Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

June 19, 2023

1169m

Lake Chelan, WA

Chelan Butte is a rather small peak that looms above the town of Chelan near the outlet of Lake Chelan with hardly any mountaineering significance to speak of. This peak is however detached from the rest of the chain and subsequently boasts over 600 m prominence and that’s how it caught my attention. The area locates in the rainshadow zone and usually offers sunnier weather when the main ranges are soaked in. The area is also accessible in winter but the drive over the Cascades divide always scares me when the weather is less than ideal. I eventually decided to just do it in summer but I would combine this hike with several nearby peaks to make the long drive worthwhile.

Kostya wanted to get out for a day-trip on Monday and even offered to drive his Tesla out. The weather was terrible with rain and alpine snow anywhere within 4 hours of driving, but sunny on the far eastern edge of the Cascades. I threw out the objective of Chelan Butte and Kostya’s game, despite the driving being 5 hours each way. The plan was to also tag the nearby Badger Mountain due to its prominence, and we ended up scrambling a 3rd objective afterwards, and Kostya even managed a 4th. The two of us left White Rock at 11 pm on Sunday night. My plan was to sleep in the vehicle for several hours wherever we made to, but Kostya managed to stay awake all the way to and past Leavenworth and we eventually slept at a charging station. It was already 3 am and we woke up at around 6 am. We resumed the drive into the town of Chelan and parked at the paved trail-head. This objective turns out to be a great one for the Tesla. With the Tacoma we could have easily driven to the summit of Chelan Butte but the drive-up option was never our intension. We wanted some exercise and the full hike requires 800 m elevation gain.

The hike might seem boring on paper but I forgot that this peak locates in the semi-desert area. In the deserts the smaller peaks are usually the better peaks. In this particular case, the entire hike would be done in open country with views from the start to finish. The start of the trail was rather an ATV road (no longer open to motorized use) and soon we merged onto some proper trails. There were some long switchbacks on the lower mountain and our first stop was Elephant Head. This “peak” has a separate entry on peakbagger.com, but in reality it’s just an outlier with at most 15 m of prominence. The remaining hike was steeper and foreshortened and this hike was overall longer than I expected. The true summit has lots of communication structures and is rather ugly. We could also see motorized ascensionists approaching from the west, so we quickly left the summit after some mandatory victory shots.

I called for a break once we were no longer in the vicinity of those high-frequency towers and with views of Lake Chelan. I had not eaten anything yet and I was feeling the lack of energy. On the descent Kostya went ahead leading the trail run. Kostya is one of the fastest descenders I have hiked with and I struggled to keep up with the pace. I nonetheless descended at my fastest possible pace and we made down to the parking lot in a single shot. I jogged for about 1/3 to half of the trail distance. Despite that, our round trip time was over 3 hours so like mentioned above this hike does require one to do some workout and isn’t “nothing”. Not doing much lingering at the trail-head we soon started the drive towards Badger Mountain, the most uncertain objective in this day.