Summit Elevation (m): 2902
Trip Date: Thursday, September 8, 2005
Elevation Gain (m): 777
Round Trip Time (hr): unknown
Total Trip Distance (km): 18
Quick ‘n Dirty Rating: Class 2/3 – you fall, you break something
Difficulty Notes: Moderate scrambling on the Kane route. Note that we ascended from our camp at Baker Lake before exiting the Skoki area.
Technical Rating: SC6; YDS (3rd)
GPS Track: Gaia
Map: Google Maps
The only Kane scramble in the Skoki that was left after 3 days of scrambling was Redoubt Mountain. Jon, Rod and I packed up our camp at Baker Lake early on Thursday morning, September 8 2005 to head for Boulder Pass. We quickly made our way to the pass and while Rod continued on to Halfway Hut, Jon and I dropped out heavy packs and skirted the south shore of Ptarmigan Lake.
We were soon grunting up yet another Skoki scree slope (say that 12 times over) and trying to follow a logical line of cairns up through the cliff bands to the first ridge on Redoubt. For most of the trip Jon was in the lead but on Redoubt I was in turbo mode. The weather didn’t look that promising and now that we were finally on the last scramble I really wanted to nail the summit badly. Originally we hadn’t planned on bagging Redoubt but since the trip had gone so well it was worth a shot.
We came up the first ridge gasping for air and soon were staring down at the 100+ meters of elevation loss into the bowl under the summit ridge. This was not a pleasant sight but we grunted down it and immediately started up the final ridge. It was sort of depressing to realize we were originally only regaining height we had already climbed but once we hit the fun stuff we soon forget about that. The final 150 m of ridge was exciting hands-on scrambling that I would classify as upper moderate to low difficult. The rock was solid in places but you have to be very careful not to pull the occasional loose boulder onto yourself.
Eventually we came to the tilted tabletop summit and made our way slowly to the final cairn of our epic Skoki trip. As we shook hands on the summit we both realized that we had set the bar pretty high on this trip and that it would probably be a while before we repeated something like this. At least another year anyway.
The descent was straightforward and before long we were plodding our way back down the Corral Creek road to the parking lot with full minds and tired bodies.
