Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

September 22, 2024

1902m

Snoqualmie Pass, WA

Chair Peak is one of the more rugged and iconic summits in the immediate vicinity of Snoqualmie Pass and offers at least a handful routes including the winter classic NE Buttress and the newly bolted 5.9 sport route named “Voie De Chaise”. For a number of years my plan was to climb the NE Buttress in winter but I was never able to find that perfect condition window with the right partner(s). I still wanted to climb that route but it was no longer a priority on my ever expanding to-do list, as nowadays I’m more strictly interested in taking the easiest possible way on each objective, which in this case would be the south shoulder “scramble route”. I’m not sure who did this route first but Jake Robinson was the first to detail the “beta” of this route on the internet, so this was also a tribute to my late friend who died roughly 4 years ago on Kololo Peaks. I had already made an attempt on Chair Peak’s scramble route in 2022 with Silvana and Karen but that trip got diverted to the nearby Kaleetan Peak due to the unexpected closure of the approach trail. This time I came back with Erica but it was mostly the weather that made the decision for us. There’s a system pushing in from the NW that the only area with decent forecast was to the far south, but then I unfortunately had committed to 2 hours of work in the evening. The scramble route on Chair Peak should be short enough that I could still get back home for work.

I had a long work day on Saturday so I wasn’t too keen to drive an extra hour to pick Erica up. Instead, I made her to take public transit down to White Rock so we could cross the border as early as possible, which turned out to be around 9 pm thank to the hour-long border delay. The drive down to Bellevue and then eastwards up to Snoqualmie Pass went without event and we turned into the gigantic parking lot at 11:30 pm. I highly doubted that car-camping in the middle of this parking lot would be legal, but at this time of a day there’d have no ranger enforcing the rules so we pitched the tent and went to bed. The alarm was set at 4:30 am as the forecast indicated the better weather was in the morning. I spent the next 15 minutes preparing for our breakfast and sure enough there’s a head-lamp approaching us. We thought that must be a ranger handling us a ticket but it turned out to be Elise. We had never exchanged our respective plans for this weekend so what a coincidence that four Canadians in two separate teams met randomly in the middle of a Washingtonian’s backyard. Elise and her partner was planning to climb a 5.9 route on a spire next to The Tooth. They were about 10 minutes ahead of us but decided that it’s okay to wait for us to do the approach hike together.

It turned out that we covered the portion of Snow Lake trail in 45 minutes and by the time we turned onto the climber’s trail we still had to use the head-lamps. It was almost bright enough though. We followed this climber’s trail for another kilometer and then our paths would diverge. Elise and Hayley would continue traversing for another kilometer aiming for the valley north of The Tooth whereas Erica and I left the trail scrambling straight up into a boulder field. This boulder field brought us into the first of the many gullies on Chair Peak’s scramble route. The middle of this water worn approach gully required some brief 3rd class scrambling. Though nothing difficult this section did take a while. We then exited this gully to the climber’s right (north) following a rather-obvious “trail” through some bushes and then arrived at another, much bigger boulder field aiming at “The Thumbtack” on my Gaia GPS app. There were lots of unstable brisk sized rubbles and I found this section being quite tedious, especially on trail-runners. The exiting ramp was easily located and we slogged up another boulder field for 150 vertical meters onto Chair Peak’s south shoulder. The weather had been better than anticipated so we took our time taking the first break of the day in the sunshine. Up until this point the terrain was nowhere “fun” but at least the approach was short and the route was efficient.

We had downloaded two sets of GPX tracks and the next section was the only spot where the two tracks did not quite agree with each other. I preferred to stay higher if possible so followed the more recent of the two tracks northwards along the narrow ridge, but then we still had to make that ~30 m elevation loss down into the west side basin. The descending traverse was not as straightforward as I was hoping for as the terrain was down-sloping and loose. There was nothing difficult but care must be taken. We then traversed into the lower of the two gullies on the west side of the south ridge. There were a couple “lone trees” and the scrambling was sustained 3rd class. The description in most of the “beta” was correct. We then exited this lower gully out to the climber’s left and found that narrow path leading across the next traverse to the supposed crux. I agreed that this was the mental crux of the route but the scrambling difficulty did not really exceed “3rd class”. A fall would likely be fatal and the rocks were somewhat loose, but it should not impose any problem to those who climb. I can see that hikers and scramblers chickening out here but it was overall just a “scramble route” so take people’s words with a grain of salt. The upper gully only required a few moves on some down-sloping 3rd class terrain, and the rest of the route to the summit was straightforward and intuitive. We made the summit in under 2.5 hours and I decided for us that we must bag another peak to turn this into a proper day-trip.

I had been using Erica’s hotspot to reconnect with the society but as soon as I made the decision to bag another peak I turned off the WiFi to conserve battery. None of us had brought a battery pack as we were only expecting a short outing. We did linger on the summit for quite a while. The descent was mostly without event and that crux section felt considerably easier now with the slight uphill incline. After regaining that “south shoulder” we crossed path with a soloist who had just come back from a year of climbing in South America. It was not very common to randomly meet someone who had climbed peaks like Alpamayo, Iliniza Sur and more impressively, El Altar. We exchanged contacts and I thought some of his connections might be very helpful for some of my plans in the Andes. We also crossed path with a fellow Seattle based mountaineer (Colin) who had almost finished the Bulger list and he was also going to do this south shoulder “scramble route”. I thought when Jake posted the trip report in 2019 this was still sort of like a “secret” in the community but it definitely had gained popularity significantly since then. The decision was made to hike Wright Mountain north of Snow Lake so we took the climber’s short-cut trail traversing to the broad pass between Chair Peak and Snoqualmie Mountain where we were joined by hordes of hikers.