A Fun Waste of Time

A Fun Waste of Time

Only getting around to posting this report a few years after the fact, but...

The page for Sheep Gap describes it well: an interesting challenge for someone who has done everything. As someone who grew up scrambling on the Mountain Loop, and who loves seldom-signed summit registers, I took this all as a challenge.

I camped near the bottom of Gothic Basin, where you can quickly detect a main reason for this peak's obscurity: You have to leave the inviting slabs leading towards Foggy Lake and the badass scramble of Del Campo; Instead you going the straight other way onto more cryptic and obscure terrain.

I climbed out of basin of the lowest tarn in Gothic Basin to gain a long horizontal boulder field. This takes you towards Weden Pass while avoiding the rather large cliff system keeping Weden Lake walled off from the Basin.

You can see this somewhat tedious boulder but not too long boulder field in the image. When I reached the long gulley of red rock, I descended all the way to the bottom to get around some gnarly krumholtz schwacking. This is an annoying amount of elevation to lose, but you have to descend some in that gulley to get below cliff bands anyway, so at best if you do heinous schwacking getting up very close and personal with some trees, you may save a few hundred feet of elevation.

Really not worth it in my opinion. I just went down the nice gulley and started climbing Weden Pass from near the bottom, near Weden Lake, a straightforward climb.

Weden Pass itself is lovely heather meadows and feels quite out there by this point. The point is further driven in by a seemingly insurmountable cliff band blocking off the Pass from the next basin. But have no fear, if you descend generally down and skiers right, you sort of get funneled from a bench down onto a pretty easy dirt ramp (covered with goat fur) that appears to be the only way down this cliff.

By this point, I may have been getting a little discouraged by how far away Sheep Gap still looked, but the pace picked up dramatically at this point. With some very easy scrambling but mostly easy contouring you're underneath the peak before you know it.

After some last approach elevation to the notch directly to the north of the peak, you're now officially Sheep Gapping.

I found this scramble to be a little scarier than expected from its Summitpost page. This was as a soloist feeling very far out there!

But it's really not so bad. I'm opposed to beta-spraying too much on the internet, but honestly the path is straightforward. Tree scrambling, exposed rock scrambling, and then you're at the Steep Bit.

I was glad to have a rope for rope soloing at this point, and certainly would have been deathly afraid not rappeling this part. It's probably 5.2ish, but just a little more slabby and without positive holds than I'd love for free solo. It's exposed and a fall would probably end at the bottom of the mountaiun. I ended up placing 2 nuts I believe.

The rest of it after the Steep Bit is more of the same, mostly pretty cool honestly. More Green Tunnels and then exposed-ish rock, though honestly this second half was less scary for me than the first.

This is where you need to more carefully follow the North Ridge specifically. The Ridge is quite easy to follow on the way up, it's kind of the obvious way, but there are points on the way down I had to think carefully about where more sloping terrain linked up with steep terrain.

The summit register was as cool as I expected! Several names I recognized, from Fay Pullen to Kevin Anderson, and only on the 3rd page since placing the register in the mid 80s. I was grateful to be there.

Altogether, it was pretty dang fun if you've already seen most things on the Mountain Loop. It had more tedium, more exposure, more uncertain routefinding than more well-trodden peaks in the area, but the mix of all 3 was well calibrated to satisfy the itches of the experienced mountaineer. No type 2 fun on this, it was good stuff!