Cardinal Peak Attempt

Cardinal Peak Attempt

Back at the trailhead with the broken ski

Feb 15-16, 2020

Saturday – 12:30pm – 10pm, 17 miles
Sunday – 3am – 1:30pm, 21 miles

Eric Gilbertson (solo)

I call this the Murphy’s Law trip because so many things that could go wrong did go wrong. After failing to find a partner for the weekend I set out solo Saturday morning to try for Saska, Emerald, and Cardinal peaks. Around 6am driving through Snoqualmie Pass I inadvertantly hit a chunk of metal in the road and got a bad flat tire. I was luckily near the exit at the pass and managed to coast into a parking lot before the tire fully deflated.

After putting the spare on (a donut) I called around asking for places to fix the broken tire. I ended up driving back to North Bend and waited for Les Schwab to open. They said the tire was damaged beyond repair so I ended up buying four new tires for the whole car.

Nice sunset views on the approach

I finally hit the road a few hours later, and reached the entiat river sno park around noon. I needed to be back in town by late afternoon Sunday, so that didn’t leave much time to hit the peaks, which were about 20 miles in. I decided to just go for Cardinal given the delays. It was still about 40 miles round trip, though.

I considered going fast and light without overnight gear, but that would mean summitting Cardinal between midnight and 3am most likely. The peak had some 3rd class terrain on top that might be spicy, and the forecast was for 50mph winds and chance of snow that night and Sunday morning. There was a lot of above-treeline terrain, so I really wanted to wait til sunrise to summit.

So I packed overnight gear and started up the road. I followed the snowed-over road for five hours until reaching the North Fork entiat trailhead around sunset. From there I roughly followed the trail for about 4.5 more hours to Grouse Creek, about 17 miles from my car. At times I followed what I think were cougar tracks.

I laid out my bivy sack at the creek and went to sleep for a few hours.

Cougar tracks on the trail skiing in Saturday night

I was up at 2:30am and moving around 3am. My plan was to go up the low-angle southeast slopes of Cardinal to avoid avy terrain. I ascended steeply through the trees for a few hours, then at 5am I noticed one of my skis was cracked nearly in half!

I don’t remember the exact incident that caused this, but it was possibly a combination of bushwhacking over logs and traversing through steep icy tree wells. I was still 2,000ft below the summit, and estimated another 2.5 hours at my pace. But it was unclear to me how fast I’d be able to get out. The back end of the ski was mostly held on by the climbing skin, with a small bit of thin material on the top. Otherwise it flapped freely. I was worried I’d be postholing out 19 miles if it broke off completely. Best case, that would put me home Monday morning, but I really needed to be back Sunday afternoon. (The previous weekend I’d gotten home at 5:45am Monday morning, and I didn’t want to repeat that).

Scooting back out on one ski

A strong gust of wind and clouds rolling in encouraged me to come back another day. I reasoned I’d be back anyways to get all three of Saska, Emerald, Cardinal. And maybe if I started back now I could make it back to Seattle on schedule.

After a combination of postholing and careful snowplow skiing I made it back to my bivy sack. The skin was still holding the ski together, and I scooted out my tracks back to the trailhead. From there I did some single-ski scooting that was quite tiring. By the time I reached the main Entiat River Road the crack was pushing through the climbing skin and preventing any gliding. But at least the ski still acted as flotation.

After many hours of scooting and some tiring single-ski gliding down the downhill sections I arrived back at the car by early afternoon, and made it back to Seattle on schedule.

© 2020, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.