Pinnacle and Castle Peak

We are in Raineer National Park and ready to do some climbing up a magnificent volcano. We immediately head up to the climbing and wilderness office to check conditions and permits. The ranger was extremely knowledgable on the mountain conditions and informed us that in the past 5 days not a single person summitted due to a 2ft dump of snow the mountain had received a few days previously. This makes for the possibility of a wet slab avalance to come peeling off the top down on to unfortunate people underneath. The weather is supposed to be in the 80's for the next few days so we scroung around and find a few other peaks to keep us occupied until Raineer is in condition to climb.

 

We chose two rock peaks that lay directly next to eachother making it very feasable to summit both in one day. They are Pinnacle Peak and Castle peak. The approach up to them is a quick jaunt up snow fields taking less than an hour to get to the base of our first climb. There are alot of options to chose from to get to the top and we go for a ridge that is 4th class scrambling to easy 5th class. We do most of it un-roped and then decide to pitch the last part out as it steepens up and we are in stiff mountaineering boots. After we get to the top we take some picture with Mount Raineer behind us and bask in the much needed sun that we haven't seen in a week. As we are sitting there we look over to Castle peak and see 14! people rappelling off the summit and heading over towards the peak we are on. We see that they are heading towards the 2nd class (almost a walk up) side of the mountain so we figure we'd let them come on up to the top instead of trying to pass them on our way down and knock rocks on their heads. It must have been close to an hour that we sat on top waiting for them to get off the descent route but after getting stir crazy we go to check out their situation. They had chosen to pitch out the climb and have every person clip in to the rope and climb up one by one. They were barely half way done with getting people up so we had them stop for a moment so we could quickly bypass them and downclimb to the bottom.

 

The rock on castle peak was much better than that of Pinaccle peak and within a few minutes of climbing we had reached the summit. It was a great acclimating day before we head up to Raineer in a few days. Even more excting, we get to see Sams parents tomorow! They happen to be only an hour or so away from us picking up a new kayak and are going to come spend the day with us!

 

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