Bear Creek Spire’s North Arete (5.8, 1,000 ft, 10p) is a classic Eastern Sierra alpine route to a 13,700 ft summit. I first attempted it as a newer climber in October and high wind conditions, luckily I was convinced to bail at the base. Later I sent it proper from a high camp in August 2019. This time around, I felt it was the perfect objective to get into the alpine with a newer trad partner. Especially because the approach was short enough to attempt in a day, avoiding the permitting game (which I was pretty unsuccessful with this year). It may also be the last alpine climb I get for the year, so worth the push.
Approach
At 4am, I got the best parking spot in my history at the busy Mosquito Flat trailhead (10,200 ft) which leads to the “best bang for the buck” trail in the Eastern Sierra up Little Lakes Valley. We reached Dade Lake @ 6pm as it was just starting to get light. Dipping my hands in the water to hydrate from my filter, it felt cold at 11,500 ft. The North Arete looked so close, but the last ~1 miles and 1,000 ft to the 12,800 ft base took a little over an hour. More time due to picking our way up rock and talus rock at altitude.
Bear Creek Spire
I kicked off the first pitch at 7:30am, throwing a well coiled rope strangely sitting 20ft up the climb down to my partner. Our only guess was this was left after a rescue since the descent doesn’t go by the base?
We made good time on the approach, but maybe could have used a little more delay. The sun was just nearly peaking over the arete with most of the pitch in the shade. I am rarely deterred by cold climbing, but my fingers went completely numb multiple times and I had a hard time understanding how good of a grip I had on things.
I think same as last time, I took the right side instead of the left side of the large blocky feature on pitch one (however, the description describes the right side accurately…). It was spooky to climb around so many hollow, detached flakes. One unavoidable flake was detached at the top for 10 ft and could be felt fidgeting. Maybe I should have gone up the left, but I don’t think my 65m rope would have made it to the anchor from that side. It barely made it from the right side when starting belay on scree…
The second pitch had more of this careful climbing, but at least I could feel my fingers now. At the 5.9 finger bypass, you had to step around and lightly use a diagonally detached stack of blocks that you could imagine just toppling over. Another spooky move that pushes you outwards towards exposure.
I was able to almost link pitches 3/4 with an anchor a little ways below the topo. P5 was the technical crux but climbed much more enjoyably with less fear of breaking flakes off and lots of great jams. I diagonally moved into the corner instead of starting up the base and there was some wild, exposed feeling face feet getting established.
After this, I managed rope drag decently for the last lead tunneling through from the West to the East side of the ridge on P6. Then we simul-climbed P7, 8, 9. Ending by belaying the final pitch around the right (West) side to the summit.
After a moment on the summit, we rappelled a rope length down fresh webbing. Here we took a moment to hydrate, eat and put our approach shoes on before picking our way down talus and around North to the ridge. It took an hour and a half to get to Dade Lake from the rappel and we made great time back to the car.
Summary
Bear Creek Spire is an obvious classic because of beautiful setting, the exposure, the ridge feel and the meaningful alpine objective. The climbing was interesting, but not that spectacular with how much I was risk-managing detached flakes in technical terrain or it was trivial on the 4th class sections. The tunnel through is a unique feature though and there was fun climbing on it.
The numb fingers really emphasized how the short alpine season was starting to close. I was pretty happy with our speed on the climb and we managed the whole thing in 12 hours car-car. I did underestimate the approach time by just looking at the stats (5mi 3,000 ft). It took longer due to half of it being on talus and at elevation.
Summary
- Approach: 3:30
- Climb: 5:15
- Descent: 3:10
Breakdown
- 4am – Trailhead
- 6am – Dade Lake
- 7:30am – Start Climb
- 11am – Top Pitch 5
- 12:45pm – Summit (mostly simul)
- 3pm – Dade Lake (with 45m break)
- 4:40pm – Trailhead
