Some other excellent trip reports:

I got all the beta I needed from these two trip reports. Thank you Isley and Jianing for your write-ups!

• https://www.mountaineers.org/activities/trip-reports/intermediate-alpine-climb-forbidden-peak-west-ridge-6
• https://www.mountaineers.org/activities/trip-reports/forbidden-peak-west-ridge-2

Contents

1. Some other excellent trip reports:
2. Strategy
3. On route:
4. Rappelling the Cat Scratch Gullies
5. Gear

Strategy

The route is inherently time-consuming, even with strategies employed to “go fast”. To climb the West Ridge, the two most appealing strategies are (1) do it in-a-day, with no backcountry camping, or (2) get backcountry camping permits for the ‘Boston Basin Cross Country Zone’ (organized under “High Use Cross Country Zones”) and spend at least one night at the Boston Basin High Camp (at 6200′, around 48.5012, -121.0638). Whether you camp or not, going for the summit is going to be quite a long day. In-a-day, you can expect a 17-hour car-to-car day if things go well, and it’s certainly possible for the day to be considerably longer if anything goes less than perfectly. Even with camping: a 12-hour day camp-to-camp is fairly common. The approach from car to camp can be only 3 hours if you bang it out. Getting out from camp-to-car can be only 2 hours. (But add an hour to break camp, so even with high-camp strategy, camp-to-summit-to-cars becomes a 15 hour day in best case scenario; still a very long day.) In any case, parties should be prepared for the possibility of an emergency-bivy somewhere unexpected, as the chances doing one are relatively higher on this route than most. I recommend each person carry a light mylar emergency bivy bag, a bit of extra food, maybe some caffeine, and extra headlamp batteries (or perhaps a whole second headlamp) in their summit-packs, just in case. The biggest hazard on this route is other-parties, both in terms of potential rockfall concerns in the Cat Scratch Gullies, and also just the time-cost of traffic delays. One of the best ways to make this route relatively-safer is to climb on a weekday, instead of a weekend. It’s also significantly easier to get camping permits for a mid-week trip. Even though camping doesn’t shave that much time off of summit-day compared to doing the trip entirely in-a-day, camping with an alpine-start gives you much better odds of actually being first on-route than starting from the cars with an alpine-start.