Trailhead: Whitney Portal
Elevation: 12306 ft
Route: Stemwinder
Difficulty: 5.6
Thor Peak is a great half-day outing from the Whitey Portal area with the best views of Whitney that I've ever seen. The south face is filled with obscure routes with amazing names and amazing rock as well. I'm still working on finding the best descent however...
Sometimes you have to climb a route just because of the name. Who can resist routes with names like Igor Unchained, The Wasteland, Lunatic Fringe, many many more examples. One of my favorites, albeit one that I have not climbed is one in the Owen's River Gorge, full name: You have been nothing but trouble since the day I laid eyes on you; You’re like a thorn in my side; I don’t know from one day to the next what stupid lame brain stunt you're gonna pull; Now get out of here, get out of my office, get out of my life, once and for all get out, out, out!
Anyways we were hanging in Bishop, looking for something to do on my vacation between cardiology and another emergency medicine block, and I noticed Thor Peak, a granitic looking lump in the Whitney Zone with such delightful route names as the Pink Perch, Satan's Delight, and of course, the Stemwinder. The stemwinder, from the limited description in Secor, seemed the least tricksy of the bunch. Named after a state-of-the-art wind up watch (at a certain point in history), stemwinder I guess means something top-notch or novel. And I guess I have to hand it to this route, it was truly one of a kind.
So, the logistics. Unfortunately like many great and innocent peaks this one is in the Whitney Zone and so you need to get a trail permit to climb on the south face. Then the approach is a hike up the Whitney Trail to outpost camp, and just past that you cut north towards the looming face of Thor. There seemed to be some sort of cairned trail but you're aiming for a lone tree on a ledge in the middle of the face as the start of the route which is described well here.
Although this route has reportedly only short technical sections we did bring a 60m rope because we've learned not to believe what we read in Secor. The first pitch is some 5.easy chimney that climbs past a pin and I do believe is probably awkward enough to warrant the use of a rope, unless you're not a klutz and know that you're not the sort of person who will fall backward out of an awkward chimney because your backpack got stuck or some such thing.
After this short pitch you get many hundreds of feet of clean third class climbing that does indeed wind around the face delightfully as you gaze down on outpost camp and the Whitney climbers.
GG coming up class 3 on Stemwinder with Outpost Camp below him
Eventually you come to a reddish tower and realize you are stuck between a 5.10 looking corner to your left and a slab hanging over a precipitous drop to your right. Here is the second section where we used the rope - although the slab seemed again to be textbook 5.easy, it seems a lot scarier over a thousand foot drop in your approach shoes!
Emerging onto the summit plateau
And from there, more fantastic third class to pop out on the summit plateau, and then about 700 more exhausting vertical feet up boulder fields to the true summit. The summit has genuinely stunning views of Whitney and a great overview of all its east side routes, and Mount Russel is easily visible as well.
The East Face of Whitney in shadow and Mount Russel in the light
At this point I was very enamored of Thor Peak and told GG that if I lived in Bishop I would come down to run laps on all of its many interesting routes. He told me to watch what I said before I had figured out the descent. This ominous and deeply pessimistic comment turned out to be prescient, as I thoroughly mangled the descent.
Now, I'm not sure if I did the descent correctly and it's just horrendous, or if I made a mistake, but I led us down a use-trail following footprints to the eastern edge of the summit plateau and we dropped down a sandy gully. At first it was easy going on sand, but progressively became steeper and bushier to the point where I was sliding through head-height manzanita and swearing never to return to Thor Peak. When I had had all my skin flayed off by thorny bushes we emerged back on the Whitney trail and continued to our car.
Reportedly you can also descend to the North Fork of Lone Pine Creek by going more north-easterly off the plateau, or even return to outpost camp by descending the plateau to the north-west. Each of these seems like it will add mileage to the roundtrip distance but maybe is overall less horrendous. GPX below, use at your own risk
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