Pingora, East Face. On July 20 Fred Beckey, Steve Marts and I did a new route on this face, which should perhaps be called the east-southeast face since our route lies between the usual “southeast” face and the climb done last summer on the “east” face. We started from a small grassy ridge at the bottom of the face and went up a few hundred feet of class 3 broken rock to the level of what appears from the bottom to be a band of overhangs. Actually rather than overhanging, the rock is just broken into steep steps with a not too steep average angle; we climbed both free and with aid left and up these rocks, above which we continued over several hundred feet of slabby rock, which gradually steepened, to an obvious single, straight piton crack, just to the right of a big, sickle-shaped crack. The piton crack was climbed mostly with direct aid for about 300 feet to its end at the top of the face. Above we could scramble to the summit. This was a fairly difficult NCCS IV-6-A1 climb. Almost all the aid was used on the single, straight piton crack. We used 45 pitons, including several wide-angles.

Dan Davis