I highly reccommend this climb for the thrill and beauty of the North Cascade Mountains. Nick and I got a later than desired start, 10:00AM, but found others were trailing in much later. We decided to camp at the 5600 foot basin area to avoid the carry over ridge and glacier travel with heavier packs. It was tough enough to get where we did. You better be in decent shape to do this climb. There is plenty of water at this site too, so no snow melting was needed. We had views of more peaks than we could name with a good map. No dissappointments stopping here at all. We left our bivy site the next morning at 5:00AM on 7-24-04, summiting by 10:00AM and we are not fast climbers. On top, we were by ourselves and could see forever, Glacier Pk, Mt. Baker and everything inbetween. We passed many groups coming up on our descent, including those pushing for the summit from the cars in one day! They had a long day ahead of them when we met them. Too much for us! We grabbed our gear on the way out to the cars, maybe 5:00PM, at the parking lot, tired but content with a great trip with my climbing friend Nick!
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Washington Top 100
