The Wapiti Valley

Other routes and climbing areas.

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Watersports

The Watersports lies on the NE face of Greyback Peak, around half a mile down the right hand logging spur road from camp. The approach is detailed here.

This area was first developed in the pouring rain, thus it's name. The lower slab is not too steep, but there is quite a lot of steep slab above and eventually a good four or five pitches of slab climbing to the top of the ridge seem possible here.

Chia Pet

This route starts at an obvious bolt about 20 feet up the licheny slab. You can add some length to the route by climbing a small crack to the bolt instead of scrambling up the left side of the slab as the first ascensionists did. Carla Bortoletto and Christie Harvie did the first ascent in the pouring rain in the spring of 2002. In 2003, 11 year old Allison Lepard lead this climb, her first lead.

Follow the bolts with some tricky route finding to avoid a big runout. Hint - look over to your right.

There is a station half way up if you want to do this in two pitches. Going to the top in one pitch will just about run you out of rope if your belayer is at the first bolt. Someone really should shove another bolt into the bottom belay station. Yes, it's easy slab and not far to fall, but let's do things right, eh? This route ends around ten feet below a grassy ledge at the base of about a twenty foot vertical step.

Sea Monkey.

From the top of Chia Pet climb a short slab to the ledge, then another short slab to the base of the big step. Now traverse around twenty or thirty feet south and up a bit of a dirt step to another higher ledge. From here You can see the first bolt of Sea Monkey. Currently there is one long pitch on 5.10 slab. The route is planned to go back right above the step at the top of Chia Pet, and then up again to who knows where. First ascent Carla Bortoletto and Dave Lepard, August 2003.

North face of Peak 4400

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This steep granite cliff, around 150 or 200 meters high, glowers over the last switchback on the approach to Dale Earnhardt dome, and is seen in the picture to the left. There is great potential for new routes here, obviously, but it is rather overshadowed by the dome on the other side of the valley. This is an obvious challenge for the future.

Big mossy steep slabs.

Well, that's the best name I can come up with and at least it's descriptive! These are the slabs above N34 visible from the last bridge on the Nomash Mainline. No routes exist here yet, and the rock looks rather dirty, but the challenge is clear. Dave Lepard, Carla Bortoletto and Ed Seedhouse attempted to blaze a trail to these slabs on a rainy day in August 2003, but were stopped heavy bush and exhaustion. A true Island B5 bushwhacking grade. Nevertheless there is quite a lot of steep rock there and the cliffs look to be around two hundred feet or more in height.

Bouldering

There are large boulders all throughout the area, though many are mired in deep logging slash. There is a prominent overhanging boulder on your left as you drive up the N34 spur to the campsite. This was scouted in 2003 but no lines were attempted.

Other areas

There is a lot of rock in this area, much of it visible only from the summit of the Dome. Dave talks meaningfully if vaguely three hundred foot overhanging walls visible only from the top of the dome. The valley to the west of the dome is drained by the Little Zeballos river and the maps show logging roads coming into this valley from south of Zeballos. Unfortunately it looks as if you'll need a boat to get to the start of the roads!

There is also vast mountaineering potential and some really big faces of non-granitic rock in the Haihte range on the other side of the Nomash river. The face of Merlon Mountain looks to be at least a thousand feet high and so far as I can tell no one has even been to it's base yet, let alone climbed it!

Ed Seedhouse
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