Mount Adams: South Climb (2018)
Trip Date: June 23-24, 2018
Distance: 12 miles roundtrip
Elevation Gain: 6700 ft
Difficulty: DifficultFees/Permits: Northwest Forest Pass and Cascade Volcano Pass ($15 self-issue at Mount Adams Ranger Station)
GPX Tracks: Day 1, Day 2
Trip Songs: Yellow Submarine (stuck in my head since the Vesper Peak trip last weekend); Jesus Save My Ovaries (a Norwood original); The Sound of Music (…as in all the songs)
I finally had a legit poop in a blue (brown in this case) bag. I need to sleep more and drink water. I should look into this “ultralight” thing because my packs are definitely the opposite of that and seems to get worse by the year (or by the trip). And skiing off volcano summits in the summer totally rocks. That about sums up my whole trip. Mostly.
Last weekend, after a couple of attempts to make this trip happen, I finally got to make my annual climb of Mount Adams. I was certain that this year I’d have a lighter pack (now that my gear is pretty much dialed in) and that I’d be faster. But then I added in the weight of skis, skins, helmet and all that other gear crap that comes with skiing to the overnight gear….basically, my pack got heavier and I stayed the same speed. Oh well.
The point is, this year marks my third year of climbing Mount Adams! It’s a particularly special mountain to me because it was the mountain that got me hooked on mountains! I know it can be done in a single day push, but there’s really nothing quite as spectacular as sunset on Mount Adams during this time of year so I always opt to overnight it. Trust me, it’s worth the extra pack weight.
My 5am alarm jarred me awake Saturday morning – I’d gone to sleep way later than I should have and I hadn’t even come close to starting to pack the night before. So I was in a scramble trying to throw all my usual things in my pack and getting to Weston’s at our set departure time of 7:30am…which definitely didn’t happen (shocking, I know). We finally left Seattle around 8….8:30ish (yep, definitely should have packed the night before) and headed towards Portland. Neither of us had been getting nearly enough sleep the past week so we alternated driving duties and napping…basically, it was an uneventful drive, barring an educational discussion of the geology of Washington and what types of rocks we might see at Adams.
We arrived at the Mount Adams Ranger Station in Trout Lake to pick up our climbing permits around 1pm where the ranger informed us that there were some 300+ people up on Adams that day (typical….but yikes!). Here, Weston gleefully found a star chart that he eventually managed to talk himself out of purchasing and noticed someone he called an “unusually handsome man with strikingly blue eyes” that I teased about being his man-crush for the remainder of the weekend.
Bracing ourselves for the famously potholed road from hell up to Adams, we were pleasantly surprised to experience a relatively easy drive up to the trailhead – far fewer potholes than the last two years…whoohoo! We were in my Toyota Corolla for anyone who is curious….not exactly a high-clearance vehicle.
We found a parking spot and dallied for awhile getting the last of our pack together, slathering on sunscreen, deciding what gear we were going to bring or leave behind. But finally, at 2:15pm, we began our ascent up to Lunch Counter where we would be camping for the evening. The trail was all dirt until approximately 6400ft (I wore my running shoes up until this point) and we were able to don our skis for more or less continuous skinning (with the exception of one very short rock/dirt crossing) all the way up to Lunch Counter (~9200ft). The snow had softened a bit but it was firm enough that it gripped well to our skins and we weren’t sliding around too much.
As we got up over a small ridge to Lunch Counter, we were met with massive groupings of tents dotting the campsites at Lunch Counter. As Weston put it…it felt ominous, like we were about to be approached to go into battle. This is also what I imagine Everest Base Camp to look like. We managed to find a campsite out of the way of most of people around 6-7pm, but we eventually formed a nice little community of our own. Our “neighbors” had two dogs Cocoa and Cash, who was an especially spunky little guy that wanted to just play fetch with everyone there!
Playing fetch with the camp neighbor’s dog Cash. Photo by Weston.
We set up camp, dried out clothing, boiled and filtered water in preparation for the next day and our meals, and snapped photos and timelapses of our surroundings and the impending sunset, Like I’ve said time and again, there’s really nothing like sunset on Mount Adams especially this time of year. To the west, you see Mount St. Helen’s being put on show by a fiery orange and red backdrop with the warm rays of the setting sun on the horizon. To the south, you see Mount Hood, standing regally in the fading blues and purples of the sky. To the east, you see the shadows cast by Mount Adams into the dusky gradient of the fading light; and to the north, proudly stands the summit of Mount Adams itself. As the last bit of light faded away, the stars came twinkling out, the moon shone bright over Mount Hood with Jupiter right next to it and Venus glittering brightly to the west over St Helens. Weston and I spent some time identifying constellations with the help of one of my favorite apps SkyView.
On Sunday morning, we got a very lazy wake up at 6:30am and moseyed around, getting ready for the day. I feel the need to document the fact that I also had my first really awesome outside poop ever (I almost never go….even on multi-day backpacking trips and yes that is terrible for you) — so I was pretty stoked about this. We spent a good chunk of the morning debating whether or not to ski the Southwest Chutes. In the end, we opted not to (there’s always next year!) due to a reported extra 2-mile traverse on the way out sans skis (yuck no thanks…also we had to get back to Seattle at a decent time because Weston and I both had work the next day) since the snow was melting more rapidly this year and also because we would have a much lighter summit pack without all of our overnight gear (yay!)..
We were able to start skinning from Lunch Counter at 8am in pleasantly firm snow that our skins stuck well to. We eventually transitioned from skinning to booting up to the false summit Pikers Peak (11,657ft). There was a pretty nice boot path going on here and I ended up never needing to put my crampons on the entire trip. From Pikers Peak, we put skins back on and skinned a good portion of the way to the summit before transitioning once more back to booting. We topped out at the summit (12,280ft) around 1ish in the afternoon, all skis and smiles!
We snapped some photos, had some photos snapped of us, threw on all the layers, chatted with our fellow climbers and scarfed down some sandwich before prepping for our descent.
The ski from the summit was absolutely amazing! First of all….skiing off the summit of a volcano is cool. And also this was the first time backcountry skiing ever where my legs didn’t feel so shot from the ascent that skiing felt like a chore. I couldn’t help but whoop with excitement at the harvest of buttery corn snow! Between the summit and Pikers Peak, the terrain dips down just slightly so there was a short distance (about 2-3 minutes) of booting to get back to the false summit, but we were quickly able to snap our skis back on and ski our way back to our campsite. About halfway from Pikers Peak to Lunch Counter, the snow turned into mashed potatoes and it was nowhere nearly as fun as the summit ski. It was rough and bumpy, but we made it back to our campsite in a few minutes and packed up the rest of our things and snacked (because, as Weston pointed out to me I was being a grumpus…accurate). After I was miraculously cured of my hangriness, we hoisted our heavy overnight packs back on (seriously I’m convinced the packs gain weight overnight instead of losing weight) for the rest of the ski out.
On our very bumpy way out to the trailhead from Lunch Counter, we skied to the west of Crescent Glacier which had small crevasses begin to open up – one approximately 4-5 feet deep and 12 feet wide which we were alerted to by a glissader who had somehow escaped falling in despite his direct chute through and a small 1-foot wide crack we were able to ski over (well, West skied expertly over it….I skied cautiously up to it and then did an awkward slow down / step over maneuver over it). We were also able to have a pretty continuous ski on the way down, taking our skis off for a few feet of rock crossing twice before putting them away for good and changing back into our running shoes for the rest of the dirt trail walk out.
We headed back towards Trout Lake after the climb, stopping at KJ’s Bear Creek Cafe for my usual post-Adams climb meal of burgers, fries and shakes. I have no photos or evidence of this because by the time I think about taking a photo of my food here I’ve already polished it off. To get back to Seattle, I normally cross back over to Oregon via Bridge of the Gods and take 84 towards Portland. This year, we went back via Highway 14 on the Washington side and it was definitely the better decision. We got some spectacular views of the Columbia River Gorge with the rolling hills, river and and layers of mountains in the haze of early summer wildfires. This is also where we started singing the Sound of Music and wrapped up our trip talking about VHS tapes of years past.
