Big Kangaroo Peak

Big Kangaroo Peak (8,280ft)

Sept 15, 2022, 6:30am – 12:30pm

Eric and Nick

Big Kangaroo is a technical peak on the Washington top 200 list, and is most famous for its interesting summit pitch. The top is a mostly unprotectable exposed 5.6 rock slab with a single rusty old bold on the small summit. Most teams don’t really trust the bolt, so the leader will go up with no or minimal protection, then downclimb on semi-trustworthy toprope. The second climber then repeats on toprope. We were hoping to tag Big Kangaroo during a weather window thursday.

After getting back from Fisher and Arriva peaks Wednesday evening we drove over to the washington pass overlook to spend the night. It was amazing how much wetter it was farther east. We had been dry basically all day clmbing peaks near Easy Pass, but now at Washington Pass it was raining hard. We hoped the forecast would hold that it would be sunny the next day for a technical peak. If the summit pitch on Big Kangaroo was wet we probably wouldn’t be able to climb it.

We got up around sunrise Thursday and luckily the skies had cleared. It was a quick drive down to the hairpin, and we were the only ones there. We did a short bushwhack through some slide alder starting at a cairn and soon came across a national forest sign in register. Beyond that we followed a climbers trail up the valley, then when the terrain opened up into a talus and scree field we cut left.

We followed the open terrain to Early Winters Creek, which was an easy crossing. From there we bushwhacked up to the base of a gully coming down from the peak. The gully started around 6000ft and from there the terrain was open talus and scree walking.

Near the head of the gully before hitting a cliff band we traversed left over a ridge and stopped there to take a break. Unfortunately clouds and mist had settled across the peaks, and we were worried the route might not be drying after all from the previous night’s rain. So we took a long break to hopefully let things clear out.

Eventually we kept going up, and reached the obvious chockstone at the base of the route. We ditched gear there and planned to climb up light.

We used a 60m rope and Nick led the first pitch, which went under and behind the chock stone then directly up to a rappel anchor. He just placed one 0.5 cam. I took the next pitch, where I dropped over to the back side and walked on a very broad talus ledge toward the peak. I then traversed around the right side of the peak on a narrowing ledge with big exposure. I got a single 0.75 cam in near the middle of the ledge.

Around the corner the ledge widened, and this was directly below the summit. Unfortunately anchor options were slim. I got one 0.5 cam in the horizontal crack at foot level, but that was about it. There is a slung boulder on the ledge but it is too small to hold much.

Nick then took the summit pitch. Luckily we were passing in and out of the sun by that point and the route was dry. If it had been wet we would have needed to retreat. He made some balancy unprotected moves to get up the bottom part, then got a 0.3 cam halfway up. From there it was more unprotected slab climbing to the summit bolt. Someone had left a 4ft long cord coming down from the summit, though we tried to avoid touching it since it was unclear if it would hold weight.

The summit was only big enough for one person to straddle, so we took turns. Nick clipped into a locker on the bolt and I lowered him down on toprope as he downclimbed the route without weighting the rope. The bolt does not look super trustworthy.

When he got down I followed, climbing on toprope. The moves were balancy and tricky, but doable. I took pictures on the summit and then also carefully downclimbed on top rope. I was very happy the rock had dried out and rain had held off. Though the “mostly sunny” forecast didn’t really happen and we were still stuck in ominous clouds.

I led back across the ledge to the top of the first pitch, and then we rapped back down to our packs. Some groups rap from an intermediate anchor, but rapping from where we did allowed us to get our gear stashed at the chockstone.

From there it was a fast and fun scree surf back down to the bottom of the ascent gully. We found a slightly better bushwhack back, and made it to the truck around 12:30pm, for a 6 hour trip.

Interestingly, we hadn’t seen any cars drive by on Highway 20 all day. We later learned a mudslide around milepost 170 closer to mazama that morning had closed the road.

On the drive back we gave four PCT hikers a lift from Rainy Pass to Ross Lake so they could take a water taxi up to the canadian border and get around a section of trail closed for fires. I think we snuck out just before WSDOT gated highway 20 at Ross Lake. There was even a TV film crew there that I think was related to the closure.

We were able to then give a ride to six more PCT hikers back to Seattle. It was pretty tight with 8 inside the cab of the Tundra but we made it work.

© 2022, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.