Woolsey Butte

Woolsey Butte 7,302′
Grand Canyon National Park
Total Time: 6:15
Distance: 4.1 miles
Elevation Gain: 2680′
Crux: Class 3
Trailhead: Point Imperial- trash, pit toilets

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Continued…

The third and final day of my North Rim brush-a-thon was slated to be the easiest. Woolsey Butte, sitting 1,500′ below Point Imperial, was supposed to be a relatively straight forward descent and bushwhack. And at only 3-4 miles roundtrip, it would give me plenty of time to get back to Phoenix at a reasonable hour. It even shares the first part of the approach with the climbers trail to Mount Hayden, making the route finding even easier. I slept in until 6:30 after my rough outing on the Dragons Head and drove to Point Imperial where a few others cars sat in the lot. I changed and packed my things, walked out to the guardrail at Point Imperial and hopped over before any of the onlookers could say a word.

I was surprised and even a bit disappointed by how unstable and loose the climbers trail was. The trail was excellent by Grand Canyon summit standards, but I was hoping to climb Mount Hayden in the spring and I had a hard time seeing how I could convince any of my non-GC peakbagger friends to climb Mount Hayden with an approach this loose and brushy. I lost the use trail in the thicket about halfway down to the class 3 gully, and bushwhacked through locust and small oaks to the top of the gully where the use trail again became well defined.

I pulled out my hedge trimmers for the second day and cut any trees hanging over the use trail, doing the climbing community a bit of a service for the Mount Hayden approach. The use trail stayed loose in the gully, and I was surprised when I reached the first class 3 waterfall. I hadn’t researched the Hayden approach too much, only that it sucked, and wasn’t prepared for the first of the three downclimbs. Thankfully there were nice steps and lips as I worked down the first 15′ waterfall before coming to the second drop, the easiest of the three with a large fallen tree hanging across. This would have made a nice rap anchor, but I crawled underneath to the top of the third and most difficult of the bunch. I took off my pack to downclimb this final dry fall, a bit steeper than the first two made even more challenging by the thin coating of dirt on the holds that had showered down from above.

Once through the final downclimb, I was at the mouth of the gully and through the Coconino. The Mount Hayden approach hooked right (south) but I needed to start working northeast towards Woolsey Butte. So I parted ways with the use trail and continued downslope in the drainage where the brush seemed at least tolerable. I trimmed locust brush as I went to try to help myself on the return trip, and mostly kept in the main drainage until a few hundred feet above the Supai cliff bands. I found a small break in the brush to begin traversing north, and the brush improved once I reached the hotter south facing slopes. There were huge detached boulders littered across the slopes, and I picked up a game trail through the manzanita just beneath them before crossing some wide open Hermit Shale, Woolsey Butte looking very close.

But as I rounded the corner, I saw no obvious path through the Supai. GCSS recommends dropping into the North Fork of Nankoweap Creek, yet I found myself immediately cliffed out by 50′ overhanging waterfalls. Perhaps one of the adjacent bays would go? I tried two seperate Supai bays to the south, finding myself cliffed out after getting through the upper two bands. Considering this was supposed to be the easiest peak of the trip, I was getting my butt kicked by route finding.

I wasted a good hour trying various ledges to try and get through the Supai without success. I very nearly gave up before deciding to traverse around past the North Fork of Nankoweap to the ridgeline just above Woolsey Butte. I left the drainage and hiked the easy Hermit Shale above the Supai bands finding a large and easy class 2 ramp at the far end taking me all the way to the shallow saddle with Woolsey Butte.

I felt a bit silly for wasting so much time looking for this huge ramp, and tried to make up for it by charging upslope, working up a few short class 2-3 bands to the small summit. I found the register easily enough and recognized a number of names, the summit seeing a group about every 4-5 years. Similar to the other peaks from the trip, I switched out the bottle for one of Art Christiansen’s registers and put the old summit register in with the new one (just a single folded sheet of paper).

I very briefly tried to spot Kolb Arch without luck before starting back up towards the rim, still trying to make up for lost time. From the saddle, it was 1,600′ of elevation gain and at least 4 Grand Canyon rock layers in under 2 miles to get back to the car. I got through the Supai up the class 2 ramp quickly and began to reverse the traverse back towards the approach gully shared with Hayden, this time taking a slightly higher line above the Supai cliff bands. This wound up forcing me to scramble through the boulders, which actually wound up being the most fun part of the route.

I continued back to the main gully and followed it back up, the locust brush cuttings acting like bread crumbs to find my way back through the thicket. I took a short water break at the base of the gully before starting the last bit of class 3 of the trip, finding the three waterfalls to be far easier on the ascent.

I lost the trail in nearly the same spot as on the way in, and quickly made my way over to the ridgeline off Point Imperial to pick it up again. Once back on the use trail, it was a loose but straightforward ascent back to the rim where I startled a small group of people at the point that had been taking photos of Mount Hayden. I reached the car in under 2 hours from Woolsey Butte and after brushing off the thorns and leaves hopped in for the long ride home.