Devil's Tower Summit

Devil's Tower Summit
Posted by Hello

Updated 5/26/05 - Below!
Monday was suppose to be a recon day, but the weather was too perfect to sit around so we decided to go ahead and climb and headed up the scramble at 11:30 am.

We got stuck behind two teams that held us up for two hours but decided to go ahead and continue.

Rodney led pitches 1 & 5, Liem led pitches 2 &3 and Jean led pitch 4.

We took the meadows traverse and summited at about 7:20 pm.

The raps went well until pulling the rope to set up the final rap.

We will leave you in suspense as to what happened next but needless to say we did call 911 but after getting our heads together and the use of our knife we were able to make use of the remaining rope and get ourselves down safely.

As soon as I can get access to a computer I will update the post and add pictures.

-Updated by the Godfather per Rodney

5/26/05.

Actually we had Ken call the ranger and then after we figured out what to do we called him off. Liem convinced me to lower him down to find another place to rap from and then we lowered Jean. At that point I climbed up a bit and cut the two ropes and tied them together to give us about 80 feet of rope, but 40 from which to rap. I then rapped to those guys and hooked in and then pulled the rope. It got stuck again. I was getting unnerved to say the least - we could not catch a break. So Liem said, "We've got options" and we tied off the remaining rope (about 40 feet) and did a single rope rap to a small landing which we were able to scramble down to the path with the help of Ken with his flashlights showing the way to the bottom.

The next morning we viewed the route and found our rope had gotten snagged on the right side of the face of the column. Clearly unexpected. We were trying to keep the rope out of the column's cracks.

All is well and we learned a good lesson. Great climb, though!