North Palisade, West face. The Palisade Range offers California’s most alpine climbing on 14,000-foot peaks fluted with ice gullies that rise above cirque glaciers. Almost all the technical climbs have been in this picturesque setting on the eastern side of the range, and the longer aretes and buttresses facing west have long been neglected. To reach them entails the crossing of at least one high pass. David Wilson and I found out how simple this dreaded walk really is after the Fourth of July weekend. It took us exactly two hours with packs loaded for a wall climb to crest 12,000-foot Bishop Pass, formidably graded for grandmothers by the Forest Service, and another two of stumbling in the talus while looking in awe at the several miles of two-to-three-thousand- foot granite buttresses that came before our goal, the west face of North Palisade. In the evening light, these snow-free cliffs rose in a deep red wall above the blue lakes of Palisade and Dusy Basins. I had thought that the west side of North Palisade would offer only discontinuous slabs until I saw and photographed the range from the air some years ago. One image showed a dead vertical thousand-foot wall rising from the talus until it merged into a steep arete that ended on the summit ridge between North Palisade and Starlight Peak. At dawn we were on this wall, climbing easy fifth-class rock for three pitches until a smooth, slightly overhanging headwall faced us into four pitches of F9 and F10 climbing. Protection was adequate, but in shallow, discontinuous cracks characteristic of the fine-grained diorite in this part of the Sierra. From shivering in the shadows and numbing fingers in cracks, we exited onto a fine, sunny arête. One particularly serrated section of crackless towers forced us into a gully for a few hundred feet, but otherwise we continued roped climbing to the summit, which we reached at three P.M. on a perfect day. That evening we ate dinner at a lake in Palisade Basin and walked out to the roadhead in the moonlight. NCCS IV, F10.)

Galen Rowell