Brewer Buttress, Castle Mountain 2006
Alpine II, 5.6+, 12 p
September 1, 2006
Hiked up to the Castle Mountain bivy hut on thursday night.
It took us under 2 hours to reach the hut as opposed to the
"3-5 hours" it is supposed to take which is a bit misleading.
We had fresh snow everywhere from a storm that moved through
in the past few days. It was cloudy and cold but good,
clear weather was supposed to move in overnight.
A small note on the hut: it is tiny and I've no clue how 6
people would sleep in it. 4 would be tight. We had it
to ourselves and it was nice and cozy. The snow was
welcome for melting water.
Sure enough we woke up to blue skies and after a bit of
confusion found the start of the route, it was past 9am
by that point and still quite chilly, but it turned out
we climbed in the sun for the majority of the time, thus
it was warm. We topped out and there was past knee deep
snow at the summit plateau. Both of us wore approach
shoes (I climbed the route in my 5.10 guides) and regretted
it multiple times. Finding the descent gully was a bit
exciting too, but eventually we found it and rapped
without too much difficulty, glad to be back at the hut.
The correct gully is the second one west from the bivy
hut, which is about 20-30 minutes west from the top of the
route.
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