Short TR: South Crack of Thor Peak

South Crack of Thor Peak 5.9 (Hard..at least for me!!) - Oct 2000 Bob Austin & Eric Tipton

I've done quite a few Sierra route this year. Most of the climbs I've done have had short cruxes. Example: Sun Ribbon Arete is 5.9 but only has one crux pitch. So with my first full year of Sierra climbing coming to an end, I had come to believe that if you get through the crux section, you'll get through the climb without much of a problem. I had never been on a Sierra climb that was as sustained as the one I was about to climb.

Eric climbs quite a bit harder than I do so when he suggested we do South Crack of Thor Peak, I was somewhat relieved. Afterall, he had FA'd (with Pat Brennan) a 10d route named 'Odin's Wrath' next to the route we were about to do. So South Crack goes at 5.9? No problem. I figured we should be able to fire off this 10 pitch climb in a 6-8 hours. Wrong. We left the Whitney Portal at 4:30am and began hiking up the hiker's trail. We reached the beginning of the route by about 7am. Looking up at the route, it looked like a great hand crack. At least it looked like a hand crack from the ground. Wrong again. It turned out to be 10 pitches of hard offwidth & chimney with some runout face climbing thrown in for good measure. Man, this route was hard. It was WAY hard. Rock quality was good but there was lots of choss (indicating that this route has probably only been done a handful of times). Several long runouts, routefinding problems, and hard climbing finally ended when we topped at by headlamp at 8pm. After taking a wrong turn on the descent, we finally reached our car at 12:15am (almost 20 hours after departing). This is a great route but if you plan on doing it, have your offwidth skills up to par and be prepared for a sustained climb. It kicked my ass. There were several sections worked me hard. If Eric wasn't with me, there is no way I could have led through some of the tougher sections. We both agreed that this was a tough route for the rating. Of course, I thought it was a lot tougher than Eric did. All in all, a great day and a great climb. While I learned a little bit about Sierra humility this weekend, South Crack turned out to be the best Sierra climb I've ever done.

Regards, Bob Austin

While I learned a little bit about Sierra humility

Funny how the climbs that work us over are often the ones that score the highest personal marks.

Thanks for the TR.

Cheers,