Technical climbing info
- Mountain: Colchuck Peak
- Elevation: 8,705ft
- Route: Colchuck Glacier
- Length: 3,100ft
- Grade: I/II
Short & Sweet
After a fairly intense (ie. extremely dangerous) experience on Mount Hood’s North Face recently, Jess and I were feeling pretty risk adverse in approaching a tight weather window between periods of heavy unseasonal precip. We’ve been wanting to climb Colchuck’s North Buttress Couloir, but had never actually climbed Colchuck to begin with. Why not check it out?
Well, the climb is a beautiful one. Grade I is usually a grade that I find tedious, but this one hit all the marks to make it worth the day. A beautiful trail ending at Lake Colchuck, wild surroundings, a little exposure in places, and just enough variety in the route to give me the “what’s next?” feeling.
All things considered, there isn’t really much to write about for this climb. It is a relatively straight forward up and down. If you plan ahead, you can do a double tap of Dragontail’s West Route. If we were to do it again, we would have probably slept in the parking lot the night before and climbed both peaks.
Unfortunately, the North Buttress Couloir looked more melted out than we’d like. We’ll be back in 2021.
Up NEXT, Dragontail SURE looks nice doesn’t it?
Dragontail Peak, West Route
Jess and I took a random Tuesday off with the hope to climb. As of Monday early morning, the overall conditions looked too warm and we called off the climb…or so we though. Sitting around at 5pm and feeling guilty/fat, we said “Why not shoot for Dragontail?” We had just got a good look at…