Guess what “Sport” discovered? The Ogul Peak list. This list was developed to encourage peak-climbing in the Lake Tahoe Region.
OGUL is the Washoe Indian word for mountain bighorn sheep. The Natives hunted this agile mountaineer in both the Sierra Tahoe Region and the Basin and Range to the east. Though now extinct in the area, this once great mountain sheep is a fitting symbol for the Tahoe OGUL List.
Sport noticed that we had already climbed 6 of the 63 listed peaks (Price, Pyramid, Ralston, Tallac, Freel and Jobs Sister). She set the goal of climbing all of them. This is surely going to cut into my “sitting on the couch and drinking beer time”.
English Mountain is #54 on the list. It is located in the north Donner Pass area north of I-80. We climbed to the summit on Saturday. The weather was beautiful. We reached the summit by climbing the mountain’s southeast ridge.
The start was an off trail hike over broken rock and through manzanita.
Soon we had our objective in view.
We crossed some steep, loose scree slopes.
And climbed many steep, loose scree slopes.
There was also quite a bit of class 2 climbing with some exposure.
Eventually we saw the solar panel at the summit.
This solar panel and battery are used by the Placer County Search and Rescue. The battery is located in a steel box. We found the “register” inside this box (note the tin cans).
There were not many entries on the 8 ½” by 11” piece of notebook paper that is being used as the register. (Note to self…when climbing some of these more obscure peaks bring along a notebook and pen.)
There is a benchmark.
The views were beautiful. This is Castle (#37) and Basin (#40), two more Ogul peaks, to the east.
Thank you for reading our post.
-Russ
"...Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host and then a master?"
Kahil Gibran.
