Kangaroo Temple - North Face, September 2002
Having enjoyed our previous Washington Pass rock climbing experience on Liberty Bell, Agata and I returned for more eastside "alpine cragging". Wanting to explore a new area, we set our sights on the Northwest Face of Kangaroo Temple. With the car parked at the hairpin turn at Washington Pass, we made the short but tedious hike over to Kangaroo Pass. From the pass we had our first good look at "The Temple", as it's sometimes called. Traversing a sandy trail below the slabs of Wallaby Peak (interesting Australian theme here) we soon could see several parties already lined up for Temple's Northwest Face route. It would have been a long wait and as an alternative we decided to climb the easier North Face instead.
In short, the climbing was really quite lame. Beckey's CAG mentions something about the route being rated at 5.6 or something. I failed to realize that he was merely referring to the odd move here and there, while the rest of the route was much easier and crappy to boot. I led out on the loose and crumbly first pitch left of the notch to a big hole/ledge in the face with some trees for anchors. An old rusty piton in a crack indicates you're on route. From there, I traversed right over more crappy rock to a belay at the 2nd rap station. Agata and I then simply walked around the corner on an exposed ledge shortly beyond the anchor mentioned earlier. Finally, I climbed easily up a dirty crack and brought up Agata to the sandy slopes just below the summit. (more...)
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