Park Butte

November 9, 2023

1658m

Mt. Baker Area, WA

Park Butte is a popular hike on the south slope of Mt. Baker that boasts a fire lookout on the very summit. The fire lookout is unlocked and hikers are even allowed to camp inside. The only difficulty comes from the access as one needs to drive on logging roads to as high as 1000 m. The roads are in 2WD shape, but not maintained in winter. I had this objective in mind for at least 5 years and eventually I pulled the last minute trigger after seeing a marginal weather window on Thursday morning. The hike’s short enough that I could easily sneak it in as a before-work exercise, especially if camping at the trail-head. Kate was keen to join and agreed with the car-camping strategy. There was already some snow in the mountains, but the trail-head was still accessible from the recent reports on WTA and AllTrails. When it comes to easy hikes like this I do have to admit that AllTrails is a great tool even though I do not like AllTrails.

I finished work at 10 pm and we subsequently left White Rock at 10:45 pm. The drive to the trail-head was longer than I thought as we needed to detour to Concrete and Baker Lake, that we did not arrive at the trail-head until 1 am. There was no one else at the trail-head and we pitched the tent right in the middle of the parking lot. I decided for us to wake up at 5 am in order to be on the trail about 1 hour before sunrise. In retrospect we should have started an hour earlier for the views but I seriously needed to sleep after an exhausting day at work. The night was cold that we literally had to force ourselves to crawl out of the sleeping bags. Packing the camping gears was also painful thank to the condensation but at least Kate brought us warm breakfast stored in vacuum mugs.

We started hiking a little bit later than expected and I had to use the GPS track to find the correct trail-head as we did not park right in front of the trail. I had decided to bring a pair of sandals for a supposed creek crossing above Schriebers Meadows as that creek had been stressed multiple times in the trip reports. There’s supposed to be a foot bridge but the bridge had been removed for the winter season. The bridge was indeed not there, but the crossing was rather trivial that we were able to simply hop across on rocks. Most of the rocks were coated with a layer of ice, but we were still able to just hop across so I don’t know why this had been an issues for the other hikers. I guess most hikers need an actual trail to follow and rock-hopping or scrambling isn’t in their skills set. The trail brought us back into the forest after this creek crossing so we unfortunately did not get the best of the dawn colours. We broke out of the forest at around 1400 m and plodded across some snow covered meadows to the east side of Park Butte.

Plodding across Schriebers Meadow in the dark

Arriving at the supposed “difficult” creek crossing…

Kate hopping across the creek, well, more like just a stream….

A zoomed-in view towards White Chuck Mtn. and Mt. Pugh on the horizon

Glacier Peak dominating the southern skyline, with Sauk Mtn. in front

The sun’s about to rise above the horizon.

Alpenglow on Lincoln Peak, one of the most difficult climbs I’ve done

Kate posing in front of the actual sunrise

Survey Point to the south – not really a peak, but is officially named

Mt. Baker and Sherman Peak catching the morning lights

Kate having fun hiking in the winter wonderland

Colfax Peak is another sub-peak of Mt. Baker – bagged in 2019

We were plodding on snow covered meadows

Another look towards Mt. Baker and Easton Glacier

All of the wetlands here were already frozen

Another photo of Kate in front of the morning sun

Glacier Peak behind the ridges to Survey Point

This is an unnamed tarn in front of Survey Point

The amount of snow was greater than anticipated because I read on AllTrails that the entire hike was free of snow 3 days ago, but thankfully the tracks had been laid all the way to the summit, presumedly by parties in the previous day. Without the tracks we would be dealing with some post-holing. The trail wrapped around the south-east ridge of Park Butte before making a gradual ascent to the lookout. We took a minor short-cut near the summit following the tracks. The lookout was indeed not locked, so we spent about an hour inside to take a shelter from the cold winds. I also scrambled to the high point immediately south of the cabin as I suspected that spot to be actually higher than the bottom of the cabin.

All of the sudden we could see the lesser peaks in Twin Sisters Range

Thankfully the track had been laid in the previous day or two

We were on the upper east ridge of Park Butte now

Kate on the last few steps to the summit

We got into the cabin and found the book to sign

South Twin and North Twin in the Twin Sisters Range

Me scrambling to check out another summit contender

Eventually I became too cold even sitting inside the cabin so we reluctantly decided to descend. Once making the decision to descend we really dashed our way down, jogging most of the downhills. The fresh snow made the jogging even easier, that we got back to the trail-head in just over an hour, concluding the round trip in under 4 hours 20 minutes. We eventually got back to White Rock at 12:30 pm in time for lunch in a local Japanese restaurant. I also earned myself an hour of napping time before showing up at work.