Palmer Mountain

Palmer Mountain (5,043ft)

Climbing the steep gully near the summit

Feb 24, 2019

Eric and Jake

We left town Sunday morning and drove just past Baring to turn off at the bridge to Money Creek campground. Just past the campground we turned right on a snowed-over forest service road. Luckily another vehicle had driven in before us. The snow was pretty high in the center, but the forester had just enough clearance to not get stuck. About 1 mile in we came to a gated bridge and carefully parked off the road in the snow.

By 8:15am we started hiking up on snowshoes. It was a difficult call whether to bring skis or snowshoes, but we figured since the route was steep bushwhacking with potentially thin snow cover at the lower elevations skis would probably actually be slower. In the end we definitely made the correct call.

Approaching the summit

We crossed the bridge then turned immediately right at the beat up truck on the side of the road. We broke trail on the road for 1.5 miles to the washed-out Lowe Creek bridge, then turned left into the woods. We bushwacked generally straight up, following the ridge when it became more defined. Some old roads show up on the map but they have basically disappeared and been overgrown.

Around 11am we reached an old quarry with some dilapidated buildings. There the terrain got steeper and the snow deeper and more fluffy. Our speed dropped considerably as we struggled up the slope. We switched leads every 500 vertical feet, and eventually got high enough to see the summit.

We followed the ridge to the steep east side of the summit block, then traversed through trees along the south face until we encountered an obvious gully leading to just west of the summit. We wallowed up the gully in snowshoes and topped out just before 2pm.

Difficult trail breaking

I had never climbed in this area and was impressed by Lennox, Cleveland, Baring, and other big mountains around. We soon turned around, carefully downclimbed the gully, then swiftly retraced our route down. I think we went down at least 5 times as fast as up, though our overall average for the day was still only around 1 mph.

By 4:15pm we returned to the car and managed to drive back out without getting stuck.