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Chair Peak/Voie de Chaise

John Fang and I climbed this sport route on Saturday, August 3, 2024. The climbing is very fun and the approach unpleasant especially the last section is full of scree. This route, like all others have reported, has a high level of rock fall from upper pitches. We did not do the last pitch of scramble partly due to rock fall concerns. All picture credits go to John.

Placeholder Contact Profile Lei Wu
August 05, 2024
  • Road suitable for all vehicles

  • The route starts at the Snow Lake Trailhead. At the junction of Snow Lake and Source Lake overlook, we went to the Source Lake Overlook route. You can go the other way too with the benefit of being on the trail for a little bit longer.  The trip report and beta from Isley Gao and Rob Busack is very helpful. The overall route they went still made sense on our trip. 

    No water above Source Lake. There was still a very small section of dirty looking snow near the base of the climb. 

    The last section is very loose scree. I found it slightly easier to walk along the right edge of the scree (climber's right). 

    Where the climbing starts is fairly obvious from a few hundred feet down if you visually follow some kind of track marks in the scree to the base of the rock.

    IMG_1565[1].HEIC
    Looking at the Peak

    When you get to the base of the climb, the first few bolts follows a light colored line on the rocks. 

    IMG_1573[1].jpg
    Orange mark shows the start of climbing

The overall route finding is fairly straightforward by following bolts and the rappel stations are very close to belay stations. John and I swung leads. He took the money pitch (pitch 5). The first bolt of Pitch 5 is hidden from the belay or rappel station. You can however spot the second and third bolts. Enlarge the picture and see where the draws are clipped on the first three bolts from the belay station of Pitch 5. 

IMG_1611[1].jpg
First three draws clipped on Pitch 5.

There were parties above us and one party down below. We asked the party which passed us not to rappel on us. They waited for us at the top for quite a while. However, we did not spot another climbing team below us until this other party and us met with them on our rappel at the start of Pitch 5. They experienced rock falls when we rappeled from upper pitches. At the start of Pitch 8, when I was rappeling down, my rope triggered a rock fall of  cannon ball size, John screamed at me with advance warning.  I was able to see it coming down toward me and duck away to the other side on rappel. 

The climbing is very fun. The rock falls are at the scary level.