Glacier Peak Winter Ascent

Glacier Peak (10,550ft) Winter Ascent

Feb 8-9, 2025

Eric and Olly

38 miles skiing, 7 miles snowmobiling

81/100 Winter Bulgers

Glacier Peak is the Bulger peak I’ve failed on the most on winter attempts. I first climbed it in early April 2016 on snowshoes, then in Sept 2018 on my Bulgers speed record project. Both trips were using the current standard route, which is to start at the North Fork Sauk trailhead, cross over White Mountain, and ascend the south side of Glacier via the Cool Glacier.

In mid March, 2020, I made my first winter attempt using the same approach as before. I was with Ryan and Westy and we ended up bailing because of sketchy avalanche conditions on White Mountain. I returned again in mid March 2023 on the same route, and again had to bail because of sketchy avalanche conditions in the same area. Interestingly, on my early April 2016 climb I also encountered sketchy avalanche conditions in that area.

I’ve since concluded that the current standard summer and spring route for Glacier Peak is not the ideal winter route. There does exist another route, though, that completely avoids avalanche terrain. That’s the White Chuck River approach. That was the standard route until 2003, when major flooding wiped out large portions of the trail along the river and severely damaged the access road. Since then the road has been decommissioned and blocked off, and the trail has been abandoned. That approach is rarely used anymore.

However, in March 2020, the weekend after my first failed winter attempted, I made a solo trip up the White Chuck River route. I followed the old road and old trail for a ways, before it got washed out. I continued along the river bed, then made a big spiral to hit the standard south side route to the summit. The trip ended up being about 48 miles, but completely avoided avy terrain. The only problem with this trip was that I summitted on March 21, but that year the last day of winter was March 19. So I technically just made an early spring ascent.

Some people use the definition that winter is Dec 21 – March 21, and they might count that as a winter ascent. But the official definition of astronomical winter (also known as calendar winter) is between the winter solstice to the spring equinox. The exact date varies from year to year, but the spring equinox is generally March 19, 20, 21, or 22 depending on the year. This variation is because a calendar year is not exactly 365 days, and this discrepancy affects when the solstice occurs on the calendar.

I’m following three rules for my Winter Bulgers project, and one of the rules is that the trip must start and end (returning to a plowed road) between the day/hour/minute of the winter solstice to the day/hour/minute of the spring equinox. So the trip March 20-22, 2020 started, summitted, and ended during spring. I would simply have to return. (For reference, my other two rules are the ascent must be completely legal – ie no sneaking in from Canada or avoiding permits or ignoring fire or road closures, and no motorized transport is allowed beyond the trailhead).

In early February this year it looked like Glacier Peak would again be in the cards. Snow conditions warranted a trip that avoided avalanche terrain, and I was saving Glacier Peak for such a weekend. Olly and I planned to basically repeat my March 2020 trip, though we would take the slightly more direct Sitkum Glacier route to save some time. This route has slightly steeper slopes, but still keeps the slope angle less than 35 degrees. In my March 2020 report I’d written down my timing for each leg, and we used this for planning purposes. This is one reason I always include these times in my reports.

This time the snow conditions would make things slightly more difficult, though. There had been multiple lowland snow events that hadn’t melted, and based on NOHRSC it looked like the FS-23 approach road would be covered in snow 4″-20″. I knew the road south of Darrington is generally plowed to the FS-23 turnoff, and FS-23 would not be plowed. Baker National Forest road conditions updates confirmed there was a bit over 4″ of snow on the turnoff.

The conditions report mentioned a few blowdowns on the road, which shouldn’t be a problem. But it also mentioned there was a washout at milepost 4 and the road was closed to motorized vehicles beyond that point. This meant, if we could get to that point somehow, we’d have an additional 2 miles of road skiing to get to my previous starting point. So our plan was to bring my snowmobile and big chainsaw to make certain we could get to the washout, then we’d start skiing from there.

Saturday morning we drove to the end of the plowed road at the turnoff, and I was able to drive about 0.5 miles up the road before the snow started getting a bit deep and there was a fresh blowdown ahead. I pulled out at a good turnoff and unloaded the sled. We started up the road at 8:30am, sawing out one blowdown on the way with my little electric 10″ saw. We soon made it to the washout at mile 4, and I can see why the road hasn’t been repaired in years. The entire road has slid down into the river, and it will take a lot of work to fix.

I parked the snowmobile there and we contiued on skis by 9:15am. There’s a narrow path around the washout that has been cut out and is wide enough for four-wheelers or small jeeps to take, and it looked like fresh tracks from earlier in the week from a jeep. But I needed to follow my rule that all ascents are completely legal, so I didn’t snowmobile any farther.

We made fast progress to the Old White Chuck Road turnoff, and the jeep tracks continued farther up FS-23. Interestingly, the Old White Chuck Road has seen a lot of maintenance since I was last there in 2020. All the blowdowns have been sawed out, and we had very smooth skinning up the road. The only times we had to stop were to cross streams where culverts had been removed.

After 4.5 miles we reached the end of the road around 1pm, and found the trailhead sign still intact after 22 years. In 2020 the trail had been in rough shape from blowdowns, but those were all cleared now also. We continued making fast progress skinning along the trail, until we reached the Meadow Mountain Trail 1.5 miles in just beyond Fire Creek. Beyond that point the maintenance ended and we soon encountered blowdowns. A quarter mile later the trail was completely washed out on the side of a cliff. I remembered this spot in 2020, and recalled making a sketchy downclimb to the river below.

This time we had a rope for the Sitkum Glacier, and we slung it around a tree and rapped down the dirt cliff to low angle snow below. The snow depth was unfortunately not ideal. It was deep enough to make progress challenging in bare boots, but not deep enough to cover all the blowdowns and rocks enough to allow for skinning. So we proceeded in bare boots postholing. We wove through dense brush at the beginning, but eventually the river bed cleared out a bit more. It was snowing heavy at times with low visibility, and I was happy to not be up on the summit then.

In general we tried to hug the river edge, and cralwled over lots of downed logs. Once we had to scramble through a cliffy section, and someone had left a rope there for help. After a few hours we reached an impassable side cut, so we climbed up into the woods to get around. There we reached the trail, and decided to stick to the trail as long as possible. Interestingly, we encountered pink flagging, and this helped us navigate around one big washout. From that location, about 0.5 miles before Glacier Creek, the trail was in good shape with trees logged out and no more washouts.

We made fast progress then on skis, and followed the trail all the way to Kennedy Creek. The snow on the side was less deep than in March, and the crossing was no problem. There was a huge log over the creek just upstream of the confluence, but this had overhanging mushroom snow on top that made it sketchy. So we rock hopped next to it. On the other side we cramponed up a face and gained the trail, which was surprisingly in good shape with no blowdowns.

We followed the trail as it zig zagged up to a 4000ft plateau. There it disappeared but the forest was open so we just skinned across. By 10:30pm we reached Sitkum Creek near the PCT at 4100ft and decided to camp for the night. I set up the mega mid, we melted some snow, and we were asleep by midnight.

Our progress had been a bit slower than hoped for, and we were camping below our intended spot at 5200ft. So in order to get back closer to schedule we just slept 3 hours that night.

Sunday we were up at 3am and moving by 4am. We skinned to the ridge just south of Sitkum Creek, then cramponed up the icy face. I was following Greg Slayden’s GPS track and trip report from his 2003 ascent of Glacier Peak via the Sitkum Glacier route, the standard route back before the road washout. By 4500ft the ridge slop eased enough and the snow got soft enough that we switched to skins.

We made fast progress up through the mostly open forest, and soon broke out of the trees at 5300ft. From there we followed mellow slopes, keeping the angle below 35 degrees as planned out using caltopo shaded relief maps.  By sunrise we crested a lip at 7000ft that the USGS quad showed was the start of the Sitkum glacier. But there were rocks sticking out and it was clear the glacier had receeded a lot. By 7400ft we roped up, and wove around cliff bands to the upper lobe of the glacier.

By then the clouds receeded and the summit poked out in the clear sunny sky. This was definitely a better summit day than Saturday. We skinned up to the saddle just east of Sitkum Spire, and planned to continue up the ridge. But there were major cornices overhanging the north face. So we instead switched to crampons and traversed the icy south face just below the ridge. We continued traversing and ascending up to 10,000ft, south of the summit cliffs, until we encountered rime ice. It was clear the face would not be skiable above there, so we ditched the skis.

From there it was an easy climb up the rime-feathered face, and we reached the summit at 11:30am. It was clear and calm out, with temperatures around 10F and undercast extending in all directions. It would be hard to ask for a better mid-winter morning on Glacier Peak. We hung out for 15 minutes admiring the view, and made sure to tag the east and middle summits since I couldn’t remember which was taller.

We soon plunge stepped back to the skis, and were skiing by noon from 10,000ft. The face started a little slabby but we soon found blower powder. We made fun turns down to the Sitkum Glacier. The upper Sitkum has the funnest skiing of the day. I rarely ski powder like this, since I usually seek out the most stable icy consolidated snow possible to avoid avy conditions. But our route was all low angle so this was a rare treat of skiing in deep powder.

We followed our ascent route down all the way to treeline, and continued down to about 4500ft. There the slope got too icy, so we cramponed back down the ridge and skied the short distance back to camp by 2pm. We were soon packed up and moving, and this time progress was much easier since we didn’t have to navigate – we could just follow our up tracks on cruise control.

Back down by the river bed we skinned quickly down the trail until the major washout 0.5 miles beyond Glacier Creek by sunset. We debated the possibility of climbing up to the 3400ft plateau then, since maybe we could use our skis in the trees up there to make faster progress. But we were unsure if the trees would be open or not, and if they were dense then the bushwhacking could end up being slower.

Since we already had a posthole track broken out in the river bed, we decided to just follow our tracks. We made much faster progress down the river this time. To regain the trail we continued a few hundred feet farther downstream than our rappel location, and there found a mellow slope to climb back up.

Once back on the trail we put the skis back on and made fast progress back to the old road, and out along the road. By then it was getting much later than planned, and I was starting to worry about getting home in time for work Monday morning. So we decided to save a little time I would hustle ahead and get the snowmobile all loaded up, so when Olly caught up we could immediately cruise out.

I soon reached the FS23 road, and skinned out quickly I encountered fresh fourwheeler tracks 1 mile beyond the washout, and those smoothed the snow over enough that I made even faster progress. I reached the snowmobile by 1:15am, and soon had it loaded up and ready to go. Olly arrived not long after, and he hopped on the back wearing his pack with the skis strapped on A-frame style.

We cruised back, and I saw a lot of fresh tracks on the road from four wheelers. I suspect they weren’t jeeps or trucks, since there were several blowdowns on the road that I could squeeze under in the snowmobile but I know my truck wouldn’t have fit under. Also, one blowdown I had sawed out just wide enough for the snowmobile to squeeze through, and the wheel tracks were also able to squeeze through after me.

By 2:30am we made it back to the truck and were driving out by 3am. It had been 24 hrs since we got up that morning. I would have preferred to go to sleep right then, but I needed to be at work by 6am to get ready for my morning Statics and Controls lectures. Luckily this was a west-side trailhead and getting back in time was possible. I dropped Olly off at his place in Seattle at 4:30am, and considered just driving straight in to work. As long as I’m the first one in the parking lot I know there’s a big enough place to fit the truck even with the snowmobile hanging off the back. And I have a spare outfit in my office for just this kind of occasion. (It’s happened before).

But I figured it was early enough I might just barely have time to drive all the way back home to Issaquah to sneak in a shower before returning to work. So I drove home by 5am, unloaded the sled, took a shower, then headed back in to work.

Movie of the trip:

© 2025, egilbert@alum.mit.edu. All rights reserved.