In early August, Chris Robertson and I hiked into the McGee Creek drainage and were immediately enamored with the vertical maze on Mt. Crocker’s north pillar. With multiple quality routes already established on this feature, we decided to focus on the nearby west pillar instead.

On August 9, we established an eight-pitch route on this previously unclimbed feature and found generally excellent rock with clean cracks. Our line begins at the toe of the pillar and follows a consistent crack system for two pitches, through a gunsight notch and one rope-stretching pitch of ridge running, before getting to the main event: an impeccable and intimidating tower shaped like a tooth. Here, we found excellent finger and hand cracks leading to a fantastic arête finish, with hidden cracks offering decent protection.

The Crockerdile Tooth (800’, 8 pitches, 5.10d) took us about seven hours, which included cleaning the route for future parties. To descend, one can rappel the route’s last three pitches with a single 70m rope, ultimately trending south from a low point on the ridge to the ground (rather than continuing down the ascent line). This descent can also be reached easily from the top of the north pillar via a five-minute walk to the west pillar’s summit.

           —Zach Lovell