Trailhead: South Lake
Elevation: 12237 ft
Route: North Ridge
Difficulty: 5.7
Hurd Peak is a cool little summit in the middle of the South Lake basin with easy technical routes on less than perfect granite. The approach is mellow, with my GPS recording a total of 8 miles for the whole day and the setting is spectacular. This is not a popular peak and you will likely have the route to yourself - this is likely due to the unusually crumbly granite in a range that is known for splitter rock.
Polemonium (sky pilot) high on Hurd Peak
A little more than a year ago I had surgery for femoral acetabular impingement and a labral tear in my left hip. Simply, the bone at the head of my femur did not fit well into the socket and was tearing into the cartilage that protects the joint. It's been a slow recovery and I've spent the last 12 months working up to long hikes, outdoor rock climbs, and movement on mountain terrain. Finally we put it all together with an alpine climb on Hurd Peak out of the Bishop Pass/South Lake trailhead.
GG at the start of the first pitch dihedral
There were many things I missed about alpine climbing. I missed the multi-stage nature of the endeavor. There is an approach, maybe 2.5 miles in this case, where you quickly warm up as you hike up towards the toe of the route underneath the weight of the climbing pack. There's the climb itself, 5 pitches for Hurd Peak with the 5.7 crux occurring within the first 10 meters. There is the almost ritualized racking of gear and checking of knots and execution of belay change overs. There is the sigh of relief at the top when you take your shoes off and untie your knot and pack the harness away. There is a period of annoyance, especially on this peak, as you walk along the long ridgeline looking for the true summit. There is the descent, fortunately a walk-off through sand to the west towards the shore of Long Lake. The completion of each stage feels like a small victory building towards the success waiting at the end of the day.
Following a pitch on Hurd Peak with South Lake in the background
I missed polemonium (sky pilot) the purple high altitude flower that smells like urine, maybe to attract its pollinators the flies or maybe just to keep other insects like ants off of its sticky/smelly resin covered leaves.
I missed the descent after the climb down from vertiginous heights (oh to just stand on flat ground again!) through dust and shale and scree into flat (safe) lush meadows and through snowmelt streams.
View of Bishop Pass and Mount Goode from the summit
I did not miss rock that crumbles under the rubber toes of my climbing shoes when I carefully weight the foot, and this is my one small complaint against Hurd Peak.
If you put the "Geology" layer on in Caltopo you can see that Hurd is mostly granite, like most of the rest of the climbing peaks of the Sierra, although it also has a region of schist, a metamorphic rock. Despite the name, the schist layer is not why I think the rock was so crumbly on Hurd. Most of the worst rock was actually on lichen-covered granite. Instead of the crisp sharp corners usually found on granite cracks and blocks, the surfaces tended to be grainy and rounded, hard to climb and hard to place protection in. Although granite is one of the hardest rocks, it weathers like any other rock eventually, and apparently this rounding of corners is common on weathered granite. While I was belaying GG I wondered whether the lichen was actually eating away at the granite, which is apparently something it can do, burying its fungal hyphea a few millimeters in tiny cracks in the granite.
Well, geologic time includes now.
Caltopo with GPX of our route. Geology map layer shows the metamorphic zone (purple)
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