A Solo Ascent of Geurt's Ridge (5.5, 1,500') on Mt. Olympus

This is a quick trip report of one of the classic Wasatch ridge climbs.

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I don’t solo very often, but I do love soloing long ridges in the mountains occasionally (the last one I did was the south ridge of Mt. Superior last year). There are few things sweeter than covering a lot of technical ground in the mountains in a short amount of time. I’d never climbed the route before but it didn’t seem to be that difficult. I was only worried about the two rappels on the route (I didn’t want to take a rope), but had heard that they could be bypassed by downclimbing. It turns out that that was the case. The first downclimb felt to be about 5.4 (the crux move for me was toward the end of the downclimb) and was relatively exposed. I started the downclimb about 30 feet back from the notch on the right (south) side of the ridge.

The crux of the route came right after the first rappel.

The second rappel bypass felt like 4th class scrambling and is really short and obvious. It’s not very exposed. Even if I’d brought a rope I would have just scrambled down that one. Someone added a bolted rap station here in addition to the slings around the block.

Here are my times:

Left the trailhead – 0:00
Left the trail and started bushwhacking to the ridge – 0:58
Started climbing – 2:02 (I kind of got lost while bushwhacking)
Made it to the main summit – 3:15
Left the top – 3:22
Back at the trailhead – 5:09

Overall, I enjoyed the route. It wasn’t super consistent, but it was fun. I think I prefer the West Slabs route on the mountain, but this one was still worth doing. I did the whole thing in my approach shoes and it worked out great.

As always, click a photo for the larger version: