Mt Woodring, Southern Slopes

Mt Woodring, July 9, 2015 (written August 29, 2015).  Mt Woodring is not often talked about, but it is a respectably sized peak at 11,585 ft, and makes up much of the division between Paintbrush Canyon and Leigh Canyons.  There's a small bit of class 3 climbing near the summit, but is mostly class 2 after one leaves the Paintbrush canyon trail. Ortenburger and Jackson's guidebook refers to this route as the Southwest Slopes, but it looks  pretty much to be strictly southern to me.

Spring and early summer this year was pretty wet and rainy, and I set off from the String Lake trailhead at 6 in the morning under a light mist and occasional light rain.  While I was concerned about the weather worsening, I knew from the forecast that there might be a brief clearing before rain was forecast for the afternoon.  So with a little luck, I might sneak this in.

It's about a 3 hour hike to Holly Lake at 9,416 ft, From there, I left the trail and start climbing a large alluvial fan up to the broad gully making up the southern slopes of the peak over boulders and scree.  Clouds hovering over the summit keep me from seeing the summit, but it's easy to see how the route goes.

Mt Woodring and Holly Lake.  The climb is up the prominent alluvial fan in the middle right, then pass the snowfield in the middle of the pictureon it's right.  Then, today at least, up into the summit's cloud bank.

As I climbed, I stayed in the broad gully and well to the right of a large buttress attached to the SW ridge.  Within the gully, there is a small pinnacle which sits in the middle, forcing one to decide to go right or left to attain the summit ridge.  In spite of the fact that the summit still lurked in the clouds, it looked better to the left of the pinnacle, so I continued that way.  It was typical Tetons:  plan carefully and choose the path of least resistance.

In the upper part of the broad gully, about 3/4 of the way up the south slopes route.  I choose to go left around this small pinnacle, and that worked out fine.  Going right may have been good too.

At about 11 am, the clouds finally descended and enveloped me.  No rain however.  I started dropping way-points in my GPS program on my iPhone so I wouldn't get lost on the way down.  At bit later, I got to the summit ridge, and had to do a bit of careful route finding and I also built a few small cairns at key points in case the weather worsened.  Still no rain, and no thunder and lightening.

I reached the first, and lower, southwestern summit at 11:40.  I wasn't exactly sure where the higher northeastern summit was, as visibility was only about 30 feet.   After a minute, the other summit briefly cleared; it looked like a very long way away.  However, knowing it was hard to judge distances in these conditions, I checked the GPS and decided it couldn't be far.  I had to be thinking about getting down off this peak before the weather deteriorated!  It took only about 10 min to get to the higher northeastern summit. There I found the USGS survey marker.  Someone had left a shiny new quarter next to it....I wonder why?

The benchmark on the summit.  Note the shiny new quarter someone left. 

Grabbed a quick lunch in the fog of the summit.  The view to the north was exciting:  a dramatic vertical drop entirely wrapped in fog.  Don't slip here.

Soon I was backtracking, finding my cairns, and knocking them down as I went.  As I descend, the clouds cleared away, and I enjoyed a dramatic view of the central part of the range that included Teewinot, Owen, the Grand, and the Enclosure.  Lucky me.

The clouds briefly clearly, a dramatic view of the main part of the Tetons.

As I continued down, the clouds returned.  Still no rain.  Made it down to Holly Lake at 2:15 pm, had a snack, and started down the trail. Two minutes later, what I thought was a non-threatening sky suddenly became quite threatening and one minute later, the rain started; it accelerated quickly and forced me under a tree to get rain gear out.  Before I completed that, the thunder and lightening started, the rain came on mercilessly, and I was feeling very thankful to be down off of the summit.

Continued a long hike out; raining much of the time along with occasional intense thundershowers that drove me under trees for short periods.  The rain finally let up, and I was back at the trail head about 6 pm.