Back in the beginning of May, I attempted to summit Glacier Peak, the most remote of the Washington volcanoes. This trip proved to be my first unsuccessful mountaineering trip in my short career, but was a really cool learning experience. Since then, Glacier Peak had been nagging at me, since I consider it to be the most beautiful volcano in Washington. In addition, the remote setting is super appealing to me, because it’s an area of the state that you can’t see from any road. The other mountains are obviously very beautiful as well, but they’re less mysterious. Here’s Pete getting one of our only views of the mountain when we tried to ski it in May.
I went with the same group as last time, minus Scott and adding Pete’s friend Dustin, who was visiting from NH, aka the state with the most mountains that also happen to be inconsequential.
The weather forecast looked great, and we had high hopes of not only summiting, but also being comfortable while doing it! The perfect combo! As we drove through the mossy old-growth forests, I got excited about the prospect of better weather and much lighter packs, since we weren’t skiing. It was overcast and cool on the approach through the trees, and then when we set up camp in Glacier Basin, the clouds came in and we got completely socked in. This wasn’t encouraging. However, we went to sleep with fingers crossed, and had a great surprise around 4 am, waking to enjoying a clear sky and no breeze.
We set up towards Glacier Gap, passing a few other groups who sensibly decided to sleep in a bit later. As the sun rose, our level of psyche only increased. We made it up to the only significant actual glacier crossing and roped up as a team of four. Dustin was a champ on his first glacier climb, and the rest of us felt comfortable taking him along, since it was low angle, and only involved crossing two snow bridges. Before long, we arrived at the saddle between Disappointment Peak (does every large mountain have some feature named “Disappointment”?) and the true summit, and took our crampons off to head up the ashy ridge that was not covered by snow. At the top of this ridge, we put our pons back on and front pointed up the steeper final headwall to the summit. We’d arrived! And for the most remote volcano, there sure were a lot of people. In fact, we saw more people on the summit than any of the other five volcanic summits other than Baker. There was a Mountaineers group with an overbearing leader (typical, in my experience), a bunch of local Instagram celebrities, as well as some old-timers who had attempted the mountain almost 40 years ago. There was even a rare pupper on the summit.
Good times were had by all, except the uptight Mounties leader, and we headed back down to camp. The descent was uneventful, we relaxed in the sun at camp for a while, enjoyed one of my favorite sunset views, and then had a great night’s sleep before the beautiful trek out back to the car.
I actually had enough gas in the tank to run out the last couple of miles. What a great trip! Awesome to get my 4th volcano IN THE BAG. I’ll spoil some future trip reports and say that this was my favorite mountaineering trip of the season. Beautiful, remote, and a really cool objective.
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