Glacier Peak
Date: July 29th-30th 2006
Sent to washingtonclimbers@yahoogroups.com.
By Kristian Andaker
Route: White Chuck Glacier route via North Fork Sauk River trail head
Photos here.
At the beginning of July, Jess and Alex had surprised me with a plan to climb Mt Rainier right away as I landed at Seatac after some vacation in Sweden. After that different adventurers had dragged me along up Mt Adams, Mt Baker and Little Tahoma and right before this weekend I realized I only had one peak left to climb to complete the 5 tallest peaks of WA in July.
With a goal like that in mind I slowly convinced myself that Glacier Peak had to be climbed the coming weekend. For a while it looked like it would have to be a solo trip, but then Molly joined in on the adventure. I think that was a good thing, because the 34 mile round trip with 8,300ft elevation gain (plus another ~2000ft in elevation which you both gain and lose just going one way) would probably have driven me insane if I was on my own.
We left from my apartment around 6.30pm on Friday evening with the plan to have a quick dinner and then go to the trail head to sleep before heading out. Our plans were derailed a bit already at departure though. After 5 minutes driving we realized we didn't have a CD player, and headed back to my place to pick one up. Then we went for Mexican food. After filling our stomachs with energy we started the drive down 520 and up I5. After some 20 miles we found a reason to return home though: Molly's car started making strange noises when accelerating. The noises could best be described as a fan which has bent to start touching something on each rotation. The noise was definitely worthy of a call to NPR's "cartalk". Fearing that we'd get stuck on some forest road in the middle of nowhere we decided to head home to my place to start out for the third time, this time in my car. By 8.30pm we were finally off on the 2h15min drive to the trailhead.
We slept under the stars at the trail head without bothering with the bivy sacks. It was surprising to see so many other cars there, but we later realized there are lots of people hiking around on the trails in the area without actually going all the way to Glacier Peak.
The trail starts out with 5.5 miles through forest following the North Fork Sauk River. It goes up and down but doesn't gain much elevation. After that soft start you reach a 3 mile stretch of switchbacks which take you up to 6000ft where the trail joins the PCT. Here you turn right and after a mile of flat trail you reach White Pass where it's time to leave the PCT again.
The path up the switchbacks and along the PCT goes through the most amazing alpine flower beds I had ever seen. We were enshrouded in clouds, with the fields stretching as far as we could see in every direction.
From White Pass it's another 5 miles to Glacier Gap if you're a bird. Unfortunately Molly and I aren't birds so the distance probably became more like 7 miles after we followed the ridge from White Pass and then crossed it at the last notch before the ridge goes high. After the ridge we dropped down ~500ft into a basin with scattered snow fields and boulder fields. This is where we got the first good view of Glacier Peak. After hiking up out of the basin we reached the White Chuck Glacier area. The glacier seems to have receded quite a bit since our map was drawn. We only spent about 10 minutes walking on glacier and about another 1.5hours (after the basin) to get to Glacier Gap where we had planned to sleep.
As we reached Glacier Gap at 7250ft it was about 2.30pm. We picked out a bivy spot with as much wind protection as possible on the plateau. As we sat down to eat a bagel with cream cheese we started talking about how nice it would be if we could wake up on Sunday to just hike out, instead of having both the summit and the hike out to do that day. We were also watching a set of cumulus clouds building as the mist occasionally cleared around us. This made us wonder if the weather reports we had heard about "increasing chances of rain" might cause us trouble.
It didn't take more than 10minutes of those discussions before we said "let’s go get it done!" and started repacking to make an afternoon/evening summit bid.
We walked straight across and over the first snow field and after losing that altitude again we started up the Disappointment Cleaver ridge. After about an hour we could see the Disappointment Cleaver itself up ahead. The rock scree looked really nasty so we opted to walk on the Cool glacier instead.
As we kept heading up the glacier the Disappointment Cleaver kept growing on our left. After a while we passed the point where we would have to backtrack if we would want to get onto it again. After another 30 minutes the clean, relatively crevasse-free glacier we were walking on ended in an ice fall. We were blocked to the left by the sheer walls of the Disappointment Cleaver. Straight forward we had the ice fall. And as we moved to the right to get around the ice fall we realized there was another large rock structure there. On examining our options we discovered a pretty narrow part of the ice fall where we could probably pass through. We set belays and went through the 20 meters of ice fall thanking some unknown inventor for the brilliant idea of aggressive front-points on crampons.
After the ice fall we found ourselves on a heavily crevassed glacier. We weaved between them and stepped over a few until we reached the ridge between the Disappointment Cleaver and the summit. As we reached the rock the crampons and rope came off and we started up the final hill reciting poetry and singing to one another to take our minds off the grudging last 1000ft of elevation gain.
Around 6.30pm we reached the summit with big smiles and tired legs. Molly shook her head at forgetting the flask of port wine in the car, but we enjoyed the treasured cold, fried, crispy, salty bacon I brought as if it was Beluga caviar.
We had walked in fog and under cloud cover almost all the way up, but at the summit we had sun and could look out over a cloud landscape the seemed to cover most of Washington, broken only by other peaks like Rainier and Baker.
We took the Disappointment Cleaver down after a small detour to get up on that summit too. Perhaps we didn't go the most appropriate route down, but the rock we down-climbed was terribly loose, brittle and chossy. We were very happy we had taken the glacier route up.
As we got down at 8.30pm it was getting dark. We were exhausted and hungry. The potato and tuna deluxe soup we concocted on the stove as the wind slowly grew in force tasted like heaven. As we slowly drifted into sleep in our bivy sacks after filling our stomachs we dreamt of a sunny hike out.
That's far from what we got though. Early in the morning we woke to find a winter landscape covered in new fallen snow with plenty of more white fluff on the way down, very poor visibility and strong wind. Without bothering with breakfast we got our packs together as fast as possible and started down, thankful that we got the summit done the day before.
As we packed we noticed Molly had had a night visitor in her pack. Some rodent had been in to chew up half her lunch, and left it, after bowel processing, in her food cup.
The hike out started with snow, cold and strong wind as we got down from Glacier Gap and crossed White Chuck Glacier. By the time we reached the Basin and the ridge it had turned into light rain and then we started the loooong hike out.
It had taken us 9hours from the car to Glacier Gap, and another 5.5hours up to the summit and down to Glacier Gap. The trip out from Glacier Gap took 6 hours but felt like 10.
As we reached the car we thought our adventure was over. We started dreaming of what to eat for dinner and how great it would feel to have a shower.
The Mexican food (yes, we had Mexican both before and after the climb :-) ) we stopped for in Darrington was superb. Our only doubts about the restaurant was the large number of building code violations they seemed to have in their restrooms, but we decided that was just charming.
As we headed out from our 4pm senior citizen dinner we drove right into the last adventure of the weekend: My car overheated. And then it overheated again. And then it kept overheating every few minutes all the way home. We coasted home on low RPMs and occasionally stopped to let the engine go down. Then we dropped of the car at Goodyear in Redmond where Jerry came to rescue us and get us home.
Wow, how great it can feel to sleep sometimes.