Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

October 4, 2022

2207m

Cascade Pass, WA

The Triplets is a small, but rugged summit in the immediate vicinity of Cascade Pass. Together with its brother, Cascade Peak these two peaks are significantly overshadowed by the much more fabled Johannesburg Mountain. This is very unfortunate as The Triplets itself is a worthy destination. The Triplets and Cascade Peak are more rarely ascended than Johannesburg Mtn. itself. Elise and I climbed The Triplets on the approach day to the east route of Johannesburg Mountain. The NE Face offers a straightforward route to the summit without the need to do roped climbing.

After a long side-hilling traverse on choss and heather slopes we ditched our packs at some obvious boulders and went for the summit without carrying anything. We easily ascended to Triplets/Mix-up col and scrambled onto the NE Face. The terrain was more complicated than expected with plenty of class 3 and that’s assuming one stays on the easiest route. We probably made some errors here and there but it’s impossible to tell as we didn’t really bother to wonder around to search for a “better” line. There’s some significant exposure near the summit and we stayed on the top for a while. There’s no register unfortunately as I was curious who had actually done this peaklet.

On the descent we followed the exact same route that we took on the way up and not far down from the summit we discovered a cave full of quartz crystals. We both took some crystals back home. I think Elise took more than I did as I was more wary of the pack’s weight. The detour to check out this summit took about 1.5 hours which was a bit longer than expected and now we had to rush for C-J col to beat sunset.