Elevation Gain: 957m
Distance: 17.53km
Total Time: 12 hours 41 minutes
Date: August 5th, 2025
(includes Cirque Lake Peak and Elephant’s Perch Approach)
Brayden and I had found a pristine camp site around Bead Lakes near the southern flanks of Warbonnet Peak in the Sawtooths. We had reached this area after an ascent up Monte Verita and a fun boat road and approach from Redfish Lake. Our plan was to ascend the following morning with an alpine start in an effort to beat the regular cadence of afternoon thunderstorms. We were both a bit anxious to see what the ascent would be like. The SE Face was our route of choice and it goes at 5.7 with ~5 pitches to its name. This would be our first foray into alpine climbing in Idaho so we weren’t sure how the grades would compare to our usual haunts. Adding to that, an earthquake in 2020 upended many of the alpine routes around the Sawtooths. A tower called Old Smoothie was completely destroyed and the last pitch of Warbonnet was permanently altered after a massive chockstone shifted. The old 5.4 pitch was apparently no longer possible and a very runout workaround had been discovered. Apprehensions aside, we were both fired up to climb this aesthetic summit so, we’d just have to see the damage for ourselves.
At 6am the alarms went off and we hit the trail just 30 minutes later. The approach was as easy as they get albeit a bit of grunt early in the morning. We found the start of the climb without much fuss and Brayden kicked us off with the first lead. He pulled his way through some characteristically run out terrain, but the climbing never got too hard. I followed up and then lead the second pitch along a bench and through a huge tunnel of sorts to the base of pitch 3. This proved to be easy climbing, while the next pitch ramped up the difficulty a bit with an immaculate looking crack system.
Brayden tunnelled his way over to me and then set off up pitch 3. The first crack system was obvious and straightforward, but after there there were two options to follow up. One at climber’s right appeared to be quite stout, while directly above the first crack system there was more of an off-widthy/chimney pitch that appeared more comfortable. Brayden cruised up and then I followed through and what proved to be a really fun pitch with fantastic jams.
Pitch 4 was touted as high quality and indeed there was a phenomenal looking hand crack above. I lead through on great jams and protection and then walked a long ways up an easy but unprotectable arete to the chockstone and final pitch. Here I had my first look and immediately noticed a shiny new addition to the route; bolts. Well that assuaged any concerns. It looked like the entire crux chockstone section was now bolt protected and that would make things much easier. Brayden followed up to see the new development as well.
The last pitch was Brayden’s and set off across the slabby chockstone, clipping two bolts along the way. Then came the crux, a committing lean across the gaping maw below. From there a decent crimp out left offered the only means to get up and over to the other side. After that the difficulties eased off and the final run out section was dispatched with easily. Brayden lead beyond the rappel anchors to top out on the summit and then returned to belay me up. As I made the crux move, I came to appreciate how easily Brayden had made it look. My legs were fully stretched out spanning the gap and I just barely reached the crimp. It was a committing haul up of that hold but then I was home free. I climbed past Brayden to reach the summit as well and then we both got to work setting up a rappel.
This first rappel was a bit awkward as we had avoid any form of a king swing into the void. I had left an extended sling on the chockstone so that we could pull ourselves out of the notch between it and the wall and this proved to be quite helpful. After that we scrambled down to a rappel station around the top of the arete on pitch 4 and promptly got the rope stuck. Brayden climbed back up and rescued it and then we down climbed a ways to a rappel station climber’s right of the base of pitch 4. Brayden lead this rappel, but it didn’t quite reach the ground so he built an anchor and clipped in. I then made on short rappel to a tree below and then re-rigged everything to get us down to the ground.
After reaching the col again, we had a lot of time to spare and decided we might take a stab at climbing up Cirque Lake Peak right across from us.