
| fastandlight and I drove up from Boise Friday night, and caught the last shuttle boat across to the far end of Redfish lake around 8:15. What a great deal - trade 6 dollars to avoid about 5-6 miles of hiking. well worth it!. We started hiking towards flat rock junction. After probably a couple miles at most we started heading up a steep dry drainage on the south east flanks of Heyburn. The draining was mostly class 2 with a couple class 3 sections, but it never flattened out ... ever. It was starting to get dark, and we were looking for a place to bed down. We finally found a ledge where we could bivy I am guessing around 8700 ft. The first bivy for both of us where we actually contemplated tying in, but figured that would be overkill.
In the morning we woke and decided that we would continue up and bring all our gear with the intention of coming down the opposite side via the bench lakes. We had bivied on the right side of the main drainage. Above us, it now split into two steep and narrow drainages. We chose the one on the right as it seemed to be leading in the general direction of the summit based on the quad we had. Class 3 turned to class 4 a few times which made for some fun scrambling. Somewhere around 9300 - 9500 ft, it turned back to class two scree. We could now see the summit tower above, but we were starting to get concerned since we were on the Southeastern flanks instead of where we wanted to be on the west. We had hoped that we would be able to traverse over the ridge to the west side, but that wasn't panning out. We continued up to the highest point next to the summit tower headwall, and realized that there was no getting to the stur chimney from here. We were now standing at what is referred to as the silver saddle. We did not want to backtrack the hundreds of feet down to try and find a way to the west side, and to the north was the steep snow filled north couloir. So here we were litterly less than probably 120 ft from the summit but on the wrong side of the tower.
We contemplated climbing the short East face on the main tower, where there is is a route based on Lopez's book. However neither of us being trad experts could see a good way up the lower section. Supposedly the first 40 ft are the hardest, but there was a section that looked pretty run out for our liking, so we decided not to attempt it.
We then decided to descend the very steep north couloir to the highest bench lake. We set up a rappel and started down. With only one 50 m rope this would be slow. Also Lopez's book described it correctly - full of rotten rock. We did a second rap down to get us onto some 3rd class rock/gravel/mud. We decended another couple hundred feet, where again we had to set up a 3rd rap to go over another cliff. Downclimb more 3rd class shitty rock (the kind where boulders the size of car tires would be suspect) to where the couloir widens to a 50 degree snow field which we then had to downclimb without axe or crampons. Thank God it was warm and we could kick steps in the snow with our trail shoes. It seemed like it took hours (actually it did) to get down this. Physically and mentally draining. So many times I was tempted to glisade, but without anything beyond a hiking pole or a cleaning tool for braking, I thought it would be best to continue the laborious process down.
Finally down to the upper most bench lake, where we took a break and drank water. From there back down to Redfish it was pretty uneventfull. We got back and the boat back at approx 6:30 pm saturday night. We were a bit bummed at getting so close, but after talking to another couple guys who were foiled attempting the northwest ridge and not being able to find the correct route to the summit either we didn't feel so bad. With so many pinacles and ridges on Heyburn it is often hard to get to the top.
Next time would probably approch from the same way, as it seems shorter than going via bench lakes - just have to make sure we get the right drainage this time.
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