Mt Conness West Ridge 2019

On November 2, 2019, Max and I climbed the West Ridge of Mount Conness. We made a quick drive up, popped the top of my camper van in the Saddlebag Lake parking lot for some restless sleep, and started out at 9 AM for a decidedly non-alpine start. The climb follows the ridgeline in the photo above.

We hiked from Sawmill Camp up to the plateau below the summit, and then back down to the toe of the West Buttress. This is looking up the route from several pitches up.

After a few easy technical pitches to start, we simul-climbed the rest of the ridge to the summit on mostly very fun 4th and easy 5th class terrain. There's Max above on one of the many cracks to choose from.

I was fully expecting it to be quite cold this late in the season and figured we'd be having more than the typical suffering on this climb, but although it did dip toward freezing at night, it was t-shirt weather during the day.

We stuck right on the ridgeline all the way up and occasionally had some fun moving onto the sheer southwest face and putting some big air under our heels, as in the photo above. That's Max waving, to the left of the block overhanging the face.

Alpenglow on the summit. We topped out right around dusk and had a long dark hike back down to Sawmill and the van. 11 hours round trip.