18 Aug 2026 6 min read Trip Reports

Cardinal Pinnacle, West Face

A fun and casual day out with 2 parties of 2, climbing great rock in a fabulous subalpine setting

Multi-pitch climbing in the Eastern Sierra usually involves a fair amount of driving, hiking, and logistics, but Cardinal Pinnacle skips all of that in favor of a short drive up from Bishop and straightforward 20-minute approach. Ellie and I had mutual friend named Emma driving down from Truckee to come climb and hang out for a day, so we settled on the West Face of Cardinal Pinnacle as a great 4-pitch 5.10a to climb together, and I reached out to Kelsey so that we could get two parties of two going.

Because of the heatwave that was currently hitting the Eastside, we started from the trailhead early, around 6am. The approach is a steep scramble upwards on talus – we took a line straight upwards from the parking pull-out which was loose and unpleasant. It's better to walk north/northwest along the gravel trail that parallels the road for about ~200m in order to pick up a better trail through the talus that follows the fall line down to the road from the lowest point of the central buttress of Cardinal Pinnacle. Regardless, we still found our way up to the base of the formation in about twenty minutes, where we easily found the base of the route by the large leaning block that forms the starting finger crack.

Scrambling up loose talus. There is a better trail than this about 200m to climbers' right that I would take next time.

Pitch 1 of the West Face route begins with a short but fun section of 5.9ish finger crack behind a detached block, then moves over easier terrain before a short face climbing "crux" (I found it to be around the same difficulty as the rest of the pitch, but YMMV) moving right on good flake holds. After that comes a really fun sequence of thin crack moves between good finger pods, which I was glad to have brought a couple of microcams for. This takes you up onto a huge ledge with a pair of rappel anchors, and then a couple of easy moves up and right lands you in a nice belay alcove. This pitch as well as all the others on the West Face are all smooth and clean white granite - the rock on Cardinal Pinnacle was some of the best I've encountered in the Sierra!

Kelsey on the thin-crack moves near the top of Pitch 1. I thought that the movement here was more interesting/challenging than the earlier step right that is allegedly the 10a crux of this pitch.

Pitch 2 begins with a clean and pleasantly steep hand crack dihedral - it's remarkably splitter, so we'd brought three #2 cams in order to sew it up. Kelsey took this lead and cruised through the upper portion of the pitch which involves traversing rightwards on face holds and seams to a belay stance on a smallish ledge. I followed and enjoyed the pitch - although first three pitches of the West Face all have a grade of 5.10a, most of the climbing on them is fun and cruiser 5.8 and 5.9, with only a few moves that might veer into 5.10 territory per pitch.

Kelsey on the smallish stance that form the Pitch 2 belay ledge. We managed to time it so that we didn't end up with both of our parties sharing this belay at the same time, which was a good thing since it was spacious for two but would have been cramped for four!

Pitch 3 is the least straightforward of the pitches on the West Face. I took the lead for this one, traversing rightwards off the belay on face holds into a wide seam, which had a bunch of hollow-sounding blocks and flakes inside it that made for easy climbing but weird and sparse protection. I was happy to be solid at the grade since I didn't place much gear on this pitch, preferring to run it out through the sections of bad rock which also helped with rope drag, since the pitch starts with a big rightwards traverse and then ends with a big traverse back leftwards to the base of a short chimney and the first and only gear belay of the climb on 1"-3" cams.

Kelsey following the pitch three traverse back left to the belay

The fourth and final pitch pulls through a short chimney, then almost immediately cuts left up a blocky low angle dihedral to a ledge below the true summit of Cardinal Pinnacle. Kelsey took this pitch and had to do a bit of downclimbing to get back down to the dihedral out left, since we both thought the pitch continued further up the dihedral past the chimney. Most parties rappel from a set of bolted anchors at the top of this dihedral, but it seemed a shame to stop without tagging the summit, so I scrambled up past this anchor to the blunt arete of the summit pinnacle.

Despite the whole West Face route having shiny new ASCA bolted anchors on it, the only protection available on the summit is a single ancient 1/4" bolt with a homemade hanger. I opted to lasso the blunt summit horn with a sling instead of trusting the bolt and brought Kelsey up for some high fives up top and great views of the valley below. Even with the rope, climbing the summit pinnacle involves an exposed arete traverse where a follower fall would involve an unpleasant pendulum, so just know that before attempting it! The climbing is pretty easy here, maybe ~5.6, and after high diving and taking our summit selfies, we easily downclimbed back to a set of good modern rappel anchors on the ledge below the summit block to wait for Emma and Ellie who were close behind us, wrapping up the final pitches of the West Face.

Topping out the summit of Cardinal Pinnacle via an exposed but easy arete traverse! This isn't officially a part of the West Face route but it seemed worthwhile to tag the summit since we'd come all this way!

All four of us hanging out at the rappel anchor just below the summit. This is maybe ~50' above the rappel anchor at the top of pitch 4.

The descent off of Cardinal Pinnacle is a straightforward sequence of 4-5 rappels. We opted to do a singe rope rappel back to the anchor at the official end of the West Face route, then tie our two 70m ropes together in order to do the rest of the descent via double-rope rappels. This worked well for Kelsey and myself since we were simul-rappeling on Grigris and had just enough rope stretch to get down to the ground on the second of the two rappels, but proved slightly problematic for Ellie and Emma who did their rappels sequentially with ATCs and as a result had half the rope stretch and had to do some downclimbing/traversing to get through the last ~15' of the descent.

Fun, overhanging double-rope rappel! This took us to an awkward stance at a nice shiny rappel anchor on a slab, and then from there we rappelled to the ground.

Party mode rappelling! This slab stance wasn't super ideal for 4 of us but we made it work!

After finishing the rappels, we drove 5 minutes up the road to Lake Sabrina for an extremely pleasant swim and lunch by the lakeside before heading back into town for beers at Mountain Rambler!

Trip Notes

Cardinal Pinnacle is a fantastic half-day objective and the West Face would be especially good for days with uncertain weather, since the approach is super short and you can easily retreat from almost everywhere on the route without leaving gear (besides the gear anchor at the top of P3).
2 parties of 2 is one of my favorite ways to climb! All of the vibes of climbing as a part of 3, with none of the faff!

Gear Notes

Bring a couple of microcams and brassies, they're helpful for the thin cracks on pitch 1 and the traverse left on pitch 3.