Jolly-Humerus-Elbow-Yellow Hill Traverse

Jolly Mtn (6,443ft), Humerus Hill (5,920ft), Elbow Peak (5,720ft), Yellow Hill  (5,527ft)

Feb 7, 2021, 5am – 9pm

27 miles, 6,500ft gain

Eric and Fred

We had to cancel a more ambitious trip after the weather and avy forecast deteriorated, so planned to ski some near-treeline peaks in the Wenatchee Mountains and completely avoid avy terrain. There’s a list of peaks called the “Backcourt 100” which are roughly the hundred tallest peaks east of the cascade crest between highway 2 and I-90. These peaks are appealing because many of them are reasonable choices on days when the weather and snow conditions are not good.

We decided on a string of peaks along a ridge between Jolly Mountain and Yellow Hill, just east of Cle Elum Lake. Conveniently there are two parking areas nearby that are maintained in the winter – the Salmon La Sac sno park and the Last Resort staging area. We considered hitting the peaks as a loop from Salmon La Sac but decided a traverse would be a similar mileage and funner. Unfortunately it didn’t make sense to involve the snowmobile in a traverse, so I had to leave it out of the fun for a weekend.

It looked like a good ski descent down Yellow Hill, so we decided to do the traverse north to south, and do it Sunday when it was supposed to be cold enough that it wouldn’t be raining at lower elevations.

Sunday morning we left a car at the Last Resort staging area and drove about nine miles up the road to Salmon La Sac sno park. There we suited up and started skinning up the road by 5am. Progress was fast since the road had been freshly tracked down by snowmobiles the previous day. By sunrise we reached 4,600ft and cut the last switchback up to Sasse Ridge. Snowmobile tracks ended there and we roughly followed the ridge up and east. The weather soon deteriorated as expected and it snowed basically the rest of the day with very strong wind and at times limited visibility.

We stopped briefly to tag Pt 6086, then continued up to Jolly Mountain by mid morning.  Most of the rest of the ridge was rolling hills, and to save time we decided to just leave the skins on and ski down slowly and carefully in climbing mode.

We had some excellent turns in deep powder down the southeast ridge of Jolly, then traversed over Humerous Hill and eventually wrapped around to Humerus Hill. The top 15ft were rocky and icy enough that we booted up to the true summit. We continued along the ridge to Elbow, then traversed the trickiest section, the southeast ridge of Elbow. Here the wind was almost strong enough to knock us over and the blowing snow made visibility low. We had to avoid cornices on the left and an icy rocky slope on the right, but eventually made it through.

By 3pm we made the last climb up to Yellow Hill and finally ripped the skins and changed to ski mode. The best turns of the trip were just below the summit of Yellow Hill along the south face. After dropping a bit too low in the wrong drainage we climbed back up and then skied down the correct drainage as planned. By 5pm we bushwhacked out to a forest road and breathed a sigh of relief to be almost done. It was still 10 miles back to the car at the staging area, but we figured road skiing would be easy.

Unfortunately we hadn’t completely done our homework on this road. I had thought it was part of a groomed snowmobile route that connected back to the staging area, but in hindsight I’ve learned it is not part of that system. Just at sunset we reached the edge of the West Fork Teanaway River following road FS 113, but were confused that we couldn’t find a bridge across. Multiple maps showed the road crossing the river. The darkness probably didn’t help, but we bushwhacked up and down the river and there was definitely no bridge. It was too wide for any fallen logs to scoot over, and looked sketchy and deep to wade across.

We skied back up the river to the confluence with Corral Creek, hoping to find a better crossing upstream. But after more bushwhacking we realized the crossings were still difficult, but if we crossed there we would have to cross twice instead of once. Our best options appeared to be to tough it out and wade across down lower, or ski out to Cle Elum and try to find our way back to our car from there. That didn’t sound very appealing.

So reluctantly we bushwhacked back to the spot where the bridge was supposed to be. It was actually a very wide part of the river, which generally means the shallowest part. I could kind of imagine that could be a spot vehicles could maybe drive through at low water, but it looked long-since abandoned. While we were still warm we quickly stripped down to our underwear, took the liners out of the ski boots and just wore the plastic shells on our bare feet. I strapped my skis on my backpack and cautiously waded into the water.

It was very cold, and as I got farther it eventually reached up to my thighs. I kept moving and soon crested the deepest part and emerged on the snowy bank on the other side. The clock was still ticking on getting cold and I quickly ripped the clothes out of my pack and sat down to take off the boot shells. I dumped the water out of the shells and started putting the liners back in. I expected my feet to be numb by then but paradoxically they were toasty warm. I’ve had this phenomenon happen before, when Matthew and I went for a swim in the Atlantic Ocean in February in Quebec. We jumped through some ice into the water and when I got out I was surprisingly warm. I think it’s some weird survival mechanism of the body in extreme situations.

Sitting on my pack out of the snow I actually took my time putting my clothes on since I wasn’t really cold. Eventually we got suited back up and continued moving. We bushwhacked up the bank on the other side and soon popped out on an old road bed. There were huge mounds in it like it was abandoned. But we followed it and eventually met up with snowmobile tracks. If a snowmobile could make it in there, we could probably make it out with no more river crossings.

We followed the tracks on FS 113 and eventually met up with a groomed trail. From there it was easy skinning and skiing back to the car by 9pm. A few inches of snow had accumulated at the Last Resort staging area, but surprisingly at least 10 inches accumulated at Salmon La Sac, just 6 miles up the road! My car was the last one in the lot, and luckily I didn’t get stuck driving out in the deep snow.

 

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