Whitehorse & Cathedral in a Day

Tim, Scott, and I recently had a great day climbing on Whitehorse and Cathedral Ledge. We climbed two classic routes—Sliding Board on Whitehorse and Thin Air on Cathedral—in good time, then enjoyed some parking lot beers. While I loved the climbing, I’m pretty sure the post-climb Trilliums made Tim’s day.

Here’s the story of our day in eight pictures.

Here I am at the belay atop Sliding Board’s third pitch. We’d just combined the crux pitch with a very runout pitch 3. A real rope stretcher. Scott is visible in the pic finishing up the pitch.

This is a great shot of the start of pitch 4 on Sliding Board. It begins on a blank-ish slab before laybacking up the corner just above my hand. A fun, albeit short, pitch, it leads to a cramped and uncomfortable belay anchor.

This is the final pitch we did on Sliding Board. The traverse from my current position to the lower of the two bushes on the right was a little thin!

Here’s Scott approaching the thin traverse on the final pitch. It wasn’t his favorite sequence of the day, in part because the line he picked was a little too high. Once Scott reached the anchor, we got to the ground in three 70-meter raps.

As soon as we hit the ground, we drove over to Cathedral, re-racked, then headed up to Thin Air. This photo is of me near the top of the first pitch, about to link it with the namesake traverse on Thin Air’s second pitch.

Tim scampered up the first pitch to the pedestal, then shot pics of Scott on the traverse. For most climbers, the traverse is the highlight of the route.

From the anchors on Thin Air’s second pitch, climbers head out right, then climb back left to a chimney and, atop that, a large belay ledge. On the first 20 or so feet (shown above) the pro is a bit sparse. But the climbing is super-fun and the pro soon improves.

There are two more pitches on Thin Air after climbers negotiate the chimney on pitch 3. We made good time on them. Here’s Scott scrambling up the final moves of pitch 5.

Once he got to the anchor, we hiked back down to the car and enjoyed some well-earned Trilliums. Sadly, our photographer was too preoccupied to capture the après scene.

Words by Doug Martland
Photos by Tim Peck