Trinity Mountain

Trinity Mountain

Peak 7272

April 5, 2025

Eric and Olly

9 miles skiing, 5kft gain, 33 miles snowmobiling

The plan for Saturday was a car-to-car climb of Chalangin, my last remaining peak on the WA Top 100 list. I’d previously tried to climb it in early November, 2024, but had to bail when we encountered sketchy avalanche conditions near the summit. Over the winter I’ve been focusing on making progress on the Winter Bulgers list, which does not include Chalangin. (The Bulgers is a historical list of peaks, that is approximately the hundred highest peaks in WA, but not exactly, and Chalangin was recently surveyed to be more prominent than previously thought).

Now that winter is over I’m interested in climbing Chlangin again to complete the list. On my previous attempt I’d climbed up from White River, up the west face. This time I decided to go for a slightly different approach. I planned to hike in from the east, over Little Giant Pass, to gain the east face. This route would require a bit more elevation gain, and be a few miles longer, but would avoid potentially slow lowland melt-out conditions on the white river route. And it would avoid the steep west face avy terrain. It looked much more skiable, and I hoped this meant it could be done as a car-to-car single push with good spring snow conditions.

This route would have a 17-mile snowmobile approach vs a 5-mile snowmobile approach for White River. This was kind of appealing to me, since I hadn’t sledded up Chiwawa River Road in a while. The road was last groomed March 15, and became officially unmaintained starting March 28. Usually, in my experience, Chiwawa River Road is sleddable until early May. At that time the road melts out to the gate 8 miles in, and the gate is closed until mid June for mud season. All of April is generally still good for sledding up the road to access peaks.

Friday we headed out a bit later than expected, and got delayed near Cole’s Corner helping out a drunk driver that had driven into a ditch. By 11:30pm we were finally parked with the sled unloaded and packed up. We parked about 0.5 miles beyond the Fish Lake Sno park boundary, at the edge of continuous snow. The sign “no wheeled vehicles beyond this point” is still up, but locals with cabins back there are now driving beyond the sign. So it’s ok to drive to the edge of snowline now.

My goal was to start early enough to get to Little Giant Pass by sunrise, so we could see our route down the steep west face. But we also needed at least a few hours of sleep. So we pushed things back a bit and got moving by 3am after a few hours nap.

The road was very icy, and this is not good for a snowmobile. The snowmobile relies on the track throwing up snow onto the tail to cool the engine. Ice won’t naturally get thrown up, so the engine overheats. I’ve installed two sets of scratchers, which are supposed to chip up the ice and throw that up to cool the engine. However, this is the first time I’ve needed them this year, and it appears I hadn’t properly adjusted them. (One of the sets is a custom set I made, but hadn’t been able to test in the field yet).

As a result, every two miles the engine overheated and we had to stop to cool it down. We packed ice chunks under the rack on the back to help, and I rode slowly at 10mph to try to keep the engine cool. But we still had to stop every two miles. This led to a significant delay, and we didn’t get to Little Giant trailhead until sunrise, around 6:30am. I was still optimistic we could somehow make things work, despite the ~4 hour delay from planned timing.

We first had to cross the Chiwawa River, and there is no bridge. So we took our liners out of our boots, rolled up our pants, and forded the river in bare feet inside the ski boot shells. This is much more stable than fording purely in bare feet. The water was knee deep, and not too cold. On the other side we dumped the water out of our boot shells and put the liners back in.

On the other side we made fast progress up the firm icy snow in the mostly open woods. We roughly followed the trail, and zig zagged up the slope using ski crampons. As we got higher we crossed a few old avy slides, that looked like they’d run within the past few days. By the edge of treeline I looked down and one of my ski crampons had come off. It appeared the screw had loosened (I need to put thread lock on that in the future). I ran down to look, but couldn’t find it.

We decided to contiue to not waste any more time. We eventually crested Little Giant Pass and stopped to take a break around 10:30am. There were great views of the Napeequa Valley below, and we could see Chalangin in the distance. It looked very far away. The west slope hadn’t been in the sun yet and had an icy breakable crust.

I didn’t feel comfortable skiing that, especially with some cliff bands below. So I would probably need to boot it. In hindsight I should have predicted this, but I was still in winter mindset where slopes that high elevation likely haven’t gone through melt/freeze cycles. Now in spring basically all slopes are going through melt/freeze cycles.

We estimated given our new delayed timeline and the need to boot down 2000ft to the Napeequa valley instead of skiing, we would likely reach the summit around sunset. The east face of Chalangin would then refreeze, and we might have to boot back down to the Napeequa. This would put us back to Little Giant Pass sometime between midnight and sunrise, and it would at that time be all ice and require booting back down, which would further delay the trip. It was amazing how missing the optimal melt/freeze timeing on east vs west slopes can add about 50% to the time of a trip!

It appeared the chance of success would be pretty low to get Chalangin. The alternative was to climb a few nearby peaks, and ski down in perfect conditions when the snow was soft corn. Then we could snowmobile out while the lowland snow was still slushy and the engine wouldn’t overheat at all. We decided on this option.

We first cramponed south along the ridge, giving the cornices a wide berth, until we topped out on Trinity Peak. We then retraced our steps, and strapped the skis on our packs. We booted up the north ridge to peak 7272. From there we put skis on and skied fun mellow slopes with excellent soft corn down to our up tracks. Shortly below treeline I found my missing ski crampon.

After more fun soft snow skiing in the trees we reached the Chiwawa River by 3:30pm. We forded back across, and had the sled loaded up by 4pm.

The ride out went much smoother, with the snow slushy enough now to cool the engine. I could now ride around 30-40mph instead of 10mph. There were a few pavement sections melting out around mile 4 from the sno park, and I deployed my retractable wheels to get through these. By 5pm we were back to the truck and soon heading home. A handful of other cars had driven up the road past the bridge, and these looked like cabin owners in the area.

 

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