So I'm taking this mountaineering class this spring with an organization called BOEALPS, or the Boeing Alpine Society. The class is called Basic Climbing Class, or BCC, and every year there are roughly 60-70 students and a whole bunch of instructors helping teach the class. Every Wednesday from mid-February there is a 2.5-hour lecture where we review the material we should have read for our homework each week; most of the material is from Freedom of the Hills, THE bible on mountaineering. The students are also split into teams of roughly 6-8 students for either Saturday teams or Sunday teams, and every weekend from mid-march until early June there is an outdoor outing on the selected day.
The early outings focus more on skills work, such as routefinding / navigation, belaying, rappelling, ice ax arresting, snow anchors, kicking steps, etc. But then the trips transition very quickly into "real" mountaineering outings where the goal is to summit a peak and live to tell the tale. For this particular outing, it was actually a two-day overnight outing where we had to set up a snow camp overnight inbetween our first day's hike and our second day's objective.
The plan
For this trip, we selected Mount Ellinor and Mount Washington in the Olympic National Forest, about 2.5 hours' drive from Seattle. Because we wanted to start hiking from the trailhead around 8am, we planned to arrive by 7:30, which meant that most of us met up at the Kent P&R at 5:30am or earlier. Personally, I got up around 4am on Saturday. If you know me very well at all you probably already know that I am not a morning person and I consider 10am to be a reasonable time to show up at work. So waking up at such an hour feels like insanity every time. But I digress.
We had determined online that there was some kind of trail from the Mt. Ellinor upper trailhead to a saddle just east of Mount Ellinor via either the "summer route" or the "winter route", where the winter route goes right up a steep snow chute. Since it's not summer yet, and there was some snow in the chute, we opted for the winter route. The snow was super icy and the chute was super steep so kicking steps up to the saddle was challenging, but not quite impossible.
Snow chute!
Kicking steps in the chute
Mt. Ellinor summit
Sonny and Leonard headed to "A" peak (east of Mt. Ellinor) to begin leading the rock face on the west side of it while the rest of us booted up to the top of Mount Ellinor, which was an easy hike. Fortunately for us, the clouds cleared right when we got there so we took some excellent summit photos (and selfies of course).
Seal Team 6 - Mt. Ellinor
Sun's out, guns out!
"A" peak
After that we headed back down to the saddle and traversed over to "A" peak, and got our harnesses on so that we could toprope our way up to the top of the prominent rock face. The climb was pretty easy, probably 5.4 or 5.5, but was made harder by the fact that we had mountaineering boots on and scarier because there was a lot of exposure.
"A" Peak
Rockin the summit
Whoa, that's a lot of air.
Steep gully
There was a little bit of confusion as to the way to proceed next. We had figured that we wanted to traverse north / northeast into a flat bowl roughly north of "A" peak, but weren't quite sure what the right way to do that was. We eventually found a steep gully coming down from a saddle and set up fixed lines with snow pickets and tree anchors to downclimb with prussiks. Looking back up at the gully from the bowl, we realized it was actually steeper than we had thought.
Wait, we came down that??
Descending the steep gully
Snow bowl, setting up camp
The snow bowl turned out to be even more flat and perfect for camping than it looked on the topo. Plus, the snow was pretty soft so we set about digging trenches for our tents, both for wind protection and to flatten out the snow. Soon we had our tents set up and we were ready to melt snow, boil some water for dinner, and watch the sun setting over the horizon.
Home is where your tent is.
Snow kitchen
What was really amazing was that from our "kitchen" we had the perfect view of Seattle, Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount Saint Helens. We were truly blessed by good weather and good visibility!
Amazing sunset!
Unfortunately after sunset it got really cold really fast so we hightailed it to bed.
Rope teams to flat spot
In the morning we got up early and set about deconstructing our tents. This was made somewhat difficult due to the fact that the snow was now quite solid and icy, but we managed.
Amazing sunrise!
Eventually we geared up and started traversing northeast-ish towards Mount Washington. Since the snow was so icy, we decided to set up rope teams protected by snow pickets, and then ascended a fixed line to the top of a steep / icy section that flattened out nicely at the top. From there we took in the view and decided to leave behind our camping gear in order to lighten our load a bit.
View from the "flat spot"
We headed up a gully that looked promising, but when we reached the ridgeline we realized that we had probably gone the wrong way unless we wanted to rappel off to the west side of the ridgeline, which we didn't. So we headed back down to reconsider.
Traverse around
Eventually we decided to traverse around further to the northeast to try to find a route from the south of the summit, but by the time we got nearby we realized that we probably didn't have enough time to reach the actual summit considering that we'd need to set up some ropes on the ridgeline even if we found a good snow path to the ridge. So we took a good look at the route options... and headed back to where we'd stashed our camping gear.
Mt. Washington is the pointy tall one in the middle.
Bushwhacking down to the road
After a short-ish snack break, we decided to head back down to the road. We had figured a bearing of around 120 degrees would get us to the road, so we started heading down. I wouldn't quite say we followed the bearing very well though, because we were trying to find the least-steep way down through the snow. We made quite a bit of progress downward until we got bounded in by a steep creek (waterfall?) and a cliff, and we weren't quite sure how to proceed. We stalled for at least 20 minutes doing some recon and considering our options.
Finally found something resembling a trail.
Eventually we decided to hike up and right, away from the creek, hoping to find a path that wasn't too treacherous, and we found one. In fact, we actually found something that resembled a climber's trail, and from there on out we were golden. When we got to the road we were actually only about 100 feet from where one of our cars was parked! Success! So we rounded up the other cars and changed into more comfortable clothes, and headed out for post-trip burgers and beers =D
