at 11am.  Now we have a whole day to kill.  So we decide to cache our climbing gear at the base of the Grand.  This way we will familiarize ourselves with the approach and will not have to carry gear the next morning.  We hike up to the Lower Saddle at 11,600' and cache our gear, then return to the Meadows.  Now it is 6pm and we are exhausted from hiking all day.  We go to sleep as soon as our bivy sacks are in the shade.

7/26  Awake at 4am for the Grand.  Since we know the approach and are not carrying anything, we set a fast pace for the Lower Saddle.  Still, it is a long hike and by the time we have collected our gear and reached the black dike it is 7:30am.  If we had a permit for Lower Saddle we would have been here three hours earlier.  Even so, 7:30am isn't terribly late and there is nothing to slow our progress towards the summit.  Our plan is to climb Exum Ridge (5.6) and off we go.  Making good progress, we climb above the cutover to Wall Street, the long ramp which leads to the start of Exum Ridge.  We realize this pretty quickly and are only about 300' above the cutover.  Still, we hate to lose any elevation and we decide to continue on Owen-Spaulding (5.4) instead of backtracking to Exum Ridge.

We continue up Owen-Spaulding making good progress and avoiding the helmet-less noobs showering rocks down the left gully.  Reaching the Upper Saddle at 10:30am, we take a short break.  We are at 13,160' which will be our high point for the entire summer trip.  Here begins the technical climbing on Owen-Spaulding.  As I'm putting on my climbing shoes, it starts to hail.  We can see that the storm will quickly pass and the rest of the sky looks clear.  But it is demoralizing.  We are exhausted from all the hiking in the past 26 hours, and we don't expect to reach the summit by our predetermined noon turnaround time.  Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, we head back down Owen-Spaulding (which is also the standard descent route for most climbs on the Grand).  We are back to our Meadows bivy at 4pm.

My tips if you want to climb the Grand: Get a bivy permit for Lower Saddle or Moraine. Platforms, Meadows and Caves are too low. Bring only a good pair of approach shoes (at least for Owen Spaulding and Exum Ridge, not sure about Exum Direct). You'll be happy to not carry the extra weight of rock shoes, but you will want really sticky rubber the whole day. Cache your ice axes as low as possible given the conditions. We could have left ours below the moraine at 10800' and instead carried them to well above 12000'. You will find plenty of water to treat along the way, especially up to the Lower Saddle. Never carry more than 1.5L at any time. One rope instead of doubles will cut weight, though the O-S rappels are a bit more tricky and bailing is harder.

On the balance, I'm glad we bailed.  Though certainly we could have summitted a bit after our turnaround time -- the weather stayed nice all day as was forecast -- we would have been completely exhausted and prone to making errors.  I've always felt little affinity for summits.  Honestly, I skipped the top of Bugaboo and would have skipped the top of Conness had Jason and Morri not demanded I come up for a group photo.  For me the point of climbing is to enjoy the climbing and the location and the friends.  So some day I'll get back on the Grand and reach the summit.  Or not.  It is a bit disappointing to have hiked for three days (with all of our climbing gear!) and not have climbed a single technical pitch.  But that's how climbing is sometimes.

7/27  We sleep as late as the sun allows.  Those bivy sacks heat up fast when absorbing solar radiation.  We putter around with breakfast and pack camp.  Then take our time hiking out.  Guy nearly walks into a bear on the trail about one mile from the trailhead.  My MP3 player has just enough battery... giving out about 15 minutes before I reach the car.

7/28  Rest and recuperation day.  I finish reading James Michener's Poland.  We take a very brief rinse in the frigidly cold river near our campsite.  Kelly hot springs (warm springs?) is only a few miles from where we are camped, but the spring is filled with algae and looks unappealing.  At night we power up the laptop and watch The Kingdom.

7/29  It has been six days since we tied into a rope.  Ridiculous!  We wake early and drive into the park to climb the South Face of Baxter's Pinnacle (5.9, 5 pitches).  The approach is reasonably short by Teton standards (still a few miles of hiking) and we reach the climb with no problem.  I lead pitches 1, 3 and 5; Guy takes pitches 2 and 4.  Pitch 5 starts with the 5.9 crux and is the best pitch I've climbed in the Tetons (which isn't saying much).  The descent involves a single rappel off the only fixed anchor we see anywhere in the park.  This is followed by a long walk down a very loose, dangerous gully.  Overall, the Tetons had too much hiking, exposed scrambling, loose rock and nasty descents for my taste.  The scenery is amazing, but I haven't found any stellar climbing.

I finish the Subtle Knife on the hike out.  We return to camp to find a note from the forest service mentioning the five day camping limit.  Ooops.  Ok, we plan to leave tomorrow morning anyhow.  We watch Clerks 2 on the laptop and spend our last night in the forest.

7/30  We pack the car, eat some ice cream, and drive to the Wind River Range where we find a beautiful spot to spend the night just a few miles down the road from the Big Sandy trailhead.

The Tetons really killed our progress towards Quota.  We only can count 10 pitches in 10 days.  Current Quota Status:

Pitches climbed so far: 64
Hours driven so far: 62