Glacier Peak Attempt

Descending from near White Peak

Eric, Westy, Ryan
March 14, 2020
32 miles, 7,000ft gain, 3:45am – 9pm

It looked like clear weather over the weekend, though windy and very cold for March. We were all interested in skiing Glacier Peak so headed out Friday evening. I had snowshoed Glacier peak on April 1-2, 2016, and but wanted to return to get a winter ascent. In April I was able to drive to the trailhead and the first few miles of the trail had been snow free, but this time was earlier in the year and it was a much higher snow year.

The route

Friday night we carpooled in my forester and were able to drive to 0.5 miles up the North Fork Sauk road before a tree-filled mudslide blocked the road. A friend of ours had made it through in his truck a few weeks earlier, but the soft mud was too deep for my forester and it would certainly have bottomed out. I spent a few minutes trying to dig out the mud with a shovel, but I soon gave up.

We car camped that night near the mudslide, with two in the car and one in a tent.

Saturday morning we were moving by 3:45am hiking up the road in trail runners. It turned out several major

Traversing towards White Peak

blowdowns blocked the road within a quarter mile of the mud slide, so it wouldn’t have been worth getting through the slide anyways. By mile marker 1.5 on the road continuous snow started and we soon switch to skins. With the current number of blowdowns it actually would not help to bike on the road since it would be time consuming carrying a bike through all the blowdowns.

Once we started skiing, though, there were almost no blowdowns. About 6 miles past the car we reached the north fork sauk trailhead around sunrise and took a short break. We then started skinning up the trail past the massive cedar trees. Of all the places I’ve hiked in Washington, this area, the hoh rainforest, and Big Beaver Creek have the biggest trees.

Getting in a few turns down from the ridge

We made quick progress on the consolidated snow and soon passed the site of the old Mackinaw shelter (which is now gone). We were able to follow the trail switchbacking up to just about the edge of treeline. There we started traversing to roughly follow the trail, but the snow was dust on crust and it was very slippery. We instead decided to put on crampons and boot directly up to the ridge through some trees.

There were some small unstable snow patches in the trees but higher we followed scoured slopes to the ridge. From there we put on skis and skinned to what we thought was the col just west of White Peak. In April I had taken the col west of White Peak and it worked well.

We checked the GPS and were not quite at the correct col, but it looked like we could ski down from where we were

Our line back down into the trees

to access it. I led the way and started traversing. It was extremely windy and a lot more snow had accumulated up there than we had anticipated. We encountered some unstable wind slabs and it looked impossible to safely get down from the ridge. The north side was much different than the south side we had ascended. With no safe way forward to Glacier Peak we reluctantly retreated.

We booted back up to the ridge, then cramponed back down the icy slope to the trees. When the snow got softer we put skis and and had an amazing ski several thousand feet down to the North Fork Sauk river. We soon changed back to skins for the rolling terrain and skinned back to the trailhead. There we took the skins off and skate skied and scooted back to the car, arriving around 9pm.

It had been a long 17.5-hr day and we drove directly back to town that night.