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Sloan Peak, Fire on the Mountain.
By Blake Herrington, AAC
Rad Roberts and I established a new route on the southwest face of Sloan Peak that, compared to new routes established in the ’Rado or California, would be a grade IV. But going by the AAC’s use of the IV definition being a “full day of technical climbing,” we think it’s more fairly a grade III+. The whole grade thing is messed up and pretty vague, though, so here’s what we did:
We did 1,200′ of steep climbing, and then 500′ of class 3-type stuff to the summit. Pitches were probably: 5.11- (1), 5.10 something (6), and a couple around 5.8. We started climbing at maybe 9 a.m., and it took around 11 hours to the summit.
