(Back to: Contiguous USA, California, High Sierra)
Mt. Ritter, West Arête.
By Claude Fiddler, AAC
Mt. Ritter, with the West Arête taking the obvious skyline from lower right to upper left, with the summit out of the frame. Claude Fiddler
The west escarpment of Mt. Ritter (13,157′) stretches over the headwaters of the San Joaquin River. This impressive wall is steep and the rock suspect, but an arête leading from Ritter Lakes basin to the summit was too hard to resist, especially since there weren’t any climbing routes on this side of the peak. Once again we observed the inverse law of approach miles to number of climbing routes in the High Sierra. I mobilized the smarter-with-age squad of Mort Testerman and Jim Keating. As we planned the trip, the days of living our lives out of our cars seemed a hundred years ago. But then divvying up the gear at the trailhead we stepped back into a like-yesterday routine. Who gets the rack, who gets the rope, did you bring matches? No, but I brought film for the Brownie. We camped at the west end of Thousand Island Lake ahead of the Labor Day backpacker invasion. The next morning we hiked past Lake Catherine and over to Ritter Lakes. Hiking time: two ibuprofen.
The obvious summit-bound arête looked great from the lakes. From the inlet of the middle Ritter Lake we gained a couple of hundred feet to the toe of the arête. We stayed either on the arête or on the north side to the summit. Two thousand vertical feet of class five (up to 5.7, with some care-be-taken easier scrambling, brought us to the summit register.
We made it back to camp by 6 p.m., twelve non-stop hours after we’d started. It was great to dust off the hardware of the rack and the software of our minds.
The west side of Mt. Ritter and the Minarets from Rockbound Lake, High Sierra. Claude Fiddler
