Approach: 3 hours and 47 minutes
Climb route: ~8 hours
Descent top to base: 50 min
Hike out: 3 hours and 5 minutes
Total time: 17 hours and 16 minutes

2nd

Hike up to Colchuck Lake, cross the outlet, and head up a climbers, head up Aasgard pass until you are about 400 feet above the lake. Head left through dense bushes to the obvious gully leading up to Colchuck Balanced Rock.

5.7

Climb a few steep 5.7 moves along the broken ramp system heading right, passing a tree, and continuing to easier terrain that leads to a flat ledge below a vertical crack. This follows the same line as Pitch 1 of the West Face.

5.10c

Climb the thin-hands splitter for approximately 25 feet, then move up and left toward the trees at the far left end of the ledge.

5.12a

Climb directly up the finger cracks to reach the base of a V-slot with a thin crack. Use flakes out left, then head up and right past a roof, traversing left past two bolts. Follow wild knobs and a finger crack for a few more meters to a bolted belay.

A few notes about this pitch: The 1st edition Cascades Rock guidebook references a bolt near the flakes, but that bolt is no longer present. I mentioned this to Blake, and it seems the original route included a piton, with plans to replace it with a bolt. However, once the piton was removed, it left a good cam placement, so the bolt was instead added to the anchor. As a result, the anchor now has two bolts, unlike the single bolt noted in the guidebook.

Also, the flake you briefly traverse left to is completely detached and feels sketchy to pull on. We found it safer to climb a move higher (above a solid cam placement—likely where the piton used to be), then traverse left and step on the flake rather than pull on it.

DR notes: I'm not even sure you need to use the flakes (let alone the sketchiest, furthest left pillar-like one), but rather the more rail-like (flake?) feature at the top of the corner that's actually solid. Maybe putting a foot on the furthest-right flake is a nice rest. I would think something like "carefully utilize flakes on the left while keeping gear in the groove" would be better. Also, the leftward deviation in the topo is massive, way out of scale to what you actually do, which is step a foot or so left.

5.11a

Follow knobs, fins, and thin cracks, stepping right twice into new crack systems, and finish at an anchor on a small ledge.

5.11+

Move into the right-slanting slot above, then mantle up and right onto a square ledge. From there, a powerful layback takes you past an overhanging flake and up to another narrow ledge.

5.11+

Hand traverse left along the golden flake, then climb the overhanging corner upward, surmounting a steep bulge near the top.

5.10a

Traverse right, then follow a thin corner feature straight up until you can trend up and left across lower-angled slabs, reaching a belay on a slab beneath a prominent roof system.

5.9

Face and knob climbing lead into a crack on the alcove’s left side, then continue around the roof’s left edge to reach a belay stance on the ridge.

5.8

A less difficult pitch of blocky climbing follows right-leaning cracks along the crest to the summit.

V1, ~3m

Do the boulder problem to the top of the balanced rock.

We opted in favor of descent rather than the boulder problem, which both of us had already done on previous ascents. See photos from the trip report for West Face (5.11+/12-, 8+p) and The Scoop (5.11c, 6+p) on Colchuck Balanced Rock. I climbed the boulder problem on both occasions.

Scramble

Make a 30m rappel to east from slung horn (you do not need to do this if you bypass the summit block area as we did), then scramble down scree or snow rightward (clockwise around peak) and back to the base base of the climb.

2nd

Hike out the way you came.

1st

I hung out for the morning at sister Jenny's place in Leavenworth before driving to Index to meet my friend Nate to kick off our climbing roadtrip.