In February 2012, while doing some aerial photography of the Liberty Bell group with John Scurlock, we were flying a bit east of the group when I noticed a southeast-facing wall of golden granite on Big Kangaroo, the high point on Kangaroo Ridge. Even in the wintery conditions, this wall was devoid of snow, an indication of its steepness. It looked similar in quantity and quality to the popular south side of South Early Winter Spire. This wall faces away from the WA Pass spires so I had never known of its existence.

Curious, I did some research. I learned that this SE-facing wall on Big Kangaroo has a few routes on it. Many of these routes were established in a flurry of activity in 2010-2012 (since the wall is hidden it has remained largely undiscovered by many climbers). Most of these routes are hard, in the 5.11-5.12 range. The easiest route up the wall was first ascended by Beckey (no surprise there, that guy seemed to find every climbable rock in the Cascades) in 1967, when he and Dan Tate put up a route following a central ramp and corner in the middle of the face. The route has 3 distinct parts: the start of the route is mostly low 5th class climbing up a ramp; the middle of the route has slightly runout and burley chimneys the final section has finger cracks and technical face climbing and is the best (and technically the hardest) climbing on the route.

In June 2016, my friend Sam and I climbed this route. We each brought lightweight crampons and an axe for the early season snow. Apart from the quality finger crack and wavy hand crack of the upper two pitches of the route, we thought that most of the climbing was pretty moderate and mediocre, and had a slightly unsettling flavor of looseness (to be expected due to the fact the route goes up a gully weakness and the lack of climbing traffic on this wall). However, the position of the route and the achievement of climbing one of the larger steep walls of granite in the Cascades made up for the quality of climbing.

The south face ends a few hundred feet below the summit. From there, the West Face route, first climbed in 1942, is the best way to climb to the summit. This involved ascending a snow-filled gully to the left (north) side of the summit block, climbing a final 20-ft exposed and unprotected face to the summit, and then tentatively downclimbing while on toprope off an old bolt on the summit. In a way, climbing the West Face route was the most enjoyable climbing of the day, and it certainly added to the overall feeling of achievement to reach the summit. From our packs, we simply descended a gully (scree and snow) to the Hairpin Turn. It was a full value day of Cascades climbing.

The following page gives a route overlay and photos from the climb.