Chalangin Peak Attempt

Chalangin Peak Attempt

Nov 3, 2024

Eric, Ross, Peter

22 miles, 6500ft gain, 12am – 10:30pm

I’d recently finished my survey project to determine an accurate list of the WA Top 100 peaks, and I was finally ready to finish climbing all the peaks on the list.  Based on the quads Chalangin didn’t qualify, but the quads were in error in this case. Lidar showed Chalangin in fact had 410ft of prominence. This amount was far enough outside the error bounds of Lidar that it didn’t require a dGPS ground survey to be certain. So I’d put off climbing Chalangin and instead focused on conducting ground surveyes necessary to establish the final list. That meant I kept pushing Chalangin down the road as a low-priority objective.

Finally, by early November I was done with my ground surveys and set out to finish the climbing portion of the list. November is generally the month with the most precipitation in WA so this makes climbing peaks challenging. Sunday looked like a break in the weather, though, so we decided to give it a try. NOHRSC was showing 2-3ft of snow around 8000ft, with snow line at 3500ft in the white river valley and down to 2500ft in the Chiwawa River valley.

There are two main approaches to Chalangin. The first is the start at the Little Giant trailhead on Chiwawa River Road. This route follows trails over Little Giant Pass to the Napeequa valley, then goes off-trail through open forests to an easy scramble up the southeast ridge. This is about 27 miles and 11,000ft gain. The other route is to hike up White River to thunder creek, then bushwhack up the southwest face to the Luahna-Chalangin col. Then either scramble the 4th class ridge up to the summit, or cross over onto the Pilz Glacier and scramble up the southeast ridge. This route is about 22 miles and 6500ft gain.

I’d previously descended the white river route from Luahna twice – in late October 2017 and in February 2021. This route had the advantage that I was familiar with it this time of year, it had less mileage and elevation gain, and more of the miles were below snow line. The disadvantage was that I’d heard the white river trail was badly overgrown past the boulder creek turnoff. This could really slow down progress. I’d most recently hiked it in falll 2021 en route to Tenpeak, and it was in great shape then. But Nick said in August this year it was overgrown. This route also had a small section of avy terrain just below the Chalangin – Luahna col.

The Little Giant route had the advantage that there was no bushwhacking. But it was completely snowed-over for the entire route. There was an avy slope getting down from Little Giant pass, and two stream crossings without bridges that we’d likely have to wade.

We decided on the white river route. I suspected the trail might be easier to follow this time of year since the leaves would have fallen off all the brush. Plus I was familiar with the route this time of year. The fresh snow from Friday had had a day to settle Saturday and I expected NOHRSC to be overpredicting depth, since it was overpredicting snow depth last year in most cases I observed. So I expected the avy risk to be low and progress to be fast mostly below snow line. This route also had the advantage that it was easier to bail back below snow line if the weather turned bad. We decided to take snowshoes since a majority of the route was below snow line and skis sticking out of our packs might slow us down on the bushwhack. Also, this early season there is a risk of rocks sticking up just under the snow surface (aka sharks) that can easily grab a ski.

The Little Giant Route seemed like it would take much longer breaking trail, which didn’t bode well for success on a Sunday trip with no margin for error to extend it into the next day (we had to be in to work Monday morning).

I usually ball-park estimate 1 mph average for a winter trip, so we’d need to start early. We met up at the White River trailhead Saturday night, slept a few hours, then were moving at midnight.

We made excellent time up the trail, and after the Boulder Creek turnoff the White River Trail was still in great shape! It looked like some trail angel must have come through and brushed it within the past month. The brush was all trimmed back and only a few blowdowns were on the trail.

We cruised all the way to about Thunder Creek, but then the trail got wiped out by a forest fire. This must have been the Airplane Lake fire from 2023. The undergrowth was all burned out but blowdowns slowed down progress. We roughly followed Nick’s GPS track from August and this brought us to a good crossing point of Thunder Creeek.

On the other side we met up with the old Thunder Basin trail, and followed this to another burn zone where it disappeared at snowline around 3500ft where we transitioned to sturdier boots. We then bushwhacked through a short section of slide alder, then crossed back over Thunder Creek to the base of the southwest basin of Chalangin.

We scrambled up a snowy ledge system on the left side of a creek, then followed an easy open snow slope to a flat basin at 5100ft where we switched to snowshoes. Sunrise was just starting then, and we tried to figure out the best way up the headwall. In the winter I’d just gone straight down the headwall, but now the slide alder was still uncovered, which would make progress slow. I recalled in October descending the trees on climbers right, and they had been nice and open.  Generally snow travel is also more consolidated in the trees this time of year. So we diverted right.

After wallowing through some slide alder we reached the forest and travel became much easier as expected. We made good time, briefly switching to crampons when the terrain steepened, then back to snowshoes at the edge of treeline at 6000ft. We’d been carrying our approach shoes to there in case we decided to descend a different way, and we finally tied them to a tree in that spot.

Interestingly, there was a big avy slide above us, likely from Saturday. I hoped that meant anything that could slide had already slid. We started traversing left, sticking to low-angle slopes and heading directly for the col. The visibility went in and out and we were hit by occasional snow squalls, but overall the weather was not too bad.

The snow got deeper and powdery and progress was very slow. We took turns trail breaking and it was tough work. Eventually we reached about 7500ft and got to the edge of the avy slope. We spread out and I took the lead. I dug a lot of quick pit tests and the snow was stable, though at 7800ft I found a 0.5ft deep wind slab at the base of a steeper face. It seemed pretty isolated just on that feature, and didn’t exist lower on the slope. So we decided to continue.

Ross took the lead and got to the edge of the final stretch to the col. It looked like we were just about there. He decided to test the stability of a gully we had to cross by shovelling snow down into it from above. This triggered a small 0.5ft slab that spanned about 20ft across the face. Obviously the wind slab was not as isolated as it had been farther down. That slope had already slid, but there was another steep slope on the other side of the gully that was likely also wind loaded. Above us was rock cliffs, so there was no real alternative to get to the col besides crossing the avy slope. Even if we made it across, I knew there was another small avy slope on the southeast face just below the summit we’d have to cross. It seemed likely that would be unstable too.

So we reluctantly decided to bail. The snow conditions just weren’t safe that day. We were just 500ft below the summit, though it was probably still at least 2 hours away given our trail breaking speed. It had taken us 14 hours to that point.

We made quick progress down the powder back to our stashed shoes. I then switched to crampons to descend the steep forest slopes. I thought I could maybe save us some time by bushwacking through the trees all the way down to White River, but I eventually hit slide alder and gave up. We bushwhacked back to our ascent route and got down to Thunder Creek by sunset.

Then we followed our ascent route back out. We dropped back down to white river, then hiked out to the cars by 10:30pm. I had set a mouse trap in the truck that day since Peter said mice were running around the truck bed the previous night, but, for better or worse, I didn’t catch anything.

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