| Corkscrew Route on Sloan Peak Trip Report |
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| Corkscrew Route on Sloan Peak   | 
| Page Type: Trip Report Location: Washington, United States, North America Date Climbed/Hiked: Sep 24, 2011 Activities: Mountaineering Season: Fall | Page By: jacobsmith Created/Edited: Sep 29, 2011 / Jan 14, 2012 Object ID: 750029 Hits: 234 Loading... Page Score: 0% - 0 Votes Loading... Vote: Log in to vote |
The ApproachSloan Peak, as one of the more distinctive peaks of the central Washington Cascades, has been on my list for some time - the road closure being the biggest reason for putting it off. On September 23rd I finally decided to make an attempt.
The roadwork, active because I left on a weekday, extended the approach by about 4.5 miles and, as I had little idea what sort of trail I was looking for, complicated the route-finding considerably. By counting rivers I had a fairly good sense of where the turn off was going to be, but not aware that it was clearly marked I turned down a small path out of what looked like a camping area toward the North Fork Sauk river. This path quickly disappeared and I found myself by the river, unsure whether I had ever been on the trail at all. After examining my map I decided that I must have turned off the road too early but that I was very close and should be able to make my way up the river to the actual trail. This turned out to be much more difficult that it sounded, involving multiple river crossing, an unfortunate run in with a hive of yellow jackets (resulting in more than a dozen stings) and the eventual realization that I had gotten turned around when first crossing the river and had been going in completely the wrong direction. With my map correctly oriented it was a simple matter of again wading across the river and returning to the road. The actual trailhead was clearly marked about a quarter of a mile after where I had made my error. With about two hours lost by that time I headed up the trail, which, though overgrown, was not too difficult to follow. The river crossings were not nearly as bad as I had been lead to believe, though finding the trail again once over them was occasionally interesting. Once across the valley, the trail proceeded to get extremely steep, extremely quickly. Due to the amount of yellow jacket venom in my system and the fact that I was too nervous to eat much, I made slow progress up through the forest to where the trail indicated on the map ends. Somewhat below that point, on an avalanche slope, I found bushes thick with fat, tart huckleberries. From there a climber’s trail (read: goat path) lead to the north-east ridge, where I bivouacked. Summit and DescentAfter stashing my extra gear I made my way toward the glacier soon after sunrise. During the night I had heard an avalanche of some kind and saw evidence of resent icefall. Unsure of the best place to cross, I made a number of exploratory traverses before finding that the only route remotely feasible for a solo climber was a snow ramp abutting the north-east face of the mountain which went most of the length of the glacier, requiring only some crevasse maneuvering at the north edge. Once off the glacier and around the sunny and warm south-east face the trip began to become much more pleasant. As mentioned in Beckey’s guide, most of the remainder of the Corkscrew route is a simple path through the heather, with only two or three crux spots with considerable amounts of exposure. My route description from here unfortunately becomes rather vague, due to the almost circular nature of the path I had little idea where I was on the mountain and had a disturbingly hard time pinpointing my route on photos of the peak once I returned. At the peak I found a bronze Mountaineers summit register attached with a green cord to a rusted rectangular metal box and signed my name before descending.
The descent was uneventful, except that I lost the route multiple times between the north-east ridge where I had bivouacked and the basin where the marked trail comes out of the forest. Overall, this was one of the most terrifying, mentally and physically straining peaks I have ever climbed. It may have been considered a day trip when the road was accessible but hiking in from Mountain Loop Hwy it is at least ten and a half arduous miles.
for additional photos: http://ifiwereacrow.blogspot.com/2012/01/sloan-peak.html Images
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Mountain Loop Highway > Sloan Peak > Corkscrew Route on Sloan Peak