Windy Peak

Nearing the summit in the snow

Windy Peak (8,333ft)

Eric Gilbertson

August 26, 2018

I had just climbed Boston Peak and Sahale Peak as a day trip Saturday with Birkan, and we made it back to the car at 4:30pm in deteriorating weather. My original plan to climb more mountains around Boston needed to be modified. I was trying to tighten my Bulger completion time window, which required re-climbing a handful of mountains I’d already climbed. It appeared the weather would be pretty bad for the rest of the weekend across the cascades, so I figured I’d climb a mountain that did not require good weather.

The trailhead Sunday morning.

Windy Peak fit the bill nicely. I had already climbed Windy Peak in 2016 with Katie, but I needed to redo it, and it happens to be the only Bulger peak with an officially-maintained trail to the summit. It’s also only a ~ 10-mile round trip hike. The main difficulty with Windy Peak is the drive. It’s perhaps the farthest peak from Seattle, at about a 6 hour drive. I was starting from Cascade Pass, so hoped I could get there in a bit shorter time. Maybe I could even get there quickly enough to tag the summit that night.

Birkan drove back to Seattle, while I drove east, through Washington pass and Winthrop, then farther, northeast to the Cathedral Driveway trailhead near Loomis. I reached the trailhead much later than I had expected, at 10:30pm. At that point I made the call to wait until morning to tag the summit.

My official excuse was that my knee was kind of hurting after climbing Boston and Sahale earlier that day, and I

The forest recovering from an old fire

didn’t want to jeopardize the rest of the summer by actually injuring by pushing too hard in a day. But perhaps an equally important reason was that it was pouring rain, cold, dark, and I kind of just wanted to sleep right there in the comfort of the car. I crawled into the back of the forrester and went to sleep, with no alarm set for the morning.

The next morning I rolled out of bed at 7:45am, packed a few things in my little day pack, and headed down the Cathedral Driveway trail. It had momentarily stopped raining, though the skies looked like they could let loose at any moment. I overshot the turnoff for Windy Creek, but when I hit a bridge I turned around and made the turnoff. (There’s a small rock cairn there).

Unfortunately the trail up Windy Creek is very overgrown in places, and I got drenched from the waist down from all the wet bushes. About halfway up I passed a few hunters who said they’d been out for five days and I was the first person they’d seen.

Snow starting to accumulate near the summit

It soon started to rain again, and as I climbed above 7,000ft the rain changed over to snow. It wasn’t sticking yet, but visibility was pretty low. I reached an intersection with a sign pointing to windy peak, and after the turnoff I reached the summit around 9:30am. It was indeed windy and snowing hard, and I didn’t stay long. I quickly scrawled my name in the overflowing register and scrambled back down off the summit block.

The last time I’d been to windy peak it was also windy and snowing hard, but there was a foot of snow on the ground from one of the first major storms of the season in October 2016. I hadn’t expected snow in August, but I guess in this part of Washington it can snow any month of the year. In fact, in early July in the Pasayten Wilderness I got snowed for about 7 hours straight while hiking out from Shellrock Pass.

Summit panorama

I hiked back down through the snow, and it soon changed back to rain. I was thoroughly drenched by the time I got back into the trees. Along the hike I met the hunters again, and two of them were walking stealthily into the woods. The one back on the trail said they were going after a black bear they thought they’d heard pushing a stag over.

I got back to the car by 11:15am or so, then made the long drive back to Seattle by Sunday night. The plan for the next few days was to hike in to Boston Basin Monday afternoon with Katie after a rest morning in town, then climb Forbidden Peak on Tuesday when the weather was supposed to be good.

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