Tsepeng Pass North

Thanks for the writeup

Seems everyone likes the middle gully - myself and Fitness took the south gully. We followed the south grassy slope which was steep, but not rocky. We had an exposed scramble in the gully. The pass was worthwhile but quite difficult I thought.

We did the gully that isn't clearly visible between these two gullies. We did look up at that gully marked in red and wondered if it goes, but opted not to use it.

This was roughly our line:


(excuse the poor quality photo)

Smurfatefrog wrote: Just a note on the red arrow route, we came down there a week ago and there are plenty loose rocks. Its a very narrow gully so there is nowhere to escape. We had a massive rock that was loose that you had to scamble down on, took us a while to go down carefully, pass packs and then get out the way before the next person went down.

The same is true of the yellow route, which I descended on this same trip: there is lots of loose rock with evidence of recent rockfall. I did not feel comfortable staying in the gully. In fact, because of mist, I descended beyond the point I had previously used to exit onto the true right-hand grassy slopes (the safe route, in my view). If you stay in the gully, you come to the chockstone Tony refers to in a previous post , though from above this appears to be simply a very high drop-off, and I did not see an opening to the wormhole. The gully walls at this point are close to sheer, though there seems to be a narrow way round on the left on very steep slopes. But in poor weather I would regard this route as unsafe and highly recommend exiting higher up onto the true right-hand grassy slopes.

With regards to the Chockstone in Tony's write up. When our group ascended the 'yellow arrow' north variation we could walk right under the large chockstone which formed a small cave in the riverbed. Then when facing back down the pass and looking up to the right-hand side under the 'cave'  there was a small wormhole about 2 metres up. We needed to stand on the shoulders of the tallest of our group and squeeze through the wormhole then pass packs up (too small for packs on). Then we pulled the tall guy through the wormhole last. 

Once through, we found ourselves on a small area of a flat boulder/chockstone(enough space for the three of us) with a steep drop off back into the main gully behind. We then carefully climbed up over the remaining curvature of the chockstone taking care not to slip(I remember this feeling quite exposed) and over some dodgy lose smaller chockstones creating the 'roof' of the cavity below. The going was fairly straight forward from then on continuing in the main gulley.

At the time, this seemed better than the steep grass slopes but it would have been difficult without the tall guy.

Coming down the pass it would be pretty difficult to locate the wormhole as it would be out of site and would require a fairly sketchy downclimb to find it and would probably require rope assistance to lower yourself through safely.

This was late 2016, so the details are a little fuzzy.

It would be interesting to see how a flash flood may have changed the accessibility of this route. 

We descended this pass quite a few years ago in snow and icy conditions.  From what I can gather it would seem that we used the route to the left of the yellow arrow like Ghaz and Fitness did.  I don't recall the chockstone obstacle so would assume that we entered the main gully below this.

I have dug up some photos



Our approach above the upper main gully.  From here we descended via a steep grassy gully in to the main gully itself







We bypassed a frozen waterfall by going on the left.  I remember this as being very slippery!



 





We traversed to the left and back to Garden Castle via Sleeping Beauty