North Twin from the trail. Route is up the right skyline.
This is another of those climbs where the crux is locating the trailhead. I tried it about two months before, and got totally stumped, wandering around on the mining roads, looking for the trailhead. Ralph, however, had done the route three times already, and did a flawless job leading us right to it.
We got underway from the park-n-ride around 6:00 AM. I rode in the back of Lee’s Forerunner, and enjoyed being able to lie back and close my eyes, and leave the driving to Lee. His Forerunner has two trip odometers, a massively practical idea when you’re following an approach description that has lots of mileage notations.
Ralph showed us a shortcut to get to Hwy 20 – instead of taking the Hwy 20 exit off the freeway, you take the Cook Road exit 2 miles later on, and bypass all the traffic lights and turns in downtown Burlington. A slick trick. Of course, if you pay attention to the approach information in Nelson, he says exactly the same thing. But I can't do everything!
From there, you get back on Hwy 9, and continue for half an hour or so until you hit the little town of Acme. Immediately after crossing a small bridge after the Acme general store, you take a right, onto Mosquito Lake road, and head on for 4.8 miles. You cross a wooden-beamed box girder bridge, and soon after that turn (right) onto Road 38. Follow this road for about five miles to a Y, hang a right downhill. There's a gate there, at the bridge across the Nooksack River, and we parked there. (It wasn't gated back in September, but this is the prudent place to park. It can be gated during the day, leaving you locked in, if you drive further up.)
At the gate I was pretty chilly, for whatever reason, and had a tough time taking off my down jacket when we were ready to go. I packed it into the stuff bag, unable to conceive of not needing it further up.
We got underway about 8:10, and walked most of the way up the road, pushing our bikes. I’d borrowed Fred’s mountain bike, since I don’t have one, and it wasn’t all that comfortable, especially up hill, so I was okay with walking.
We kept on the main road, and took the fourth spur to the right, the most substantial spur road, maybe three miles in, and marked with a large sand hill. Probably a quarter mile up the spur road was what Ralph referred to as a "tank trap", some really big boulders piled up to block the road from any really determined four-wheel-drive vehicles. Even a dirt bike couldn’t have gotten through, unless you could pick it up and carry it.
Another mile and a half or so, and we got to the turnoff, to the left and uphill. Another heaped up wall of dirt before it. We left the bikes here, and commenced hiking up the trail for another half hour or so, to get to the true trailhead. (none of us had a bike computer, so I can’t provide any more precise distance measurements than that.)
From here, the trail is quite easy to follow; it basically aims for the ridgeline, and once on there, you follow it more or less all the way up to the summit. There are cairns to help with routefinding, some of which are more necessary than others. Beckey has a very precise diagram of the obstacles to be negotiated, and apparently the Mountaineers route description has even more detailed instructions, but the reality is that there isn’t much of a problem heading up. You could take any of a dozen or more variations up there, up and around and meandering as inspiration takes you. You could turn the climb into short connect bits of fifth-class climbing if you chose. It's not a dog route, but it's not nearly steep enough to want a rope.
The exposure was extreme in some places, but the rock was so grippy I never felt in the least worried about falling. The rock is an orange kind of sedementary rock, called peridotite, according to Beckey (peridot is the August birthstone, by the way) and is quite rough, like sandstone but not at all crumbly. Every hold that looked iffy turned out to be solid; it was just nonstop fun.
The only dicey bits, to me anyhow, was when we were on the north side of the ridge, where there was a small amount of rather slippery snow, and on the upper flat parts, there was an inch or two of snow covering an alarmingly slick, hard, layer of ice. Made for pretty difficult going, especially with my old boots, kind of low on tread.
We got to the summit around 1:15, and hung around for half an hour or so, taking photos and having lunch. It was just a beautiful spot, Mt. Baker hanging up there breathtakingly clear.
South Twin. Next year's objective?
Unfortunately, the icy slick snow on the north face meant we had to descend the west ridge, rather than the north face, the way the descent is normally done. The first hour after we left the summit, we’d descended just 500 feet, a rate that had me pretty anxious. Fortunately, things sped up, and we got to the trailhead by about 4:15. Another few minutes to hang out (and clean the rocks and twigs from inside my boots, which made an enormous difference!) we headed down the road to the bikes.
It took just a bit over half an hour to shoot the five miles or so down the roads, brakes sqealing and groaning, avoiding the various creeks, sand barriers and the infamous tank trap. I actually fell once, but was going slow enough that it wasn’t a problem. It was pretty deep twilight, but my headlamp isn’t nearly bright enough to function as an effective bike light and so, in conjunction with the iffy brakes, I went pretty slow. It was awfully nice to let my feet relax as I coasted down the hill, the only difficult part (besides the visibility) was that my hands got kind of cramped holding onto the brake levers constantly for much of the descent.
Got to the truck where I just changed my shirt and put my down coat back on (didn’t even bother changing my boots; my feet didn’t feel bad at all) and packed up the truck, and headed out. A stop for sustenance at the Acme market (and a call home) and we barreled home. Total time, car-to-car, a bit over nine hours. It would have been well over ten hours without the bikes.
All in all, a splendid climb, marred only by my worries about time as we neared the summit. Had we done this in, say, November, when we’d have had an hour or more of daylight, I’d have been less anxious, and would have enjoyed it more.
Descending, I put a lot more weight on my hands, and consequently they got pretty sore from the abrasive rock, so I put my gloves on partway down. The next day my fingertips were a little sensitive, but it wasn't as bad as I'd feared.