Great report on Sunset Ridge from climbers Bartosz Paliswiat and Zhong Deng who were here in early July. We're a little behind on the posting, but there is still a lot of relevant info here.
| Sunset Ridge & Amphitheater |
Zhong Deng and I climbed the ridge starting Wednesday 07/04 and
summited on Friday 07/06. We approached via West Side Road and later
South Puyallup Trail and Wonderland Trail (snow around 5,000'). Snow
started getting soft in late afternoon and walking was tedious so we
decided to stop and setup camp at around 6,400' above St Andrews Park.
The next day we followed the Puyallup Cleaver to around 8,000' at which
point we started an ascending traverse of the Payallup Glacier to 8,500' and
continued traversing to the base of the ridge. Both the Puyallup and South
Mowich glaciers are in excellent condition and no significant crevasses
had to be crossed or bypassed on the approach.
| Crossing the Bergschrund |
We encountered good snow conditions on the ridge allowing for
excellent cramponing. There was quite a bit of rock fall on the lower
ridge until we reached the bergschrund, and we mostly stayed climbers
left where the rock fall seemed less frequent (but not absent). We
crossed the bergschrund with no trouble and continued climbing on
excellent snow above. We found no need for protection anywhere on the
lower ridge.
We didn’t find the bivy spot at 10,200' (mentioned in
the guidebook), nor anything at 11,000' (mentioned in one of the trip
reports). There was a tiny bivy spot around 11,500' but it was very
exposed to wind, so we decided to skip it as well and continued
climbing. We finally found a reasonable, somewhat protected platform on
climbers left (around 11,800') and decided to stay there for the night.
Please note we had two 1-person tents; setting up 2 person tent would
likely require significant digging and the snow was very hard and icy.
We decided to start at 5:30 - 2 hours later than originally
planned due to high wind at night. We continued climbing on easier
terrain until we were forced to traverse onto Mowich Face around
12,200. The traverse had some unconsolidated snow on it in places, but
solid picket placements were available to protect it. Climbing on the
Mowich Face was excellent. Snow was hard frozen on the surface with
softer layer beneath, allowing for very secure step kicking (with some
effort required to break through hard crust). Front pointing was
required on few sections where the crust/ice was too hard to kick
through. We protected the face using pickets until we reached lower
angle terrain on Liberty Cap Glacier.
| Upper Sunset Ridge |
We encountered significant winds (30+mph with gusts up
to 50mph) near the summit and completely lost visibility before reaching
Liberty Cap. GPS was absolutely essential in finding Liberty Cap and
even more so in navigating down from it, as we could barely see few feet
ahead and had problems judging the angle of the slope. We decided to
skip the summit and attempted to climb down Emmons Glacier to get out of
wind, but failed to find the boot path (simply climbing down was too
risky, since we couldn’t see crevasses until they were few feet away).
While we searched for possible way down visibility improved and we
decided to climb up towards the crater, from where we easily located DC
route, which we followed down to Ingraham Flats.
Gear notes: We carried ice axe and ice tool each (ice
tool maybe not absolutely essential, but very useful, especially on
Mowich Face), 4 pickets (used them all) and 4 ice screws (we didn’t
place any).
May 9
