Adapted from the 2021 trip report by Ceri Godinez.
Sinclair is a dramatic, 6,800-ft granite peak rising above the Lynn Canal, across the water from Haines, AK. Reaching the top involves kayaking across the canal, landing on the beach by Yaldagalga Creek, bushwhacking to the back of the valley, and scrambling to the ridge where the technical climbing begins.
The beta I’d received from local mountaineers was that the ridge was mostly easy 5th class with a couple of pitches in the 5.7-5.9 range. I’d say the difficulty of the crux pitches was in the 5.5-5.7 range. The ridge was mostly 3rd and 4th class with maybe an occasional 5th class move. On the ascent, we didn’t rope up until the crux pitches.
The main challenge with Sinclair was getting a weather window. I had a partner lined up for mid-June. Due to heavy, late snowfall, there was still a significant amount of snow on the route through June. I was able to line up another partner mid-July. Once the snow had melted off the ridge, we waited for a weekend with clear skies, little-to-no wind, and calm seas.
In Haines, there’s no guarantee you’ll get a weekend like this during the entire climbing season, but we lucked out. The water was incredibly calm the evening of July 16 as we paddled across the Lynn Canal. It took us roughly an hour to cross from our takeoff at Viking Cove (it’s private property owned by an avid mountaineer who was happy to let us use the beach). We aimed for the shore looker’s left of Yaldagalga Creek.
We reached the far side at sunset. There isn’t a beach near Yaldagalga, so we hopped up onto the rocks and carried our kayaks above the high tideline. We set up camp on a flat-ish bear trail in the woods where the rocky shore meets the start of the steep incline.
Our plan was to try to do the peak in one push, so we woke up around 2:30 a.m. the following day and were out of camp just before 4 a.m.
The first section of hiking is a steep bushwhack through old-growth forest. You gain roughly 1,000 feet over the course of a mile. The trees keep it from being too overgrown and you can use Yaldagalga Creek as a handrail on the right. There are a few cliffy sections so we didn’t hug the creek too closely. On the left, there was a smaller gully with a little stream. We stayed between the creek and the stream until the terrain started to get flatter and brushier. To avoid fallen trees and devil’s club, we hiked higher up the hillside and tried to sidehill our way up the valley. After climbing in and out of a few gullies, we realized this was not an energy-efficient route, so we returned to the relatively flat terrain near Yadalgalga Creek.
We were able to follow animal trails near where the flat terrain meets the steep incline on the side of the valley. As we worked our way up the valley, we moved out of the devil’s club and fallen trees into a flat section with boulders, moss, and highbush blueberries. As we neared the back of the valley, the brush became thicker. We thrashed through ferns, flowers, and alders along the side of the creek. We did one creek crossing near the back of the valley. It wasn’t super deep, but the water was moving pretty fast. We contemplated hiking farther back in the valley, hoping the stream would be smaller, but in the back it branched into multiple streams that would have required removing shoes more than once.
The back of the valley, at roughly 2,000 feet, is an alpine meadow with some large boulders. It took us four hours to reach the back of the valley from our beach camp, and it seemed like an excellent alternative camping location.
From the back of the valley, we hiked up the most approachable-looking gully (on looker’s right) to gain access to the ridge. The right side of the gully was a snow chute, the left had melted out. After 2,000 feet of steep hiking, we reached a saddle on the ridge at roughly 4,000 feet.
From the saddle, the scrambling began. The ridge was mostly rock with the exception of two snow patches. I’ve heard the first one melts completely later in the summer and the second one is on top of a tiny glacier. Crampons and ice axes add security, especially on the steeper, “no fall” sections, but it’s possible to cross the snow in hiking boots and trekking poles, depending on comfort level.
The rock on the ridge was mostly 3rd class with a few sections where the consequences of falling would have been bad. There was one steep slab/corner section that was a mix of tundra and rock, where roping up might have made sense, although there wasn’t much opportunity for placing protection.
We followed the ridge until we reached a saddle beneath the summit of the peak, on the south side. From there, we could look down onto the Juneau Icefield. A small amount of scrambling plus two pitches of 5.5/5.6 led to the summit. It’s decent granite by Alaska standards (a.k.a. most of the rock is solid, but there were still some loose blocks). There’s no obvious crack system. Gear placement opportunities were sparse and involved a lot of horn slinging. We brought 60 meter twin ropes, a single rack to 1”, and some nuts.
We reached the summit around 2:30 p.m. and spent somewhere between 1 and 1.5 hours at the top. The descent is the same route as the ascent. We did a pair of double-rope rappels to the saddle, losing time after we got a rope stuck. On the way up, we noticed several rappel stations with old webbing. We used these on the descent, reslinging them with our own webbing.
From the saddle, we scrambled down most of the ridge, rappelling twice–one single-rope and one double-rope rappel–through sections where downclimbing would have exposed us to unnecessary risk.
From the ridge, we glissaded our way down the snow chute to the valley floor. It was roughly 9:30 p.m., sunset, when we reached the bottom. We began the bushwhack back to our tents, stopping around midnight, roughly a mile from camp, due to lack of visibility. We bivvied in the moss under a boulder and woke at one point in the night to the sound of a bear thrashing in the woods near our camp. In the morning, it took us another hour to reach our camp. Our travel time was roughly 21 hours roundtrip from the beach camp, not counting the hour-long paddle on either end.
As we paddled back to Haines, our minds were as calm as the sea beneath us.
