After four days of squinting at snow crystals, wrapping my brain around crystal metamorphism and digging pits in the snow, I was ready to look at something dry and non-white. Pete and I formulated plans to hit some of the ranked and un-ranked peaks just south of Sheeprock and invited Kevin to join us.
While our plans and weather were looking good, our motivation was a house of cards that nearly collapsed. After taking a backcountry skiing fall the day before, my knee was complaining and I nearly called Pete and Kevin to cancel. Pete had been out for a 26 mile trail run two days prior and his quads were protesting as well. Kevin had a ready-made excuse, having just climbed the 14er Kit Carson as a winter backpacking trip. Amazingly, we all manned up and arrived at the trail head before 8am.
From near the old Molly Gulch campground (now closed) we picked up a trail and followed it south along the creek until a log crossing Pete and I had found last year.
From here we contoured west of Sheeprock itself and tried to stick to sun-exposed aspects on our way towards “Cheesman Overlook”.
The views of Sheeprock kept getting finer as we headed for the overlook.
To our south we could see our next objectives, unranked “Southern Comfort” and ranked South Sheeprock.
The summit block of “Cheesman Overlook” had a small class 3 ramp with a tree to pass around.
The summit was windy and the clouds looked like they held the potential for snow. Our next two peaks had some 4th class scrambling and even a few 5th class moves, so we hurried on to South Sheeprock.
Some fun scrambling lead us to the summit block of South Sheeprock.
The southeast side was a slab climb, but had really bad consequences in the event of a fall. The north side had a 10 foot wall with a few good holds and a not-so-bad landing. After looking at all the options I decided to climb this north side with a spot from Kevin and Pete.
They tossed our rope to me and I had one of them tie in below me, while I sent the other end of the rope down the slab for the other to belay. Then I coached both Pete and Kevin up one at a time, both up and down the same route.
Finally, I tied in to the rope and got a belay for my own downclimb. Then we packed up the light rope and harnesses and found a snowy descent route off the north side of South Sheeprock. The other faces of the peak were more impressive than the route we’d ascended.
“Southern Comfort” rose just to the northeast and we easily traversed over there then began ascending a series of ledges and ramps while avoiding patches of snow and ice. Amazingly, several bristlecone pines call this area home.
Counter to the forecast, the sun was coming out and the view west towards the Lost Creek wilderness reminded me of all the remaining peaks there I have to climb.
Just below this group of summit boulders, we found an improbable rock plateau and imagined camping here in the fall.
Some fun scrambling took us to the summit where we spent a long break admiring the views.
The climb up “Southern Comfort” was probably the highlight of the day, even if the peak doesn’t have 300 feet of prominence it was still worth doing. Eyeballing the height difference between it and South Sheeprock makes me wonder which is really taller.
After leaving “Southern Comfort” we traversed around the north side of South Sheeprock and visited another unranked point known as “Camera Rock”.
Then we headed downhill and then north across the terrain to pick up our earlier tracks and reach the cars again.
Adam’s complete photo album
Kevin’s photo album
