I had lined up a climb for Sunday, but plans shifted at the last minute. I had a couple of solo objectives in mind, but I still posted on Mountain Project to see if anyone was up for something. Brandon Adams had also just had a change of plans with his partner and came across my post. He reached out, and before long we had a plan: Rasta Root (5.12a/b, 5p) on Trapezoid Peak. I hadn’t known about this route beforehand, but it looked pretty cool, and Brandon was psyched to lead the two 5.12 pitches—so I was in. A few texts later, we had gear sorted and a morning meetup arranged. Psyched!

Trapezoid Peak is a striking vertical wall of green granite clearly visible as the next peak west of Mt. Goode on the Bishop Pass Trail. Its trapezoidal shape stands out on the skyline, with a sheer east face that basks in morning sun before shifting to shade in the afternoon.

In addition to its distinctive ridge traverse to the summit, Trapezoid hosts perhaps the highest concentration of quality hard multi-pitch trad climbs on a single formation in the range—second only to the Hulk.

The monolithic east face remained unclimbed until the summer of 2020, when three high-quality routes were put up on the smooth green granite of the wall. In the summer of 2022, four more routes were put up. This wall features some of the best rock and cleanest hard splitters in the Sierra. For accessibility, difficulty, and quality, these routes are hard to beat. Rasta Root is one of these lines—featuring an amazing 50m splitter fingercrack and a wild roof, both with 5.12- cruxes. The route has excellent belay ledges, all belays are bolted, and the route can be rappelled with a 70m rope.

Brandon took the sharp end on the first three pitches—the 5.11 and the two 5.12s—while I led the final two easier pitches to the summit. He earned the onsight, and I settled for the less-than-epic tronsight.

We decided that an adequate rack for this route would be: doubles from tips to 0.75 Camalot, with triples in the finger sizes. We never needed to place anything larger and we did not use nuts (although you could do both if you wanted).

The following page gives a route overlay, map, time stats, and pitch-by-pitch photos from the climb. Thanks Brandon for the awesome day in your backyard!