Alpine Scramble - Granite Mountain

Trip Report

Parking lot was less than 20% full on Friday morning at 9am. We ran into several people on the trail, including some rangers hauling 4x4s on their back to aid in the lookout construction.

To make it a scramble, rather than taking the first (west-most) gulley as suggested in the description, we took the last (east-most) one that goes up a dry river bed as others have recently done. I think this was an excellent choice. The route we followed is shown below. Red on the way up, and blue on the way down.

The gulley section was some 800-900 feet or thereabouts, and afforded many opportunities to practice climbing moves with minimal to no exposure. There are easier and harder options on the way up. I thought what we did was maybe in the upper T3 range - with a bunch of tricky moves in the mix, but not much in the way of exposure.  Good pretty sustained scrambling. Students described it as the most technical scramble they've ever done.

Students making their way up:

Pulling the crux:

After topping the coulouir that rejoins the trail, there was still several hundred feet of assorted boulder hopping for all to enjoy:

Since negotiating the boulder field was tedious, at some point we moved onto the slopes on the left side, and did some side-hilling, but everyone felt that the solid rock was safer than the steep grassy slopes, so we hopped back up on the boulder field to finish it up.

The last bits:

The lookout was closed, with rangers doing some repairs. 

We tagged the summit proper:

Assorted summit views:

A pond of holy water near the summit:

Obligatory summit selfie:

Descent by the trail was rather uneventful. We took many breaks both ways to keep it nice.

As it turned out, this was a scrambling graduation trip for all four of the students. Great job and congrats to all!

Map