Whitney East Butress 9/4/16

[Beantown]

9/1 i drove up to lone pine at night and camped in the A hills, after getting my lifted jeep unstuck on a rock i drove over landing my rear diff on it, i went to sleep. Friday morning i went to try and get a walk in permit at 8am, i got #5 out of 25 but nothing available for overnight on the north fork, at 11am my friend and I went back to try our luck again and we scored an overnight for the north fork for 9/3-9/4. The rest of the day we climbed in the A hills, that settled my nerves for the upcoming 1,000 foot vertical climb up the butt I was going to lead.

the hike in on 9/3 was uneventful to iceberg lake, we got there around 3pm and stared at the route for a while. we cowboy camped it and the temp was 25 degrees when we got up at 3:45 am. We hiked up to the base of the climb by headlamp and as we called out on belay at 6am the sun was just starting to come over the horizon. The climb was fantastic, our 2nd sierra climb (we did mt sill the swiss arete a month and a half before). Lots of good 5.5-5.6 anda few 5.7 sections of solid climbing followed by easy 4th and low 5th sections i was able to run them out comfortably saving time. we did 7 pitches, 2 were 60m rope stretches, and we soloed the final 300 feet to the summit through easy 3rd/4th and a little low 5th class. We had the route to ourselves, and saw another party on the east face. we summited at about 12:45, then went down the MR and that took us 2 hours to get back to iceberg, we hiked out that day from 4pm to 715pm. I lost my iphone on the climb, got a hole in my pocket. Next time im making a tether for my phone, which i should have done. some pictures my friend took.



this one is photo chopped, me twice

[cefire]

Awesome, looks like a fun trip and good climbing

[psykokid]

Nice TR! Looks like you had great weather on the mountain that day.