Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

October 23, 2024

1627m

Mountain Loop Highway, WA

Mt. Pilchuck is one of those Washington’s “P600m” objectives that is also considered as a “classic hike”, so this is a low hanging fruit for those chasing the prominence list. This objective is best done in the so-called “shoulder season” because there are simply too much better peaks to do in the summer months, whereas in the winter the access is problematic as the forestry road isn’t maintained. The hike itself is no-brainer but I had seen comments complaining about the trail quality. Given the popularity of this hike I would expect those were made by the out-of-shape Americans who had never done a “real hike” but I had to take my words back after doing the hike myself. The trail quality was indeed bad with the upper 2/3 full of boulders and rock slabs. There’s even some scrambling here and there and the route can be decently tricky in the less-than-ideal conditions, even for experienced hikers.

Kate’s back to Canada recently so we scheduled a hike taking advantage of the Wednesday’s weather window. The plan was made a few days back so the forecast changed, unfortunately. I thought the few hours in the morning would still be reasonable as the rain was not supposed to arrive until noon according to most of the models. The afternoon hours could not be used as I needed to be back home no later than 3 pm for work anyway. The recent atmospheric river events had washed away most, if not all of the fresh snow that had fallen below 2000 m elevation so I pulled the trigger on Mt. Pilchuck. This wouldn’t be the usual forested “trash-bagging” that I’d like to do with Kate, but close enough. We left White Rock at 9:30 pm after I finished work on Tuesday, and got to the trail-head before midnight in Kate’s Subaru. The forestry road was in an excellent shape that even the Corolla could have made it. They had even paved the last stretch making the trail-head very accessible now. The sky was 100% clear by the time we got there so I anticipated a gorgeous morning. Unfortunately the reality turned out to be the opposite, as usual.

A few hours later we woke up at 5 am in the back of the Subaru and the plan was to start hiking in less than an hour. Kate prepared for our breakfast and we did manage to get going before 6 am. The view of the moon was already obscured by some thin layers of clouds, but I couldn’t tell much in the pitch dark. I was still hoping for a gorgeous sunrise from the summit. Minutes later Kate realized that she had left her head-lamp in the vehicle but that’s okay. The trail was easy enough for us to cruise with just one head-lamp, but that was short-lived. The lower trail was excellently maintained so nowhere as described, but after about 1/3 of the way the trail did become rocky with some boulder-hopping required. The temperature was hovering around freezing at this elevation so the rocks were covered in a layer of frost and the footings were extremely slippery. I had to give Kate my own head-lamp and I would lead with my phone’s illumination. We could have done this the other way around but I thought the progress would be faster if I gave Kate the brighter head-lamp. Using the iPhone was okay but the brightness wasn’t as good and I must hold the phone in one hand so the trekking poles then became useless. The conditions became really icy as we slowly but steadily made our way up the north-facing slopes under Mt. Pilchuck’s west ridge, that even some brief class 2/3 scrambling moves were required to work around some ice-covered rock slabs. We did pack the microspikes but we were too lazy to consider taking them out unless absolutely needed. Unfortunately the clouds had fully engulfed in but there’s nothing I could have done besides cursing the forecasters. We made the summit nevertheless and waited for at least 20 minutes but to no avail. The weather was not improving and it even started to drizzle.

I eventually made the call to descend. There were for campers sleeping in the lookout but none of them noticed our presence. It’s probably better to not fully wake them up anyway. The frost layer made the scrambling to and from the summit lookout rather sketchy so we took our time, but the rest of the descent wasn’t too bad. The verglass were already starting to break down but full concentration was still required. The drizzling had turned into some proper pissing minutes after we finished the rockier half of the trail, but I couldn’t care much. We simply jogged the better (lower) half of the trail back to the vehicle, concluding the round trip in 3 hours 20 minutes. The hike turned out to be longer than I thought but given the conditions it was understandable. Kate and I then took turn driving northwards and I earned about 2 hours of napping time before showing up at work. I would have to work from 3 pm all the way to 10 pm so this was still an exhausting day in the very end.