Railroad Tracks 

I actually found the Grassy Goat Trail less serious than I thought it would be. It's definitely exposed with mostly hiking, easy scrambling, and only a few sections where you would use hands. It of course varies from person to person, but I only wanted to rap one section (about half way down?, slings) and once that was in a thunder/hail storm.

The Goat Trail is casual.

I believe the first ascent was Joe Kelsey and Bill St Jean in 1973. This is according to Joe Kelsey's Climbing and Hiking in the Wind River Mountains guidebook.

The third edition of the Bonney Guide, published in 1977, attributes the first ascent to Elaine Mathews and S. Phillips, in 1973. They are also listed as the first ascent of the Central Corner 1973 (In both Bonney and Kelsey).

The Kelsey guide was published in 1994. Don't know which one is right...I first climbed the route in 1975, prior to anything being in the guidebook. We also climbed the Central Corner in 1975 - it was full of gear from an obvious retreat.

We climbed many routes in here which are not documented in any guidebooks...ascents from a time when people passed route information along by word of mouth, or just saw a line and tried to climb it.

So who knows (and who cares) who got the first ascent.

This climb starts at the end of the grassy goat trail. I found the cruxes to be solid 5.8. Use small cams on your standard rack. The cracks are flaring and bottoming and grass filled. Where gardening has taken place there are nice placements for small cams. All pitches are rope strechers (5) to 400 ft of class 3-4 to top.

I found this route to be alot longer than what is printed in Steve Bechtel's book. You will stretch a 70m rope on this! This information is as per the color coded picture. pitch one is about 300', pitch (#2) 240', pitch (#3) 110', pitch (#4) 70', pitch #5 150', pitch #6 70', then easy 5th and 4th class to the top.

The pitches are a lot longer than the Bechtel guide book. Expect full 200 meter pitches. Fairly grassy.

I third the last two comments about pitch length. Expect long pitches and usual alpine vegys. I thought this was a pretty nice route, actually, good fun and the cruxes are interesting.

Protection is quite good. It takes stoppers like crazy. You can sew it up with two sets of stoppers, a couple of larger C3s and a set of C4s to #4 (would do fine to a #3).

This route is really quite grassy. We also had a big thunderstorm the day before and that resulted in a number a wet areas. Both these things took some of the fun out of it for me (leading).

Same comment on rope lengths as Cam, but I combined his pitch 3&4.