Mummy Mountain is located in the northern reaches of Rocky Mountain National Park. The guidebook shows no climbing, despite the fact that the entire south slope is studded with 100-500' high buttresses of granite. Nate had noticed this area in 2012, had put up a few single pitch routes in 2013 and a four-pitch route in 2014. In June 2021, he encouraged me to join as we returned to see if the area had potential for more climbing.
We had planned to spend the weekend up there and explore and climb for both days, and sleep at a great bivy location we had identified. On Saturday morning as we were waiting for the sun to come around the ridge and warm the rock, we spotted a cool looking tower with a gang plank feature high on the south slopes, and figured that climbing up to and to the top of that would be a good objective of the day. So up we went. To get to the base of the tower, we climbed six pitches of corner systems and featured rock, ranging in difficulty from 5.6-5.9. We saw no evidence that these pitches had been climbed before. Our seventh pitch was to be the tower, which looked pretty good from below. But soon after Nate started up his lead, he realized that the rock was quite friable and there were several hollow-seeming flakes—so he made the safe decision to bail. We scrambled back to camp from here.
Back at camp, we decided we were a bit nonplussed with the rock quality and the complex terrain we had encountered that day. There are clearly sections of good climbing up there, but perhaps too few and far between or with too long an approach to really be worth it. We decided to head out a day early and climb elsewhere (
Astro Tower we decided later) Sunday.
In any case, it was an enjoyable overnight trip with a six-pitch first ascent with several stretches of good climbing. We may or may not come back to explore more of the craggy terrain on the south slopes of Mummy Mountain. This page gives a trip report for our exploratory adventure. We called the route "Alien Rollout".
July 2022 Update: Over
4th of July weekend 2022, Nate and I returned to explore some more rock on the south side of Mummy. On this trip we camped for two nights at Lawn Lake, and also did some fishing and exploring and summited Mummy Mountain. Click the link for a trip report.
