GENERAL OVERVIEW: Provides a route from the North Fork of the San Joaquin to the Lyell Fork of the Merced passing over the ridge just north of Electra Peak.
CLASS/DIFFICULTY: Advanced class 2. We added in some optional easy class 3 (slab vs semi-stable talus).
LOCATION: Boundary of Yosemite NP & Ansel Adams Wilderness. HST Map
ELEVATION: 12,448ft
COORDINATES: 37.70643, -119.26097
USGS TOPO MAP (7.5'): Lyell
ROUTE DESCRIPTION: This will be going east to west - the only beta I could find was from the other direction (Secor, and this climber.org report druid helpfully shared, go to the second paragraph of day 7).
The east side is all stable until the last 200ft or so, and that looks worse than it is. The west side has no consequentially unstable terrain aside from one 100ft band with various options you can take your time on.
East Side (NFotSJ):
It's all very nice and straightforward until lake 11,815. I can flesh this first part out more via request (I made detailed waypoints and have plenty of photos), but I did it with zero beta and some visual recon and found myself obviously funneled into the only path that wasn't terrible.
From the southern shore of the westernmost large lake in the North Fork of the San Joaquin basin (2960+ / 10,120+) go SSW up a grassy slope until it opens up. Once it levels out, cut NNW near the edge of the ridge looking out over the basin up a mix of grass and stable embedded talus passing a tarn to your left. You'll end up overlooking a rather nice lake that feeds into lake 2960+ that you started from - from here you can either find a way down and follow it's inlet up, or do as we did and head SW loosely following the ridge as terrain dictates to the saddle of loose garbage you avoided earlier then cut west to the next lake in the basin. From the north side of this is a nice wide grassy ramp that heads NNW. Take this up and congratulate yourself on your first thousand feet of straightforward gain.
Once it opens up it'll have patches of talus, but keep following it keeping to the east of the cliff bands following a little drainage - you can cut a little early or just go until it sort of dead ends (what we did), then go up a mix of broken slab, grassy patches, and light talus until you hit 11,815. There's some nice slabs to sleep at near the outlet of the lake FYI.
From 11,815 look upon the works of the ridge ahead of you and despair! We spent quite a while looking at the ridge through a monocular trying to find which white boulders led to the class 2 ledge up to the ridge. We failed, as we were actually looking for white boulders and a ledge.Wrinkle: If you're coming in from Clinch or North Clinch there's a high route that's a lot more talus and some slab, but it'd save you dropping elevation. I haven't done this and can't comment on it, but climbers regularly take this route to bag Electra. See: http://highsierratopix.com/community/vi ... 70#p167370 for more info
From WL11815 CYOA to the angled slab then head up that. We choose to head up the broken slabs above it and get into some easy class 3. The talus is... not bad. It's not stable, but it's inconsequentially unstable. It'll wobble and shift a bit but never felt like it was going to slide or collapse on itself. That said, slabs, cmon.
We ended up a little bit to climbers left of the broad white cliff band - and realized our white boulders had no class 2 ledges. I ended up eventually just dropping my pack and scouting, and ended up at what looked like a white cliff band from below and while I didn't see any ledge, there was a... line that would vaguely fulfill the functional requirements of being a ledge. If you showed a picture of it to people they would not think "oh hey, that's a ledge!". But at that point I figured I'd just take it and see what happened and gained the ridge quite easily. We got into some 3 here just because wandering around aimlessly on shifting steep talus isn't a life goal, but once you get to the white cliff band above there's a wide band of lower angle dark talus that drops a little bit and then climbs up in an arc to the white "boulders". That'd be the ideal way to take it up and would keep it all class 2 aside from some optional 3 once past the slab and before the lower wide white cliff band.
You can find other ways up to the "ledge" but that looked the most stable and was straightforward.
West Side (LFotM):
This is more straightforward. The initial drop off the ridge is perfectly fine - it's steep unconsequentially loose from the top (think the upper part of Dana but a bit larger) that shifts and settles into itself. It levels out then reaches the only real consequential section of this side. We encountered some sliding / collapsing talus on the way down - SWW of there were the snowfield usually is it was more broken slabbier which might be better (or having some traction on the snow) but that wasn't entirely clear from the top. YMMV, but it's doable and from there it's just slabby ridges with scattered talus until you reach the SW shore of WL10999 (or some other spot if you desire). It was a straighforward drop, I never had to backtrack, but did take a fall on my backside / pack bottom when a piece of talus resting on a slab shot out from under my foot - so there is some attention that needs to be spent.
