Date: August 17-18, 2023.
Objectives: Altair Peak and Standhope Peak.
Stats: Approx 20 miles and 6,800ft gain round trip.
Links: Altair Peak. Standhope Peak. Photos.
I had planned this as an acclimatization trip prior to heading to higher elevation terrain. The goals were to sleep up high and scramble up some peaks.
Started from the Broad Canyon Campground and headed up to Baptie Lake. Pretty straight forward and pretty warm in the east facing canyon. A few stream crossings but nothing we could't get over. Plenty of options for camp sites and it appeared that there wasn't anyone else there yet. We quickly got the tent up and headed out for Altair Peak.
This peak actually sits above Betty Lake so we had to decide on going up past Goat Lake and dropping down to Betty, or going back the way we came and taking the trail up to Betty Lake. We decided to take the second option since it seemed to be more efficient; less distance and less vert. It was already blazing hot so I did not want to force the pace. After all, the goal of this trip was to acclimatize and not to set any PR's. Uneventful hike until we lost the trail leading up to the saddle. We wandered straight up until we saw that the trail was off to our left and then moved onto the ridge. The ridge was a fun and solid class 3 scramble with a bit route finding but nothing that gave us much pause. We dropped our packs and hiked the last 500ft or so the summit. We descended the ridge to the trail and had no difficulty staying on it unit we got back to where we thought we had lost it. It was in fact maybe four feet from where we were. I blame the huge snow drift. Oh well. It was very hot hiking back to camp and I had neglected to fill my water bottle. Thus, I had inadvertently depleted myself. Dumb move on my part. We got a nice flyby of some kind of fire fighting aircraft.
After a pretty warm night and a short rain shower, we woke up to clear skies. We hiked past Goat Lake to the saddle where we took a short break. I'd call 75% of the East Ridge class 2. I'd call the last 25% easy class 3 and a bit loose if anything. The highlight here was an F-15 flying by just to the north of Altair. The summit was a bit breezy and I could see the predicted thunderstorms already starting to build. I wanted to give The Fin a try but decided that it was better to bail now when and where we could easily get down and minimize exposure, as opposed to being 2-3 hours into climbing The Fin, which would be tedious and time consuming, then find ourselves on an exposed ridge with a thunderstorm on our heads. There was a group heading up Standhope that we chatted with. They gave me a weird look when I told them that I hoped the weather would hold out for them. We arrived back at the tent right about 12:00 and had planned on a bit of a rest before heading down. Less than 30 minutes later the sky was dark and the thunder and rain started. We decided to jam on out instead of waiting for who knows how long for the storm to pass. I don't know what the people that were heading for the summit of Standhope experienced, or the people fishing at Goat Lake, but I was glad to be down low. Maybe two hours later the sun was back out and it was crazy hot. It was nice to be camping there that night and not facing a 6hr drive home.
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