Dogma (5.11c, 15 pitches) takes a wandering line up the walls right of Willy’s Couloir to reach Sherwood Forest, then blasts straight up the left side of Horseshoe Wall, staying just left of an obvious water streak. While the start and finish of the route are a bit undistinguished, the middle third—climbing the huge vertical face above Sherwood Forest—is an incredible stretch of wall climbing, reminiscent of a steeper Black Velvet Wall. Most of the hard climbing is bolted, though occasional runouts are supplemented with gear.
Dogma is generally considered harder than
Levitation 29 (5.11c, 10p), and easier than the
Original Route (5.12a, 13p) on Rainbow Wall—both of which I had climbed previously.
In
June 2007, my partner Ross Peritore and I attempted
Dogma on a 100-degree day. We climbed the lower pitches and made it through Pitch 10—including the 5.11c crux on Pitch 7—before bailing due to the heat. Ever since, I’d wanted to return and complete the route to the top of Horseshoe Wall.
That chance finally came in December 2025, with Sean McLane, whom I’d teamed up with for a stretch.
Given the short December days—and having heard rumors of a “quick scramble” to Sherwood Forest at the base of Horseshoe Wall—we decided to bypass the wandering lower pitches and focus on the nine upper pitches (Pitches 7–15) of
Dogma, starting directly at the base of Horseshoe Wall with the 5.11c crux pitch.
The scramble to the base of Horseshoe Wall took us 2 hours and 40 minutes. We nailed the approach, largely thanks to Sean’s route finding, since he's one of the faster scramblers I've climbed with and was always in the lead—following cairns, navigating occasional fourth-class terrain, and batmanning fixed ropes to get past short fifth-class sections. Given the amount of no-fall terrain and the likelihood of descending in the dark, we decided we would not want to reverse this approach.
We climbed
Dogma in fix-and-follow style, with Sean taking the sharp end for the entire route. Some of the climbing above bolts would have been quite mentally taxing for me, but Sean handled it with calm focus. We both agreed that the hardest move of the day was getting off the ledge at the base of Pitch 12—it felt significantly harder than its 5.11a rating for both of us. We also felt that the bolting was a bit strange at times, almost as if the bolts had been placed before the pitch was actually climbed. My impression is that they were installed on rappel, with clipping stances not always given as much consideration as one would hope.
We were the only party on Horseshoe Wall, though we could see another team climbing
Resolution Arete across mountain. We reached the top of the route and Mt. Wilson at 2:21 p.m.
We rappelled the route using a single 70m rope. Given the adventurous approach and our expectation of darkness on the descent, rappelling the lower portion of
Dogma felt like the safest option. We had some trouble locating the first rappel anchor due to a misleading image on Mountain Project; the Handren guide topo (which I had photographed) was correct. Once we found the anchor, the rappels went smoothly, despite not having climbed the lower route.
Darkness fell just as we reached Willy’s Couloir, which made the scrambly terrain slower and more deliberate, but we made it out without incident. Back at the road, we looked up at Wilson and could see the headlights of climbers topping out on
Resolution Arete—a standard Wilson day.
This page includes route overlays, time stats, and pitch-by-pitch photos for the upper pitches of
Dogma.
