Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

July 2, 2018

2376m

Bend / Mount Washington Wilderness, OR

This is the third peak officially named “Mt. Washington” I’ve climbed and I can assure you there’ll be more to come, so don’t get confused with the other “Mt. Washington”s on this continent. This is an ancient volcano on the Pacific Crest of central Oregon and thank to the erosion the summit nowadays is a rocky tower that has no easy route to the top. The easiest option also the standard route is North Ridge but some 5th class climbing is still required, and don’t forget this is on chossy volcanic cookie rocks… The access is short and easy via Pacific Crest Trail so despite the technical difficulties this is a popular objective among the Oregon locals.

The plan for Lily and myself was to combine Mt. Washington with the nearby Three Fingered Jack to make a 3-day road trip. The two climbs are very similar in many aspects but Mt. Washington has longer pitches. On the last day of this trip we woke up under a thick layer of low clouds in Big Lake campground but still decided to go for the summit. We figured the clouds would give way to sunny skies as we ascending into the alpine.

There are multiple ways to start the hike. Our reference was the tracks on peakbagger.com that starts from Pacific Crest Trail. We challenged that because we saw a marked trail on Gaia GPS map starting out from Big Lake youth’s campground that potentially shaves one kilometer off the slog. We weren’t allowed to park inside the camp but we did find a small pull-out nearby and walked to the trail-head. This is apparently a “user-maintained” trail so probably not very well known. It does connect with the main trail and in a decent shape. We then followed the main PCT for a while before branching off on the climber’s trail marked by a big cairn. This climber’s trail also saw some maintenance and was easy to follow with only minor blowdown issue. We gained elevation quickly.

There’s about 150 meters section that we briefly lost the trail but the general direction was very easy to navigate. At that point we just had to work upwards onto the north ridge proper and once on the ridge the trail reappeared. Patches of snow on ground probably had obscured the trail but who knows. The “trail” on the north ridge itself was also in a decent shape which surprised us. We weren’t expecting a path on the ridge at all but I guess we underestimated the popularity of this climb. At this point the weather’s slowly lifting with more and more blue skies showing up, but occasionally thick clouds would still blow in and we were suddenly in a disorienting white-out.

The ridge steepens as we slowly approaching the summit tower and the ground’s getting loose. One of the major bumps needs some class-2 scrambling on choss and after that we were not far from the fun part. Before attacking the summit tower we had to bypass a couple pinnacles on climber’s right (west) side but I wasn’t aware of that thank to the lack of research. And thank to the clouds rolling in and out Lily and I had lost visibility for much of this section so all of the route-finding decisions had to be guessed. I made a couple wrong moves for staying too high on the ridge and that involved some sketchy 3rd class scrambling along with some frustrating backtracking. The last false tower could be down-climbed but involved a couple tricky moves near the bottom.

Once at the base of the summit tower we easily located that ramp system referred in other trip reports. The route-finding on the first (nose) pitch wasn’t difficult as we just had to work leftwards and then upwards but the exposure is huge. After checking out the exposure we decided to pitch it out despite the coldness and wind. It’s really not fun to be stuck there in the wind. I volunteered to lead the pitch which required a couple shitty moves on Oreo kind of choss to start with, but once entering the upper chimney the climbing became fun. In no time I topped out and belayed Lily up using a small tree. I veered far to the left just so we could sort of see each other for communication.

The terrain then transitioned back to scrambling so we packed the ropes and headed up. It’s really easy going for a while until we faced the upper chimney. This one looked pretty tame but I was unsure what’s laying beyond the visible range so asked for another belay. In retrospect this belay wasn’t necessary but it’s fun to put two cams into the cracks. Once finishing the upper pitch the summit was only 10 meters away.

Thank to the coldness we didn’t want to linger too long on the summit. On the descent we did three 30-m rappels from station to station (with a bit of walking in between). I was in no mood of down-climbing at this point and just wanted to play with the ropes. The 3rd rappel was the worse because of the wind and the rope drags. The wind was really whipping on us that throwing the ropes down was quite a pain in the ass, but we did manage to sort it out after a few frustrating tries. Reversing the pinnacles section required some degree of caution but we managed to find a lesser technical line on the way back, staying well below the ridge crest. The rest of the hike out was uneventful and the weather did improve. Having Three Fingered Jack and Mt. Jefferson displaced in front was quite an accomplishing sight.

Not doing too much of lingering we immediately started the long drive up north. I was more awake so volunteered to put down the entire drive. In one push we made back to Salem, OR and called for a break for gas and dinner, and in another push I got us all the way back to Exit 260 past Bellingham, WA. This was an exhausting pitch but I did fine. After another gas break the third push got us back home in Vancouver, before midnight. Not bad, not bad….