Climbing the Teton 11ers

Sunset from Maidenform Peak. L-R: 11,270’ (in sun), Teewinot, Owen, Grand Teton , Middle Teton, South Teton, and Buck just poking out on the right – photo Alex Lennon

I moved to the Tetons from New England in spring of 2014, and up to that point in my peak-bagging career I had mostly focused on elevation thresholds, like the AMC New Hampshire 4000 footers and the Adirondack 46ers. It wouldn’t be till a bit later that I became interested in prominence. So naturally, when I moved out to Jackson Hole, I knew my free time would be devoted to climbing every major peak in the range that I could. As it would happen, Peakbagger.com had the perfect list for me: the Teton 11,000ft peaks. With a 400ft prominence threshold, the list boasted 23 ranked peaks scattered throughout the range, quite a manageable number- though the technicality and otherwise difficult nature of many of the summits promised to challenge and expand my knowledge and skill of mountain travel. I had a number of years of rock-climbing experience under my belt, including multipitch, but I knew I’d need to utilize all the knowledge I had already, plus I’d have to incorporate some new skills on the fly. Would I be up to the challenge?

I don’t remember when the Tetons first grabbed my attention, but I do know it was many years before I first visited. In fact, I never set foot in the range before moving there, though my brother Duncan and I had glimpsed them while driving through Idaho the previous year. What I do remember is poring through pictures and admiring the striking profile of these peaks, which seemed closer to the Alps to me than anything else in the lower 48 States. Though I now indulge heavily in the world-class skiing that the Tetons provide, I grew up always viewing the range as a destination for summer mountaineering. The ‘crystalline’ core peaks of the range do indeed boast some very good-quality rock for climbing and scrambling, so I wasn’t far off on that mark. But as any seasoned mountaineer knows, climbing good rock is only a small part of what we do, and the Tetons threw everything else at me along the way. Loose rock galore, tricky route-finding, long and dense bushwhacks, violent storms, and the lingering possibility of wildlife encounters. I would deal with all of these by the time I was through.

The Tetons run primarily north to south and are roughly 40 miles/64 kilometers in length, and roughly 10 miles/16 kilometers wide. The western slope is more gradual with a series of more rounded foothills, while the eastern slope has a sharp jut out of the valley. The Grand Teton rises 7,000 feet out of the valley on its east side, with seemingly little interrupting it. Anyone who has seen it in person knows it’s a sight to behold. From the east, the profile appears as over a dozen sharp peaks, each punctuated by a deep canyon between it and its neighbor. Unfortunately for prominence chasers, there is a high ridge called the Teton Crest which runs the length of the range behind (west of) the main profile. Viewed from the eastern side, it seems like the Tetons should be host to at least a half dozen ultras; instead we get the Grand Teton (4197m, P1990m) and Mount Moran (3842m, P794m) as the only two peaks that crack P600m; another nine are P300m. Still, pursuit of this list will demonstrate to the climber that when it comes to mountain splendor, prominence is only one factor at play. I want to take a deeper look here at three of the peaks which to me were the standouts while completing this list: Mount Owen 3940m, P210m, Mount Moran, and Traverse Peak 3368m, P320m. These were especially memorable climbs for very different reasons, and I’ve really enjoyed looking back on my recollection of each peak as all of what I describe took place five or more years ago. It’s also worth noting that Mount Owen went successfully on my first attempt, Moran on my second, and Traverse on my third - an interesting, if ultimately meaningless, progression.

Mount Owen

I was already several years into my Teton project before I had the confidence to tackle Mount Owen. As the second tallest peak in the range, Owen often gets overlooked as a climbing objective compared to the Grand. However, the consensus seems to be that Owen is a much harder climb than the standard routes on the Grand, and my ascent proved no exception. Granted, my partner and I chose to climb the East Ridge, which at YDS 5.6 is a fair bit harder than the standard Koven route. Even by the Koven, though, one should still count on being in technical and exposed terrain for at least 8 hours, and prepare for the mental taxation that comes with that sort of endeavor. At the time I lived in the Highlands, a NPS housing area just across Cottonwood Creek from the American Alpine Club Climbers’ Ranch, and thus I had a rare opportunity for a totally human-powered climb of Mount Owen.  My buddy Kevin met me at my cabin at 3am, and we trudged up Burned Wagon Gulch, aiming for the upper flanks of the Teton Glacier where the proper climbing began.

We arrived at the foot of the Koven Couloir around 4:40 am which meant we’d be treated to prime alpenglow on the north face of the Grand just as it came into view. Maybe one day I’ll climb the North Face or North Ridge, both of which are classic routes on one of the biggest alpine faces in the Lower 48.  But that was not our destination today; we turned our backs to this imposing wall and started up wet but easy 5th class slabs to climber’s left of the snow ramp in the Koven. We simul-climbed the lower half of the couloir and pitched out the upper half. At the top of the Koven couloir is the Owen/East Prong col, which is a precipitous knife-edge home to an improbably-flat bivy site. Here we got our first views north, with Mount Moran dominating the skyline and the trail in Cascade Canyon looking tiny over a vertical mile below us. The next pitches above us apparently are often soaking wet, with many reports describing a climb directly through a waterfall. Lucky for us we found this section mostly dry, and we reached the lower portion of Owen’s highest hanging snowfields un-drenched and in good time.

It’s at this point on the mountain that the Koven and East Ridge routes diverge, with Koven skirting left (south) across the bottom of the hanging snowfields before its final push up a series of easy-ish chimneys to the summit. We would descend this way, but first we wanted to climb the more interesting East Ridge- now directly before us. We punched ahead straight up the snowfield, un-roped, and soon reached the transition from snow to rock. From the valley, Owen’s hanging snowfields appear steep enough that a fall would be un-arrestable and eventually fatal; fortunately it’s much less steep in reality and a mostly trivial crossing. We stowed our ice axes and took our trad gear back out. The first pitch or two presented little trouble; good holds on not-quite-vertical rock made for pleasant climbing. Starting on the northeast side of the ridge, the pitch wrapped back around to the ridge crest soon enough and the monstrous north face of the Grand again became a constant, silent presence, impossible to ignore. I’ve really grown to love the orange and pink granite that makes up the high Teton peaks, for the most part it is extremely solid and it feels amazing to climb on.

The next pitch was the most challenging and the most memorable. A short traverse leads the climber south, out of view of the belayer, to a small roof one must mantel over and around another blind corner with huge exposure before getting to easier climbing and the next belay ledge. I seconded the pitch, and once Kevin went around the corner, I could hear him trying to negotiate this sequence. He eventually got it, so I started up, curious what might be in store. Under the roof, there was a good under-cling finger crack with an old piton in it. I ignored the piton at first and tried the mantel, but I didn’t quite stick the move before losing my grip on the under-cling. “Falling!” I didn’t fall far, but because of my position under the roof I swung out pretty far into open space. I don’t have a bad fear of heights generally, but here I felt the exposure with every fiber of my being. I was probably only a few hundred feet above the hanging snowfield, but I could sense every inch of the two thousand or so feet down to the Teton Glacier. I swung back toward the wall, grabbing the under-cling on my second swing. I was no longer hesitant to clip the piton. I rested for a minute to collect myself, got a high heel hook, unclipped, and finally pulled up over the roof. Phew! The grading in the Tetons can be quite stout; while the route goes at YDS 5.6, I thought that move felt more like YDS 5.8 or 5.9.

All that remained now was a long slabby pitch up a moderate-angled ramp of grippy granite to the summit. It felt amazing to be up there. The Grand looked in top form; it was crystal clear out. Cascade Canyon was now over 6,000 feet straight below us, and the shuttle boats on Jenny Lake were tiny dots. Teewinot looks especially dramatic from this side. I’ve never felt further away from the familiar sights of the valley - we had a long way down before we would be out of technical terrain. So we only took 20 minutes on the summit before starting down the Koven Route. Interestingly, the Koven tops out through a cave on the summit, a feature I’ve never encountered on a mountain before or since. We abseiled down the chimneys, crossed the snowfield, and then 8-10 more abseils brought us back to the Teton Glacier. I’ve never felt more relieved to be back on flatter ground. Rivulets on the glacier, frozen this morning, were now gushing as we crossed back to the moraine. We were pretty awed at our accomplishment as we rejoined the trail above Amphitheater Lake and took one last look at our towering monster of a climb we’d just tackled. It was a great privilege to tick that one off my list, and for the first time I considered list completion a real possibility. As I write this in early 2023, Mount Owen remains my proudest summit to date.

Mount Moran

Slightly easier than Mount Owen from a technical standpoint, Mount Moran is a proper beast of a mountain and is ultimately no less mentally or physically demanding. I also found Moran to be a valuable teacher for me, as each of my two attempts had important lessons in store. My first attempt, unsuccessful, came at the end of my first summer in the Tetons. I’d been climbing a fair bit that summer and felt good about taking a stab at Moran before the snow started falling. Still, this outing would prove to me that I was a bit greener than I thought in terms of leading a big trip in the alpine. I organized a party of four (first mistake) and scored a permit for the CMC campsite, one of the most scenic backcountry sites in the Tetons. Somehow, we fit all four of us and our gear into a single canoe and paddled across Leigh Lake to the base of the mountain. A massive over 3000ft scree slope descends out of the remains of the Falling Ice Glacier all the way down to the lake, so no real bushwhacking is required for those with a boat. Since we had camping and climbing gear, our packs were way too heavy to get any enjoyment out of this scree climb. It seemed interminable and our progress was slow. Finally, we made it to camp, which was indeed gorgeous and put us only 2,600 vertical feet below the summit.

For reasons I no longer remember, we didn’t wake up till 7am. We scrambled to the top of Drizzlepuss, a small but precipitous sub-tower, and made two abseils off the tower to gain access finally to the CMC Face, our route of choice. Here’s where things started going a bit sideways and our epic began. Out of our group of four, me and one other were strong and relatively efficient climbers, a third had less experience climbing but more than enough to be up to the task. The fourth guy was a co-worker in the park who I’d just met that summer, who I knew pretty well but apparently not well enough. It turned out he was a compulsive liar and his assurances on climbing experience were no exception. He’d basically never climbed outdoors before, never abseiled, and was very, very inefficient. I’d only brought one rope based on my working knowledge of everyone’s skill level. While four people on a single rope is always cumbersome, I thought a more efficient group still would have summited in decent time and the saved weight would be worth it. Now, that notion was out the window.  The abseils went slower than planned, but not too bad. Getting out onto the face, however, the pitches became incredibly slow. It was probably 9 or 9:30 when we started climbing the face. I led all the pitches on the face and the climbing was pretty easy. It took a while to get the others up each pitch though, and the inexperienced guy took forever. Every time I checked the time thinking 10 minutes had passed, it was an hour. Finally, it was 2pm and we were only around 12,000ft with 600 more to go. It had now taken us 7 hours to ascend 2,000 vertical feet! Not having a second night on our permit, I knew we had a long way out so I called it. It took us till 6pm to get back to camp, and we made it back to the canoe around midnight. Exhausted and a bit out of our minds by that point, we paddled back across the lake under a brilliant display of stars, also reflected in the glassy surface of the lake, as elk bugled all around us. We got to the trailhead at 1am.

Weary after that doozy of an adventure, I didn’t have it in me to re-attempt Moran until four summers later. By this point I had a vastly better knowledge of the mountain and what I should be doing on it. This time it would be Kevin and me only, we would climb in a single day, and we would free solo the CMC face on the way up to save significant time. It’s absolutely a no-fall zone, but amazing jug holds are bountiful and it’s not actually all that steep. Again, we left my cabin at 3am, were across the lake around 4:30, and were up at CMC camp by 6. Already way ahead of schedule compared to my prior attempt. We rapped Drizzlepuss, soloed up the face, and sure enough we topped out at 9am. I marveled at how vastly more efficient everything was this time around. But the mountain wasn’t done with us yet. Two gals we’d chatted with atop Drizzlepuss now topped out, and we agreed to combine our ropes on the descent for longer abseils. Two or three double-rope abseils took us down the face and we un-roped to traverse a short scramble back to Drizzlepuss and the crux pitch out of there. Somehow, on this traverse, one of the other duo fell off! I thought it was a boulder whizzing past me at first. Miraculously she managed to catch herself about 30 feet down (again, not close to vertical). If she hadn’t pulled that off she was gone for sure. It was the scariest thing I’ve ever witnessed in the mountains by a long shot, and I’ve been downstream from a monsoonal debris flow before. That’s a whole other story, though.

We went into full rescue mode at this point, unsure of her injuries or their severity. She was in complete shock, hugging the cliff, screaming incoherently. Kevin called the Jenny Lake ranger station and held them on the line until we could figure out if we needed a heli rescue or not. I scrambled back over to help her partner calm her down and assess injuries. It took about 20 minutes to stabilize her enough so she could get a handle on her injuries and actual pain levels. Again, luck was on our side: nothing indicated any broken bones or head trauma, or even so much as a dislocated shoulder. Only some minor bruising and lacerations seemed to present themselves, so we told the rangers we could bring her down to the valley. It took us about 45 minutes to climb the 120 or so feet back up Drizzlepuss. Somehow still faster than last time, even in the middle of an alpine rescue. We walked them down to the lake, and she got more energized the farther we went. We all still couldn’t really believe what had happened up there. As slow as the descent was, we still got back to the car at 6pm. After paddling them back across the lake, she opted to take us out for drinks and pizza at Dornan’s first rather than go straight to the hospital. We did not object.

Traverse Peak

Traverse Peak is the shortest ranked peak on this list, but ultimately it gave me the most trouble of all of them. It is the tallest summit on the dividing ridge between Moran Canyon and Snowshoe Canyon, and as such is among the park’s most remote peaks. No trails exist for two entire canyons on either side of it. The bushwhacking is dense and tedious, and the terrain is very rugged. Theoretically this area is frequented by grizzlies too, though I never saw any on my three trips to Traverse. From the east, one must paddle about 5km across Jackson Lake, where afternoon winds frequently make the return crossing treacherous. An overland approach is possible from the west, and I tried this first in October 2015.

My first foray into this remote zone was a three-day solo backpacking trip. Since there were no trails anyway, I decided to get creative with my route and make it into a larger tour of Moran Canyon with an approach from the west. On the first day, I arrived at the trailhead around 2pm and made an evening ascent of Maidenform Peak 3395m, P323m, another ranked 11er, by its southwest ridge. This area is remote enough that I felt confident I wouldn’t encounter anyone at all, let alone a ranger. Thus, I skipped getting a permit. The forecast was so flawless for the weekend that I also left my tent at home. I planned to bivy on the summit of Maidenform that night, and luckily there was a flat spot up there that was perfectly human-sized. It was a very memorable night up there, the sunset really put on a show and the stars were incredible. In the morning I descended to Cirque Lake and skirted around it into the canyon.

It was time for my first attempt on Traverse. In the Teton climbing guide by Ortenburger and Jackson, the south couloir route, YDS class 3, is described as a ‘large, obvious couloir directly across from the Triple Glaciers on Mount Moran’. Simple enough, or so I thought. Lots of slow and difficult bushwhacking brought me to this spot where I was greeted by no fewer than three steep couloirs, each of them large, none of them obvious. There is a beta photo in the book, but the base of the canyon is cut off and thus no useful landmarks presented themselves. After a bit of head-scratching I chose the left-hand couloir because, well, I had to try something. Unfortunately, about 2000 feet up, this particular couloir bottlenecked into 5th class terrain, too challenging to solo and no obvious way around. I backed off and continued my trip, spending the night in the canyon bottom several miles back to the west. The third day I made a rare ascent of Raynolds Peak 3325m, P228m, easy but remote, and ran the ridge past Ortenburger Lake, down to Dead Horse Pass, and finally out Badger Creek and over a final divide to my car at North Leigh Creek.

I next attempted Traverse in 2017, this time with Kevin. We paddled across Jackson Lake to the mouth of the canyon at Moran Bay. The bushwhack from this side wasn’t a whole lot easier, but was much shorter, luckily. I would later learn that we again picked the wrong couloir, though this time we were able to traverse into a different one as the first grew too difficult. This was early summer and thus a 3500-foot snow climb with, I’d guess, a 40-45 degree slope angle. By switching couloirs, we were able to reach the crest of the divide, at the col between Traverse and Bivouac, its lower neighbor to the east. We could taste victory, but unfortunately were stymied once again. The ridge to Traverse looked technical, with large gendarmes blocking easy progress, and the way around them to either side was not obvious. It was getting late in the day too, so we determined we didn’t have enough time to really experiment with route-finding today. We resigned ourselves to be content with a summit of Bivouac Peak 3299m, P80m, then scrambled down Bivy’s east face and back to our boat. Despite again not tagging the summit, this was a wonderful day out and we didn’t leave empty-handed.

Third time’s the charm, they say. In 2018, armed with much more useful beta photos, I took myself from the summit of Moran, Kevin and I again paddled to Moran Bay and bushwhacked up the canyon until we were below the Triple Glaciers. Finally, I could easily pick out the correct route up from the canyon floor. Naturally, it was the one of the three large couloirs I had yet to try. This time it was later in the year and the snow was mostly gone, leaving 3500 feet of decent-quality scrambling to the top. The last few hundred feet to the top was easy terrain but the route-finding was not terribly straightforward, so we again made use of my improved beta photos. We were super-relieved to finally get this summit, as it left me with only one remaining on the list. To be honest I think If we’d failed a third time there might not have been a fourth - getting out there is just such a huge effort. To me, climbing Traverse will always remain one of my most special peak-bagging memories. I felt really lucky to be able to capitalize on a very unique opportunity - a truly exploratory ascent of a peak in the Lower 48 States. While it had been climbed at least once before, potentially a good handful of times, the mountain is one that is very much still shrouded in mystery. The guidebook has very little to say about details of the route, the beta photo is vague, and none of the Jenny Lake climbing rangers I talked to had ever climbed it. It was really rewarding for me to get to do all the research, problem solving, and legwork myself on this one. Though Traverse had been climbed before, this was a unique opportunity which felt like pioneering a new route, due to the scarcity of information in the Teton climbing community.

A few weeks after climbing Traverse, I finished the list in September 2018 with my second attempt on Eagles Rest Peak 3431m, P140m on the west side of Jackson Lake. In total I used ropes on ascent for three peaks, abseiled off of five, and only one had a trail to the summit. I’m really proud to have climbed this group of amazing peaks- I asked around with as many prolific local climbers as I could find, and it seems the only person who might have climbed all of them prior to my project was Leigh Ortenburger- though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn of others- and I’m pleased to be in such good company. I also want to give major props to Dustin Erickson who, though at the time of this writing has yet to summit Prospectors Mountain 3426m, P512m to formally finish the list, is clearly operating off a lower prominence threshold of 300 feet and appears set to complete the list in that fashion. There are several peaks in that realm that I haven’t climbed yet that are classics in their own right; Thor and Cleaver especially come to mind. I will certainly get to these at some point, but for now I’ve been focusing more on Turiano’s Select Peaks list as well as the Wyoming 2000ft prominence list. My love for the Tetons hasn’t diminished though - I still enjoy climbing new and old peaks all over the range as opportunity arises.

Alex Lennon