Beartooth 12er's, Glacier Peak and Mount Villard and Aero Lakes

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For all you avid fishermen, there are some large trout in the Aero Lakes but not easy to catch.  There are also a ton of other lakes to the South and East including Rough, Sky Top, Cairn, Fossil Lakes and many others within a few hours hike of Aero and close to each other.  A fisherman could easily spend a week traveling to various lakes and barely experience it all. 

Saturday morning I packed up and hiked to a location between Lower and Upper Aero Lakes to make base camp for a weekend of fishing and peak bagging.  Prior to leaving Lower Aero lake, I tried my luck unsuccessfully with my fly rod to land some of the large cutthroats known to inhabit the Aero lakes.  If I ever return here, I'll bring a spinning outfit as backup.

After setting up base camp, I tried fishing the small stream that flows between the lakes.  I saw that someone else had been there before me and left the entrails of a couple of large cutty's in the stream.  I did see a couple of very large and very spooky cutty's in the stream.

After base camp was set up and I had done some more unsuccessful fishing, I prepared my day pack for some afternoon scrambling.  I surveyed a route to approach and ascend Glacier Peak first and started up.

The climb started with class 2 scrambling and soon became steeper and trickier class 3 scrambling.  Although class 3 climbing isn't as technically challenging as class 4 and 5, negotiating steep loose talus boulder fields can be potentially quite dangerous, especially when traveling solo.  I have been on a number of talus slopes that were a lot more nerve racking than scaling class 5 rock faces without ropes and 1000 ft plus exposure.  Some talus slopes approaching Crazy Peak and Mount Wood come to mind as well as bushwhacking up Phantom Creek once with a 60 lb pack.  Coming back down the Phantom Creek drainage I stepped onto a large flat boulder about 3-4 ft in diameter and maybe 6-12" thick and weighing maybe 500-600 lbs.  It was precariously balanced and my weight caused to slide down hill.  my feet went out from under me and my rear end hit the surface of the rock hard with the weight of my pack strapped to my back.  The fall broke my tail bone and the rest of the 2 miles of bushwhacking and 3 miles of trail were very uncomfortable to say the least.  Thank God the injury wasn't worse.  Go slow and very carefully when traversing talus slopes.

When you get to the ridge and make the final push to the summit there will be some mild class 4 scrambling.  The North face here drops off

almost straight down for maybe 1000 ft or so.

I took the opportunity to survey this view of West Granite's Southwest aspect for a possible route to the summit.  It looks doable but a lot of very sketchy looking talus.

I found a summit log rolled up in the plastic script container stuffed in a crack of a rock.  It had about 8 entries over the last 7 years, the last entry being 2 years prior.

 Turned out to be a great day for some scrambling and bagging a couple of Montana's 12er's.  The next day a storm started building so I packed up and left a day early catching no Cutthroats.  All in all, still an awesome trip.