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Party: 

Mountaineers Scramble Outing:  Matt Burton, Richard Burt, Lynn Graf, Eric Johnson, Greg Lewis, Eileen Kutscha

Highlights: 

For at least a decade, I’ve heard that the North Fork Entiat peaks have some of the best golden larches.  Many times I had tried to arrange a trip during early October for peak larch color, but the weather, calendar, and people never quite worked out.  This year the Entiat larch trip finally came together.  I led the outing myself, we had a solid group of scramblers, the weather cleared just in time for us to start our trip, and the larches kept their needles just long enough for us to finish the trip.

The trip edged past a variety of potential troubles, but made it through without any significant actual trouble:

• Mist and rain dampened us on the approach hike, but it never rained hard enough to soak through. 
• Half of our fuel leaked out, but a campfire sufficed to heat meals, beverages, and scramblers.
• The clouds occasionally covered the summits, but they always moved off again.
• There was fresh snow on the upper peaks, but it melted off just enough to let us get through the steep parts.
• Some of the higher larches were mostly bare of needles, but even those trees were decorated by frost.
• The gullies were full of loose rocks, but everyone was careful and no one came even close to getting hit by a rock.
• We managed to loose the route at least once on every peak, but we always found our way to the top, and even found better routes for most of the descents.

And the successes of the trip were outstanding:

• We scrambled four Top 100 peaks, plus a bonus Top 200 peak.  For me, that makes 78 of the Top 100, and 21 of the second 100.  Yea, I made it past three quarters of the Top 100.
• The party was congenial and competent – everyone was friendly and reliable traveling together.
• The camp was beautiful and comfortable – soft grass for the tents, convenient ledges for cooking, and wide-open views of the valley and peaks.  And we got to stay for three nights without moving camp.
• The routes provided an entertaining variety of terrain – forests, meadows, talus, gullies and rock – nothing too difficult but just enough challenge to make each route interesting.
• The scenery was dramatic – deep green forests in the valley below, rocky gray peaks above, open meadows in the high country.
• I got plenty of great views (and pictures) of the scenery.  Each peak provided a different vantage for viewing the rest of the cluster of peaks.
• The lighting was great – daytime sunlight highlighting the peaks from different angles, soft morning light warming the scenery, colorful sunsets painting the sky, low-angled light making the larch needles shine, and alpenglow literally glowing from the peaks at the beginning and end of the days.
• And the larches were everywhere – making a bright margin between the lower forests and high rock of the valley, filling the head of the valley like golden tide washing up against the peaks, catching the light above and below the trails, bordering the meadows with yellow needles to complement the fall colors of the grass, and scattered upward among the high nooks and crannies like a treasure of golden coins tossed up the mountainsides.

Details:

Weather

Earlier in the week, the forecast had predicted rain showers, clouds, and a freezing level lower than our intended camp.  We started on Friday, with hopes that the weather would clear gradually throughout the weekend, allowing us to do steeper peaks each day.  It worked out exactly that way.  We had drizzle on the approach, snowy rock on the Pinnacle summit, some snow on Cardinal, and dry rock on Saska.

North Fork Ential Valley

We hiked 9.5 miles from the North Fork Entiat TH (3900 feet) to Emerald Basin (6900 feet).  The first six miles were a gradual incline along the valley bottom, with lots of fungi and mushrooms under the trees.  Then the trail climbed steeply from the Fern Lake junction to the Pyramid Mountain junction.  (My first overnight scramble camped at Fern Lake, scrambling Choral Peak.)  We hiked through fog and drizzle, with occasional raindrops, but never got too wet.  Beyond the Pyramid junction, the trail ascended through meadows, and we could see more and more larches on the slopes around us.   The higher larches had lost many of their needles, but had gained a coating of white frost.   In the larch forests at the end of the trail, the ground was carpeted with fallen needles, but many trees still had most of their needles.

Emerald Basin Camp 6900

Emerald Basin had beautiful grassy meadows scattered with firs and larches.  We continued on the trail a few hundred yards beyond the basin and put our tents in a smaller meadow, with a collection of rock ledges nearby for cook site.  We had lost half of our fuel due to a leak, so we built a campfire among the rocks.  Even the dead branches were thoroughly soaked.  To get the fire going, we had to build a frame of wet branches and keep feeding it fir needles until the larger branches dried out.  My poor faithful pot was thoroughly blackened by heating water on the fire.  I slept in my new lightweight tent, which worked very well, despite the damp and frosty night.

Pinnacle 8402

Saturday morning we headed west and north for Pinnacle.  To reach Pinnacle, we had to drop 1700 feet from Saska Pass (7500) down to Snow Brushy Creek and then climb 1800 feet back up to Borealis Pass (7600).  On the way up to Borealis pass, we reached beautiful meadows circa 7000 feet – golden grass, golden trees, and snowy crests.  At Borealis Pass, we discovered that the ridge crest made a sharp demarcation in snow conditions – sunny dry terrain where we had come up on the east side, and shadowed snowy terrain on the west.  Near the summit of Pinnacle, we had to tread very carefully across rocks covered with several inches of fresh snow.  For our return, we took a more direct gully down to the meadow and then followed the trail back down, and up, to Saska Pass.

Gopher 8001

Gopher was a bonus peak that I wanted to do as a side on the way back.  The route follows a ridge from Saska Pass southward to the summit.  As we reached Saska Pass, the sun was already shining low through the larches.  From the pass, I first descended to meadows on the west side to bypass some steep rock outcrops.  Then I went up and down an intermediate hump and up the ridge to the main summit, staying either on the crest or on the east side.  There was occasional steep or loose rock, but not bad.  Near the top, I met Greg, who was heading back after reaching the summit.  I reached the summit just in time to catch the final sunset light on Saska & Emerald.  After sunset, the clear sky provided just enough light for me to retrace my path down the rock, and then I had to use my headlamp for the meadows and trail.

Cardinal 8595

For Cardinal, we headed back south on the trail until we were below the central gully of Cardinal, and then hiked up more larch meadows to the base of the peak.  The gully was almost a thousand feet long and filled with talus, but it was also wide and not too steep.  Yesterday morning, we cold see snow reaching almost to the bottom of the gully, but today it was melted dry except near the top.  When we reached the notch at the top of the gully, we could see a small plateau with a large cairn off to the east.  We headed more directly up southward toward the summit, and ended up scrambling some fourth class rock to the summit.  Clouds obscured most of our views on the summit.  For our descent, we went around the back of the summit and out toward the big cairn, which avoided most of the steep rock.  However, there was one steep step that was slippery from snowmelt, and some of the party decided to belay.  The weather cleared as we descended, and we enjoyed a sunny lunch break back at camp.

Saska 8404

Saska lived up to its reputation for nasty steep loose rock.  We took the trail partway back to Saska Pass, and then went about 800 feet up a large talus gully to a col on the crest of Saska’s SW ridge.  To get out of the col, we climbed a steep notch east of the col.  Then we explored both the north side of the crest, which was extremely loose and steep, and the south side, which was merely very loose and steep.  We traversed below the crest on steep ledges and ramps, and then found another notch that let us climb up near the summit area.  Saska’s summit provided the best views of all the other peaks in the trip. 

Emerald 8422

Emerald was the most straightforward scramble of the trip.  From Emerald Basin, we followed the stream up to the crest of the ridge at the top of the basin.  Then we walked NE on the wide crest of the ridge to the base of Emerald.  Once again, our route was up the gray talus gully to a notch.  Beyond the notch were a couple striking sentinel gendarmes and a narrow gully.  We went up the gully, and ended up scrambling some bits of steep rock to reach the summit block from its west side.  East of the summit block, we found a sunny little rock amphitheater where we took a long break to enjoy our final summit.  Then we descended this side of the summit via a small talus field, with a short rock step back down to the notch.

A Personal Historical Footnote

On the drive home, I noticed an interesting pattern in the forests above the river valley.  The hillsides were covered with pine forests, but scattered across the forest were dead snags that were all about twice as tall as the current forest.  Why were the dead trees taller than the live ones?  I wondered if the taller trunks were the remnants of an older forest destroyed by fire, and then I realized that we were in the Entiat Valley.

Thirty-five years ago, my father was the district ranger in Jonesboro, Illinois.  One summer, he was gone for a couple weeks fighting a big fire out west.  He later used the bonus money from the fire to buy an SLR camera and became an avid amateur nature photographer.  I picked up the same interest in photography, and golden larches are one of my favorite subjects to photograph.  Thus the Entiat Fire of 1970 led to the Entiat Crest outing of 2004.

Statistics:

Drive: 4 hours

Approach hike:  9.5 miles, 3000 net gain, 3280 cumulative gain, 5:45 hours.

Pinnacle: 11 miles, 5400 gain total (3600 gain to summit, 1800 gain return), 9:15 hours (0:30 on summit)

Gopher side trip (from Saska Pass): 1.6 miles, 1430 total gain (970 gain up, 360 gain return), 2:45 hours

Total for Pinnacle & Gopher together:  12.6 miles, 6830 gain, 12 hours

Cardinal:  3 miles, 2480 total gain (2050 gain to summit, 430 gain return), , 5:15 hours (1:10 on summit & belay)

Saska:  2 miles, 1450 gain, 3:30 hours (0:30 on summit)

Emerald:  1.5 miles, 1500 gain, 3:40 (1:00 on summit)

Return hike:  9.5 miles, 280 gain, 4:45 hours.

Total:  38.1 miles, 15,700 gain.

Route Descriptions:

More detailed route descriptions are on a separate page in the Entiat Crest Outing Plan.

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