Tenpeak Mountain (8,200ft)
Eric and Fred
Sept 25, 3am – 11pm
25 miles, 7,300ft
Fred is almost done with the washington top 200 peaks and just had a handful of somewhat challenging ones left. It turned out Tenpeak was the one that was the most reasonable to do as a day trip. This is saying something, since I hadn’t heard any reports of anyone climbing Tenpeak as a day trip.
Tenpeak is a technical summit southeast of Glacier Peak, and doesn’t see too many ascents. We found good reports from Eric E, Fletcher, and Dustin who approached from North Fork Sauk, and John P who approached from Thunder Creek. They all did overnight trips (and combined it with other peaks) but we just had a day to do the ascent. The thunder creek approach is by far the shortest, but involves a lot of bushwhacking. Decades ago there was a maintained trail up white river and maybe even into thunder basin, but it has long since been abandoned and overtaken by the forest.
Fred and I had each independently done trips four or five years ago descending from Luahna Peak down to Thunder Creek and had stumbled across an old trail still there. When I went through it was rough, and the abandoned trail along White River was even worse, covered in dense slide alder and barely followable in many places. When John P went through in 2019 it didn’ sound much different, and the bushwhacking up Thunder Creek sounded tough. This past January I had descended again from Luahna down Thunder Creek, but all the brush was covered in snow then so it was hard to imagine how travel would be in the summer or fall.
For the route on the summit pyramid the main options seem to be the southeast face or the west ridge. Both are a pitch or so of low 5th class climbing. Fletcher’s report of the west ridge sounded fun, so we decided on that route.
We met up at the White River trailhead Friday night and were moving by 3am Saturday morning. The first four miles to boulder creek went fast on the well-traveled trail. Beyond the boulder creek turnoff the trail is officially unmaintained, but it was in surprisingly good shape. It looked like it had been brushed within the past year and all the slide alder sawed out. This was a major improvement since 2017 when I’d passed through in the fall. We made fast progress to Thunder Creek, though got a bit wet from dew from some of the bushes.
We briefly lost the trail crossing Thunder Creek, but Fred had recorded a GPS track from his previous trip and we soon regained the trail. We passed by a few tents pitched in the woods, then at an open stretch of woods we left the main trail and started up to the right in the woods. We couldn’t find the abandoned trail, so thrashed though brush for a while until we stumbled across it. It was also in surpsingly good shape. Someone must be going in there and cutting out blowdowns once in a while.
By the time we reached the avy swath below Luahna the old trail disappeared though. From there we pushed through slide alder and waist-high brush, and surprisingly frequently came across pink Hi-Chew candy wrappers on the ground. It appeared someone else had been bushwhacking along the same route we were. They were frequent enough that it was almost as if they were leaving a trail of breadcrumbs to follow, though we picked them all up.
Eventually we reached open forest on the other side and travel got much easier. There were knee-high blueberry bushes to walk through, and even occasional pink flagging we followed, though most any line through the trees was easy. By 8am we reached an old campsite next to Thunder Creek at 4200ft and took a break. From here a faint trail continued farther into an open grassy meadow, where it disappeared. That was the last remnant of old trail we encountered, and it seemed perhaps hunters had maintained it to that campsite.
At the head of the 4200ft valley we had to push through dense slide alder up to 5,000ft, and that section was probably the most difficult bushwhacking of the approach. Fred found some game trails that were clear from about knee height down and helped a bit, but we still had to crawl under and over lots of slide alder. The forest soon opened up, though, and then we popped out into Thunder Basin. There we got our first view of Tenpeak up above slopes red with turning blueberry bushes. The peak was a sharp pyramid in the middle of a ridge of shorter peaks. I can understand how it got the name Tenpeak, at least from that angle.
We crossed a talus field at the head of the valley, then scrambled up steep, slippery heather and slabs until the terrain leveled out around 6400ft. From there we followed blueberry slopes a bit farther, then started scrambling up talus slopes. It was late enough in the season that there was basically no snow on the south facing slopes. We aimed for a southeast-trending gully just left of the summit, the same gully Fletcher and Dustin took up in August 2020. Without snow it was very loose, and a few large rocks got dislodged in the scree. By 1pm we reached a notch at the ridgecrest and took another break.
There were excellent views to the north of Glacier Peak, which was quite bare of snow except for some fresh dusting on the highest slopes. The massive honeyclomb glacier dropped down from Kololo Peaks to the west, and the Suiattle river valley opened up to the north. We dropped our gear in the notch and racked up for the climb. To save weight we had brought my 60m half rope since the technical section was supposed to be short. This would allow us to do 30m long rappels, but I would have to tie into the middle of the rope to lead on two strands and just do 30m pitches.
I led the first pitch, which started just south of the crest and went up 4th class and low 5th ledges and gullies the full 30m to gain the crest. Fred led another pitch of low 5th directly up the crest to a good ledge. Then I led the final short 20m pitch to the summit, which ended with jumbled boulders. I slung the summit horn and belayed Fred up at 2pm, and we hung out there for about 30 minutes. The summit register was placed in 1972, and supposedly “replaced the infamous old rusty tin can register.” Surprisingly, there were lots of sign ins in the 70s and 80s, but hardly any since then. In fact, we were the only party to summit in the past year. I suspect in the 70s and 80s the white river and thunder creek trails were still maintained, and the approach was probably much easier.
The peak’s lack of popularity meant there were no rappel anchors on our route, but we had come prepared to leave gear. We belayed down to a good horn, then slung it with some webbing. We rapped 30m down, then slung another horn and rapped the whole way back down to the notch. We had had a stretch goal of tagging West Tenpeak as well, but it was 3:45pm by then and didn’t seem too realistic given that I needed to be back to Seattle that night. Fred had already climbed West Tenpeak, but I still needed it. Unfortunately it’ll have to wait for another trip.
We hiked back down the talus, then carefully downclimbed the slippery heather to Thunder Basin. We retraced our route bushwhacking to the meadow below and back to the 4200ft campsite by 7pm. It soon got dark, and we bushwhacked back through the slide alder and regained the abandoned trail. From there it was smooth sailing all the way back to the trailhead by 11pm for a 20 hour day.
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