[b00]

buckner & horseshoe pk 8/14 – 8/16/07 for this climb there are two typical approaches. one comes in through horseshoe basin and follows the old mining route from the trail ascending to the upper basin, but has been said to be very difficult to find the route and easy to get caught in very dangerous terrain. the route we took although not a piece of cake is shorter with manageable challenges. we started at the trailhead end of the cascade river road and followed the crowded trail up to cascade pass,

cascade pass

up the arm

the king of sahale arm

forbidden

eldorado

and then on to sahale camp at the base of the sahale glacier. to our surprise, no one was there but us. there were tons of really nice camp sites with rock walls waiting for us to choose. this is a beautiful spot.

taking in the views from camp

even the views from the (composting)throne are incredible.

view from the throne

a view fit for a king(or queen)

the goats who lived here were more excited about our urine samples than any of my dr’s lab techs (when I do my annual exam :>) obviously mine must be special, because a couple of them locked horns over it.

in the morning we started at ~5:30 or 6:00am “From camp, hike eastward until the terrain begins dropping down into an obvious drainage of the SE toe of the glacier.(summitpost).”

buckner left, goode right

notice the sunlight just hitting goode in the distance

goode

from here we deviated from their directions. we put on our aluminum crampons and descended the steep good crampon snow until it flattened a little and then we headed left over to the ridge. we down climbed the reasonable class 3 / 4 ridge looking for summitpost’s scrub evergreens and ramp: “At about 6,700 ft or where most feasible between the waterfalls above and below, … look at the rocky rib on the …(east) side. Notice how it comes to an end at some trees and a notch. A little farther down (maybe 200 ft to the right), there are some scrub evergreens just before the rib cliffs out even with the lower waterfall. HEAD FOR THOSE SCRUB EVERGREENS. There is a hidden gully/ramp there which greatly reduces the amount of downclimbing necessary to get into Horseshoe Basin(summitpost).” with little difficulty we find the ramp. about halfway down the very loose ramp/gulley, we choose to continue down the moat in the ramp instead of some very steep, hard snow. an un-exposed bouldering move gets us over to some more extremely loose class 3 descending.

ramp/gully from ridge to upper horseshoe basin

we put back on our crampons, traverse some steep snow until we gain a really nice ramp system or easy side-hilling that takes on a traverse over to the base of buckner. this is our last spot for water, which has been plentiful this whole trip, and we fill up. here the snow steepens. the snow is very inconsistent – sometimes good crampon stuff, other times glop over ice, etc… . so, we harness up and break out the two pickets. my buddy leads up, placing pickets as he goes. we go a number of 50m rope lengths , as far as the snow goes. then scramble loose rock to below the summit block.

just below buckner’s summit

we are now really ready for some easy, fun terrain and that just what we get. we head to the right of the summit pyramid and the last little but of scrambling along this ridge to the summit is really nice. this is one outstanding summit – very comfortable to sit, with excellent views.

looking down from bukcner’s summit

I love you mom, from the top of buckner

summit napping :>)

we head down, but now the snow is softer and more inconsistent. we are running behind time wise, but fortunately for me, we stop to place pickets. I slip while quickly descending the steep snow and my buddy’s excellent belay and picket placement saves me :>) we traverse over to horseshoe pk. which peak is actually horseshoe, is difficult to determine as it is a bump with little prominence on ripsaw ridge. the gps coordinates and the photos we brought along from summitpost.org made a big difference. we took summitpost’s “rightward” approach. we followed the gully up, but diverting a little right for easier more solid class 3 rock to the saddle and moved up and left along a ramp. here we became a little confused. instead of continuing on the ledge around the corner we scrambled the exposed class 4 face. we should have (and on descent we did) continued around the class 3 exposed corner that turned up into a loose gully. this led us to the notch between the false and true summit. we were a little excited here, because we thought there would be some cool rock climbing. we used the prescribed triple runner around the obvious boulder and my buddy led up the class 3 rock step to the easy ledge/ramp. the scrambling was so easy that he never bothered to place any gear even though it was run out. he took a step up from the ledge and placed either a .5 or #1 cam and did one move and was on the summit. it was good thing we brought a rope for buckner. but, if I was to do horseshoe again, I’d bring a cam and a very short section of rope because there was only one move of rock climbing. yes, the ramp is exposed, but it is very easy. if you wanted to protect the one move, slap a cam in and connect it to very short section of rope as the summit is only a few feet from the ledge/ramp. some help please – we lost the top of the summit register and it now has a zip lock bag around it instead of a top. sorry. please bring a new register. all this belaying on the snow and on horseshoe had chewed up a bunch of daylight. so we knew we would have to really boogie if we did not want an unplanned bivy. we knew we needed to have daylight for that gully/ramp that led us into horseshoe basin. we make it back to the ramp with darkness approaching and do a belayed ascent of the steep snow using our pickets. this allowed us to bypass the dangerously loose rock at the bottom of the gully. we get on the ridge and full darkness does not fall until we are at the flat spot on the ridge where we don crampons and headlamps and march up the steep snow. once we reach the flat area of sahale camp, we get lucky again and walk directly to our tent (at maybe 9:00pm?) which could have proved time consuming to find in darkness :>) we talked about doing sahale the next morning, but the weather was not good and we both been up it before. so, we ambled back to the cars with plenty of time to hit good food in marblemount :>)

pano from bottom of sahale glacier

references: goldman, summitroutes, summitpost.org http://www.summitpost.org/mountain/rock/153090/horseshoe-peak.html equipment: helmet, 50m rope, a couple of nuts, a .5 & #1 cam, 2 aliens(only needed one cam), ice axe, 2 pickets btw- the horseflies were not bad at all :>)

[pimaCanyon]

Nice. What an awesome spot for a nap.

[Randy]

Holy TR overload. We need to get you on a CAPS program though.

[Dayhike Mike]

[Matt]

Nice trip. When you descended from Sahale to Horseshoe Basin, I think you may have done the same variation that we did on our Booker/Horseshoe trip, though I couldn't tell for sure. We got onto the rib at the first accessible place from the snow and then descended the rib to the exit gully, whereas Klenke seems to advocate descending hundreds of feet further on the steep slabs first. You must be working on the Bulger top 100 list. No one else does "Horseshoe."

[wildernessed]

I'm not working on a list, but that area sure is irresistible. Great TR's / Pics.

[peltoms]

Thanks for the great pics loved the sunrise onf logan, also particularly that of Cache Col Glacier in the background. I was there the week before on the glacier, but never saw it due to lovely whiteout. And I always like to have a snowpack picture.

[b00]

thanks to all for the kind words. i've read your other posts and feel honored by your replies. thanks to matt for the pm pointing out my mistaking goode for logan(i have edited the original post to correct this).

[Tom_Sjolseth]

Good bunch of TRs lately, b00! I was on that trip with Klenke and the conditions on our trip were very similar to yours, b00. We summitted on August 30, 2004. There was very little snow on the slabs leading up from Upper Horseshoe Basin to Sahale Arm. The snow that was present could be avoided. The slabs were quite straightforward, and our route was very direct. The gully Klenke found was improbable from below, but saved us a great deal of time and effort. I give Klenke a great deal of credit for spotting that gully.