Reposted from http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/923323/Wind_River_TR_-_Cathedral_Cirque

I just rolled back into Lander after a 21 day Backcountry Rock course for NOLS in the Winds and I thought I’d share a bit. I've been working for NOLS for 10 years, but just a course or two each summer. 12 students, average age 18, and 3 instructors, we spent our first 5 days hiking and doing the typical wilderness and leadership curriculum, then got rerationed by horse with 15 days of food and all our climbing equipment just a mile and a half from our climbing base camp in the Cathedral Cirque. As always it was great to see students get excited by the mountains and climbing and gain a lot of skills in a short time.

Hiking in. Pinto Park looking west to the Cirque of the Towers

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Looking down at Sanford Park from the High Meadow Lake trail

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the Cathedral Buttress. A Royal Robbins route “Orion’s Reflection” (5.9 A2 I believe) goes up the center.

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learning to fly fish

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got one

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our main cragging spot…the Hall of Splitters

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Crack technique demo

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learning to climb the Wide
she went from not getting off the ground on this thing to sending it clean in a couple days.

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A great 5 pitch 10c line “Papa Splitter" Fun for me and another instructor after a full day at the "office"

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The Hall of Splitters. Great TR and single pitch climbs on the bottom two tiers with amazing huge ledges. Papa Splitter goes up the rust colored dihedral R of center.

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Sometimes you need some natural consequences…after some timeliness issues one morning many folks were just rolling out of bed when we were supposed to be meeting, so we left them in camp for the day and another instructor and I took one student who was on the ball and put up a new 7 pitch 5.9 (mostly 5.7ish) line up the formation opposite our camp. The line we initially tried didn’t go for us so we did a 200’ traverse right on a descending ledge system which led Matt to name the climb “Ramble On”.

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mostly good weather but we did get a few quality storms and some accumulating hail

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but the sunshine returns

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Even at the Hall of Splitters we did find some routes that weren’t amazing cracks

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but the cracks…oh the cracks

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sometimes we cowered…from bugs, weather or just getting spanked on a route

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Another highlight was heading up to do an amazing clean corner multipitch route called Sweet Lady 5.9 with two students. Sweet Lady was wet but my eyes were drawn to the cracks next to the arête to the right. Mostly 5.7-8 cracks with a bit of a spicy 5.9 pitch sting in the tail to exit with rounded cracks, licheny face and some choss. We ended up calling it Dulce de Lady


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Getting started

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clean cracks

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getting to put up a fun 5.9 FA in the backcountry for your first multipitch climb ever…priceless. A little shivering is good too.

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the view isn’t bad either

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More sweet cracks and good ledges on the arête (sweet lady corner down and right)

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summits matter
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students on the sharp end at the crag

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Hiking out we camped at an amazing waterslide the before hitting the trailhead and getting picked up to head back to Lander

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great climbs, great folks, great times in the mountains…