MT. EVAN THOMAS 3097 m
This ascent turned out to be more challenging than I anticipated. I may have found a new route on this mountain. Instead of going up a break in the steeply tilted strata (it wasn`t obvious to me), I went up a gully between the two summits. From the 3020 m notch the traverse to the west summit looked suicidal, so I went for the east summit. It looked scary, but doable. The ridge was narrow, loose and steep with tremendous exposure on both sides. The climbing was pretty intense, but I knew I could downclimb it. I made it to within 20 vertical meters of the east summit. The last 12 meters was too risky to climb without a rope. I downclimbed the ridge back to my ascent gully and descended about 200 meters. I noticed there was another gully running toward the true summit, so I decided to give it a try. This time I was successful. After 7.5 hours of some tricky routefinding and climbing I finally made the summit. It felt good! It all worked out at the end.
Aug 30, 2009
Photos: 80
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