Cirque of the Towers

The Cirque of the Towers is a mountain basin in the U.S. state of Wyoming. It is located in the southern portion of the Wind River Range on the border of the Bridger - Teton National Forest to the Shoshone National Forest and is an extremely popular destination for technical climbers. The climber Orrin Bonney gave the area its present name in 1941. Before that, due to its remote location a few or hardly any visitors had ventured into the cirque. The cirque is an almost circular depression or a valley that was formed by a melting glacier over 8000 years ago. The surrounding mountains are, like, almost fully formed in the rest of the Wind River Range of granite. About the ridge of the main summit extends the Continental Divide.

Description

The summit ( towers ) are 300 meters lower than the highest mountains in the north of the Wind River Range, on average. Has the highest Lizards Head Peak with an altitude of 3914 m. Other peaks of the cirques are the Shark 's Nose, Warbonnet, Warrior Peak, Wolf 's Head ( " wolf's head " ) and Peak Pingora. There are hundreds of climbing routes with a difficulty from 5.1 to 5.11 a As the mountains are composed primarily of granite, there is a good anchorage. Two ascents of which are mentioned in the plug and Roper 's Fifty Classic Climbs of North America: the north-east side of the Pingora peaks ( IV, 5.9 ) and the eastern ridge of the Wolf head ( III, 5.6 ).

Access

From Pinedale leads to the southeast, a 88 km long, partly paved, partly gravelled road to the Big Sandy starting point, where there is a small campground of the U.S. Forest Service. The trail starts at an altitude of 2700 m and is the first eleven kilometers relatively flat. In the last 1.6 kilometers of the road is very steep and exceeds the Jackass Pass, the Continental Divide at an altitude of 3300 m. From there you have to go down to Lonesome Lake, which is one of the four lakes of the cirques a steep half-mile ( 800 m). In July and August, the Cirque is one of the most popular hiking and climbing destinations of the Wind River Range, is therefore to be expected at this time with increased operating on the route.

The Lonesome Lake is considered the first lake in the Wind River Range, whose water was considered to be eaten because of human waste as inappropriate. Within 400 meters, so no camping at the lake is allowed. The granite rocks allow only poor filtering of groundwater. In addition, alpine lakes can often difficult to clean by itself, as lakes at lower altitudes.