Climbing
Mount Moran is a massive and impressive mountain which would make it attractive to mountaineers. However, the comparative difficulty of the approach to the climbs makes it a much less popular climb than the Grand Teton and other peaks to the south. No trails to Mount Moran have been maintained for over twenty years, and any approach overland requires a great deal of bushwhacking through vegetation, deadfalls and bogs along the perimeter of Leigh Lake. Instead, most climbers choose to canoe from String Lake, across Leigh Lake and then pick their way to their respective route; but even this may require some overland route finding. As a result, most climbs on Mount Moran tend to take several days even when the technical portion of the climb is comparatively brief.
The first ascent of Mount Moran was made on July 22, 1922 by LeGrand Hardy, Bennet McNulty and Ben C. Rich of the Chicago Mountaineering Club via the Skillet Glacier route. The Skillet Glacier still provides perhaps the easiest and most direct route to the summit and is rated 5.4. As the name implies, most of the climb is on the steep snow and ice of Skillet Glacier, and an ice axe and crampons should be used in the ascent.
The most popular route up Mount Moran is the CMC route, named for the Chicago Mountaineering Club. The CMC is rated 5.5, and ascends the east face just south of the Black Dike. The CMC climbs good rock and is essentially free of snow and ice. It also has the advantage of a good camp high on the flank of the mountain.
The Direct South Buttress route, rated 5.7 A3, is recognized in the historic climbing text Fifty Classic Climbs of North America and considered a classic around the world.
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Famous quotes containing the word climbing:
“To be seventy years old is like climbing the Alps. You reach a snow-crowned summit, and see behind you the deep valley stretching miles and miles away, and before you other summits higher and whiter, which you may have strength to climb, or may not. Then you sit down and meditate and wonder which it will be.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)
“There is, however, this consolation to the most way-worn traveler, upon the dustiest road, that the path his feet describe is so perfectly symbolical of human life,—now climbing the hills, now descending into the vales. From the summits he beholds the heavens and the horizon, from the vales he looks up to the heights again. He is treading his old lessons still, and though he may be very weary and travel-worn, it is yet sincere experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)