Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

June 28, 2023

1170m

Darrington, WA

North Mountain is one of the four P600m objectives on the “Logger’s Island”. This forested ridge to the immediate north of Darrington is well known in the mountain biking community judging by the abundant trails on all of its flanks. Peak-baggers usually reserve this peak for an off-season outing, but in dry months one can drive most of the way up on forestry roads. I was supposed to have a rest day but I had already caught up with the trip reports so I had to bag a peak somehow. I remembered I still needed North Mountain. A plan was instantly formed. I would drive at least one third of the way up to make it a short hike, and then drive up Gold Mountain to justify the long drive to Darrington.

I did not leave home until 8 am in the morning as I was feeling unmotivated. I didn’t do any shopping in the previous evening so I needed one additional stop to the local Save on Food for some sandwiches. One construction costed about 20 minutes of delay near Darrington but otherwise the drive was uneventful. I then turned on the Gaia app and turned onto the well-labelled “North Mountain Road”. The initial bits were surprisingly paved. The unpaved portions were smooth, but longer than expected. It took me a long while to reach the bottom of a set of biking trails at 450 m elevation. My original plan was to park there and hike the entire length of these trails, but there were several “no hiking” signs and one truck (with bike racks) had already parked. My backup plan was to park a few switchbacks higher at 880 m (roughly two thirds of the way up) where these trails intersect the road again, and just have a short day. The drive was still a smooth sail, but was again longer than expected.

By now I was already a ways up the trails and I figured the chance of encountering downhill bikers on a Thursday would be low enough to take the risk. Right away I was glad that I did not do this objective by way of biking because these trails would be way over my head. At times I had to scramble up class 2 steps and I could not imagine having to ride those sections. A while later I intersected the uppermost spur and followed it due NE towards the lookout tower. The hike might seem innocent on the maps but it was not “nothing”. I did not carry anything and I almost regretted. The hike eventually took 1.5 hours and I should have at least carried a water bottle. Anyway I followed the road to the lookout tower and climbed to as high as I humanly could. The very top of the structure was locked, but I was still able to get some unobstructed views. While standing on the tower I should be higher than the true summit which lies about 1 km to the south, but man-made structures do not count as part of the mountain, so I must traverse south to the true summit to claim this peak. The traverse was done on another biking trail and the very top was attained by a short bushwhack. It wasn’t very obvious where’s the highest point, so I tagged a few contenders and the traverse among them required more bushwhacking. It’s this section that earned a “bushwhacking” icon on the peakbagger.com report.

I then thrashed westwards down to the biking trail. After consulting with the maps I made a spontaneous decision to do a loop hike. I usually do not like loops because I always prefer to stick to the known (that is, to go back the same way that I come up from), but this particular outing makes the perfect sense to close a loop. This biking trail led me down to a portion of the road that I did not hike on the way up. I noticed there’s a gate blocking people from driving the uppermost spur, and one Subaru was already parked in front of that gate. To get back to the biking trail I had to do a short-cut through a nasty cut-block. The thrash was short, but horrendous with thorny plants.

Not doing much lingering I turned the truck around and drove back down to Darrington. I thought about to just go home, but could not resist a simple drive-up bag of Gold Mountain. I was supposed to do that after scrambling White Chuck Mtn. last year, but I didn’t want to bring that up to the group. Only the selected die-hard peak-baggers would contemplate a motorized ascent of Gold Mountain and my partners on White Chuck Mtn. were not them. This time I was soloing so I didn’t have an excuse. The drive was again, longer and a little bit rougher than I thought and took over half an hour. The uppermost spur was significantly overgrown, though nothing like the FSRs in BC that I had driven over the years. The last few hundred meters could not be driven anymore, so I backed down to a place where I could turn around, and parked. The bushwhacking was not bad, but was annoying. The true summit was completely forested with no view whatsoever. Gold Mountain turned out to be one of the worst dumpster-dives I’ve done, but honestly I was expecting that and that’s why I didn’t want to bring friends up this thing. I eventually got back home at 5 pm.