Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

November 17, 2023

2160m

Cascade River, WA

Hidden Lake Lookout has now become one of the busiest hikes in the North Cascades thank to the explosion of posts on social media, that the small parking lot and the rough logging road access is no longer capable of sustaining the volume of the traffics on a regular summer weekend. However, most of the hikers aren’t aware, or simply don’t care, that the lookout isn’t the actual summit of the Hidden Lake Peaks. The bump that boasts the lookout has only 80 m prominence, therefore not a peak. The highest of the Hidden Lake Peaks boasts over 300 m prominence and is a simple scramble from the trail. In 2022 I used this approach to climb The Triad with Elise and the plan was to scramble Hidden Lake Peaks afterwards, but we underestimated the difficulty of the climb. Instead, Elise and I had become probably the only two persons who had summitted The Triad but not Hidden Lake Peaks. I then wanted to do this as a winter ascent, but the access road isn’t maintained in the dead winter. My solution was then to hike it in November when the trail-head is still accessible but there’s already enough snow to make the alpine a winter wonderland.

The weather had been incredible recently that I had to force myself to do some “before-work” hikes even though I’d be extremely tired at work afterwards in the evening. I wanted to do something more “interesting” but eventually settled on Hidden Lake Peaks as it’s more of a no-brainer kind of outing. Kate had just hiked to the lookout a few months ago but I explained how this trip would be completely different, and eventually convinced her to tag along. We decided to drive out and camp at the trail-head on Thursday night so that I could get some much-needed sleep. I finished work at 10 pm and we got to the trail-head three hours later. The spur road was in a rough shape, that 4×4 with high clearance is currently needed. The final kilometer was also covered in about 10 cm of snow, but imposed no problem to the trusty Tacoma. A set of tire tracks had been laid by the previous parties so all I needed was to follow the tracks.

The alarms were set at 4:30 am but we failed to get up, and reset the alarms to 5:30 am. This turned out to be a risky decision because I almost didn’t get back home in time for work in the afternoon. In any case we started the hike another hour later and only needed to use head-lamps for the initial half an hour. It didn’t take us long to reach the meadows where the snow depth increased drastically. This hike is apparently very busy even in November, that a “trench” had been dug out and packed down by the previous hikers. We therefore did not need to don snowshoes but after a few annoying switchbacks I made the call to abandon the hiker’s tracks at 1400 m elevation. We strapped the snowshoes on, and broke our own trail straight the heck up the middle of the gulch feature ahead. By the time we rejoined the trail at 1650 m I could tell that nobody had gone this far in the last few days. The trail could still be seen, but very faintly under the fresh snow. It was here that I made a spontaneous decision to do a steeper but more direct route via the north ridge. Instead of doing the mile-long side-hill traverse to the south side of the peak I led us ascending a steep (35+ degrees) route linking up several gullies to an obvious col on the north ridge. This route could involve some serious avalanche problems, but such wasn’t a concern on this particular day.

The north ridge was more involved than I thought, that the traverse onto the open north-east slope wasn’t as straightforward as I was hoping for. Instead, I led us scrambling up and over a small buttress on the ridge before spotting a feasible line to traverse onto the face. The NE Face was littered with car-sized boulders, that the current snowpack wasn’t deep enough to completely cover the hazards. I had to be extremely cautious not leading us into some deep holes. Still, Kate discovered a hole by following the exact tracks that I made, and it took her a while to extricate herself. We also encountered several steep rolls on the face that were clearly steeper than 35 degrees, and the going was quite slow. After what seemed like eternity I brought us back onto the north ridge, but the direct attack of the summit appeared too steep and rocky from this side. Maybe in the death of winter all of the boulders would be completely covered in snow, but in November I had to do a corkscrew route over to the west, south and eventually, east side to keep the snowshoes on all the way to the very summit. I surely could have ditched the snowshoes, but that would put us in greater danger of falling into more holes. The views were excellent as expected, but we weren’t doing great on time.

Thankfully the descent was rather trivial by following the exact tracks we had just made. Kate was not very comfortable on the steeps, but the snow was soft enough for her to sit and slide, that in short time we had descended back to that notch on the bottom of the north ridge. A few spots lower down were steep enough to warrant some long glissades, so we did that. Kate unfortunately discovered another hole somewhere around 1400 m right before rejoining the trail and was unable to extricate herself. One of her snowshoes were completely stuck under some alders, that I eventually came up with a creative solution to free her using the ice axe that I brought. Throughout the trip I thought that ice axe was definitely an overkill, but maybe not. The rest of the descent was uneventful and we were able to finish the round trip in 6 hours 40 minutes. I immediately turned on the engine and drove down the narrow and winding FSRs back to the Cascade River Road. Despite the lateness I had to pull over for a nap somewhere along Highway 20, but nevertheless I did get back home with about 5 minutes of spare time before showing up at work.