Ryan Strong is a dirtbag rock climber and part-time forest technician.

This summer, I did a road trip out West with my buddy Wes. I met up with him in Bowling Green, Kentucky, and set out. The original plan was to take my car, but my registration expired, so we took his Chevy Volt. We were both super stoked. Our first destination was Denver, Colorado, where a buddy let us stay at his house for a couple weeks. We did some climbing in Eldorado Canyon and Clear Creek Canyon, Staunton, local Denver crags. Mostly bolted sport climbing, but Eldorado Canyon is a notoriously sandbagged trad climbing area. 

In Denver, we picked up my buddy’s Honda Accord. He let us take it to Wyoming. We went up to Ten Sleep, did some sport climbing. As we were leaving to go south to Lander, the check engine light in Wes’ Volt came on. Turns out a marmot got into his coolant system, so we had to drop it off in Riverton to get fixed. Good thing we had the Honda. We did some more sport climbing, went to Wild Iris and Sinks Canyon. Wes was starting to get homesick, missing his local Chattanooga sport crags. The stoke was still there, but it had definitely dwindled.

We finally set out to the Cirque of the Towers in the Wind River Range. It’d been on my radar for a bit, this collection of rock towers in an amazing backcountry alpine setting. It took a day of hiking before we could do any climbing. We did two routes, the East Ridge on the Wolf’s Head, which has a lot of traversing and scrambling, and the Northeast face of Pingora, which is 1,200 feet tall right up this face.

For Wolf’s Head, we woke up at 6 a.m. It took two hours to get to the base. We couldn’t find the trail, so we were bushwhacking through juniper and scrambling over talus fields. There was quite a bit of snow, still, in early July. We had to do around five pitches of simul-climbing up Tiger Tower gully to get to Wolf’s Head, running out the protection a bit, but moving fast. Two rappels down the backside finally got us onto the East Ridge of Wolf’s Head. We went up this 600-foot ramp. From there, you zigzag between these towers on the ridge line — pretty exposed. There’s no good spot to bail, but it’s not too hard climbing. It started sprinkling on us at the end. We were concerned about getting monsoons in the afternoon, but it ended up being beautiful. After the summit ridge, there was a series of five rappels down the back.

We woke up at 5 a.m. the next day. Got to the base of Pingora at seven. There wasn’t a lot of chill climbing on it. It follows this series of right leaning cracks the entire way. A little slabby in some spots, pretty vert in others. Getting through the crux pitch on the Northeast Face was pretty relieving: It was this wide, offwidthy section. There’s a flared bit with a hand crack in the back, but it opens up in a nice way to a squeeze chimney where you fight your way up a 30-foot section. It was a long day. We got to the top at 3:30 — beautiful views — and rappelled down the south buttress.

We hiked out the next day. We were going to stay out West another week after the Winds, but we just hightailed it back East, wanting to get home.

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