Ice Climbing at Lee Vining and June Lake

View Album

Headed out to Lee Vining with the mountaineering club for some ice climbing. We got a big hotel suite split across about ten people.

The first day we headed out to Lee Vining canyon and climbed at Chouinard Falls. The second day a smaller group of us headed out to June Lake to climb at Horsetail Falls. We shifted our focus on to a north facing alpine route when the ice at Horsetail was clearly unstable. Read full post...

The second day at June Lake ended up being a lot of fun. The route we found had a water ice slope (with a crevasse at the bottom) which led up to a steep hard snow slope, followed by another section of vertical water ice.

Tom led the first section, followed by Will and then Ray, each progressively setting an anchor higher on the climb and then lowering or rappelling down. At the end of the day, Will built a v-thread and cleaned all the screws at the top anchor before rappelling down the route.