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Gap Peak to Mount Fable | 2010-10-02
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We parked our car at Grotto Canyon Creek parking lot. Our route was reverse of what Kane's book says. So our first peak was Gap Peak then Mount Fable.
It was little confusing to get to Gap I found. First of all we weren’t sure where the trailhead was. We followed Grotto Canyon Creek trail until we hit the first drainage. Bob Spirko’s track went father to west but Ali wanted followed east side of the drainage while I wanted to follow west side because we weren’t sure if this drainage will be deep that if we stay on wrong side, we cannot get to Gap. If following west side of the drainage didn’t work we could still easily get to Bob’s track. So we went separate ways. My way eventually merged to Bob's but it wasn’t a perfect trail. Soon we regrouped with Ali but according to them their route wasn’t perfect neither, so I guess it really didn’t matter which way.
Once near above treeline, and scree slope began, we defiantly find a trail. The trail lead us the first huge rockband where the trail went both left (west) and right (east) (page 3). Here I misread my GPS and decided to take right. At this point it made sense because trail was there and right side was protected from strong wind by the rockband. We walked beside the rockband and once we turned around a corner I saw something I didn’t want to see. The rockband kept going all the way to the summit. So I didn’t want to keep going all the way up hoping maybe there is an easier way up behind the summit where we can’t see. It’s almost becoming my karma lol, we needed to do an extra difficult scramble to get up a weakness of the rockband (page 5). After the rockband we quickly got up ridge top and followed it to the summit of Gap Peak.
The crux of the day (beside the off-route difficult scramble by mistake) was the ridge from Gap to Fable near Gap (page 10). It was narrow and there were exposed sections for a while until we lost elevation and ridge leveled out. After that we followed widened ridge until last slabby terrain to the summit of Fable.
For descent we followed Kane’s route. We went down scree and found a good trail and followed it all the way to the town. We only had one car which was parked at Grotto Canyon, we had to walk extra 3.2 km on highway to pick up our car.
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