Steven's Peak-bagging Journey

September 27, 2026

2092m

Mountain Loop Highway, WA

Three Fingers is the highest in the Mountain Loop vicinity and boasts over 1300 m prominence making it one of the more topographically significant objectives in the state of Washington. This peak is also extremely iconic from almost everywhere, and has a lot of history in it. From peakbagging perspective the LiDAR analysis confirmed the south peak to be indeed higher than the technical north tower but the north peak does boast over 100 m prominence, so perhaps one day I’ll return for that one and hopefully the access situation will improve by then. The south summit boasts one of the weirdest but also coolest lookouts in the state as it’s perched right on the highest point. Three ladders provide a viable way to scramble to the lookout and without them, this peak would be at least “mid 5th class” making it one of, if not the hardest P1000m objective in the entire “Lower 48”. I sure appreciated the ladders being there but part of me was curious about the true technical difficulty of this objective otherwise.

This used to be a popular objectives back in the days when the road access to Tupso Pass was still “in”, but with the washouts and the permanent closure we are looking at an additional 10 km each way of biking, hiking or running. This jacks up the round trip distance to the 40-50 km range which is doable as a day hike but only in the elite group. An overnight stay either in the lookout itself or lower down on Goat Flats is another option but making this a 2-day outing also complicates things, and that’s probably why I had thought about Three Fingers for a decade but never ended up actually doing it. I’m also not really a biker and currently I don’t even own a bike. I could wait until I own an ebike but that’d be in another year or two. Then all the sudden I started to come across trip reports on Facebook and peakbagger.com in which people started to go up a direct “bushwhacking/backdoor route” which significantly shortened the distance. The trail-head is still the same. I did a bit of research and found fair amount of “beta” including multiple sets of GPX tracks and those tracks converge quite well, suggesting there might actually be a path.

Later after doing the trip I learnt that this is actually called the “SAR Route” and had been long existing mostly to facilitate the rescue operations. The route and the lookout itself are regularly maintained by volunteers and (at least some of) those people discourage people from taking this backdoor access. Sure, I’ll pass on the information to the followers. I do not agree with the idea to keep things like this secret on the internet. Firstly the ideology won’t work considering it’s already 2026 and my trip itself simply proves that. I wasn’t told in person by anybody and solely discovered it through social media knowing nothing about the background information. Instead of fighting the trends, my two cents for those close-minded is to actually make the information transparent, state why you don’t want visitors and let each of us making our own decisions. Some of us especially peakbaggers will simply not give a fuck even if it’s made in private property with “no trespassing” signs, and as far as I know, this route is completely legal at least at this point.

Via this “SAR Route” the trip distance would be shortened to 19 km and biking is no longer needed. This meant I could have easily organized a trip with friends. Mel signed in for this trip after not doing anything in the past 4 months and honestly I was a bit surprised that no one else wanted to come. I had read somewhere that there might be a closure due to logging activities starting on the following Monday so this would be the last chance of accessing Three Fingers this year. I could definitely confirm that after being there myself, so that rumour was true. I wasn’t very sure about the amount of the fresh snow so at the last minute I decided to carry an ice axe and microspikes. They turned out to be training weight but there was enough snow/ice on several exposed parts of the traverses that would have easily warranted the use of traction. I was also unsure about the water source situation even after consulting with friends who had recently done this peak. I can now confirm the existence of stagnant water down on the Goat Flats and 2 or 3 streams higher up under the upper “snowfield”. I’m 99% sure those streams would flow the entire season but given the sizes of them don’t count me 100% on that. I ended up bringing a tiny stove with a fuel canister as the worst case was having to melt snow for water. Of course those were training weight as well. Mel and I left home at 10:30 pm and got to the trail-head about 3 hours later. My strategy was to go to bed late and wake up late as I wasn’t keen on dealing with the dew and the residual rain water given that parts of this route would be “bushwhacking”. We naturally woke up at 9 am and we were the last group starting. Two volunteers passed us at the trail-head running the entire length of the “long route” and they confirmed the closure on the following day. In fact, they would be shutting down and locking the lookout. We ended up beating them to the top (barely) but if we didn’t manage so we would be denied accessing the true highest point on Three Fingers. The highest natural ground is actually on the backside of the lookout which is only accessible by tunneling through the doors unless one’s willing to make some very exposed climbing around it, so keep that in mind in case someone decides to go up there when the lookout structure is closed.