Sunrise on Mt. Rainier, from below the summit of Pinnacle Peak.
October has been surprisingly pleasant. I hooked up with Brad through a 'partners wanted' posting on Cascade Climbers, and we both thought this sounded like a good outing.
The Tatoosh Range is a compact range of mountains just to the south of Mt. Rainier. They're not made of Rainier rock, which is a Very Good Thing, in fact Unicorn seems to be mostly granite. I've looked at them for years from Rainier, and heard for a while that this is a fun, not too difficult outing. It seemed like an ideal trip for this time of year, when the days are shorter and high conditions are uncertain.
The drive is long, of course, it always is. We met at 4:30 AM at his place in Ballard, and were at Reflection Lake in the crepuscular predawn light. In pushing for this early a start, I'd forgotten that it's still dark at 6:30.
There are about a dozen peaks in the Tatoosh Range, and you could do the entire traverse starting at Longmier and ending at the Snow Lake trail (or the other direction) but I wasn't at all sure how long and difficult the traverse would be. I really didn't want to find myself bushwhacking in frozen trees after dark... So we did an abreviated traverse, starting at Pinnacle Peak, and ending at Unicorn Peak. This has the benefit of being the string recommended by Jeff Smoot in his excellent Climbing Washington's Mountains.
You can, of course, go either direction. We started from the west. In retrospect, it would have been better to start from the east, since the descent from Unicorn down to Snow Lake is steep and tedious, and would have been a lot easier to climb up.
So, we headed up the Pinnacle Saddle Trail. The water was frozen, so the muddy trail was pleasantly hard, and we made it up to the area below Pinnacle Peak in less than an hour. We decided to climb up the north side and up a couloir rather than following the trail all the way around. It's not difficult, although the scree is particularly slippery, and took a while to get up.
You end up on the south side of the mountain for the final summit scramble, and the climbing is really fun -- easy class 3 climbing with lots of firm hand and foot holds. We were at the summit less than an hour and a half from the car.
The wind was awfully strong: when you were in it, it was strong enough to almost knock you off your feet. But five feet off the ridge, it was dead calm, a bit eerie. There was a real premium to finding wind shelter.
Down off Pinnacle, and to the next peak, The Castle. There is a very well established trail that follows along the south side of Pinnacle, which simplifies the scree walking.
And, ascending the base of The Castle.
There are three peaks on the Castle: the west-most and easiest is the lowest. From there, the highest looked awfully intimidating to solo, but once we got over to it, it wasn't bad at all, a stiff class 4: easy to climb but scarey to descend. I have to say, I looked at the rappel slings up there with a bit of envy.
The trail, such as it is, follows the ridge from here on, and the wind made it pretty unpleasant to keep on it. It was just amazing -- up on the ridge, or down on the north side of it, the wind was cold, hard, and oppressive, but a few feet down on the south side of the ridge, we basked in the calm sun.
I had been worrying some about snow, particularly about the rock at the summits being iced up. There was a few inches of snow on the ground in places, filling the trail, especially on the north side, but the rock was uniformly bare and dry.
Mt. Rainier at mid-day, one of the small semi-frozen lakes we passed in the foreground.
From here things looked considerably more dicey. We could see Unicorn, looking cold and forbidding, with what looked like practically vertical faces. It's joined to Border Peak at a saddle, and there's a snow slope that descends from there which also looked vertical, like a two-ice-tool ice climb. We spent a fair amount of time looking at the map, and the book, trying to reconcile it with the intimidating prospect before us, and eventually decided to head on and see what happened.
Turns out that the route was not nearly as steep as it appeared. We traversed down into the bowl below the two peaks, and headed up the scree slopes. We saw a couple of guys up above us, and I was hoping they'd come down and point us out the easy, or at least, less slidey, way, but they just traversed directly across (north) back to Snow Lake.
We ended up climbing up amazingly crappy rock scattered with tremendous amounts of rock. There wasn't a single firm handhold or foothold for twenty feet at a time, just iffy, crumbly rock, slow going up to where we finally gained the upper slopes of the mountain.
It turns out that a far better route would be to ascend alongside the snow slope, or, if you have crampons, up the snow slope as far as possible. It's still crappy up there, not not nearly so bad as it is to the left of there.
From here it's easy going to the base of the summit bock, which is quite intimidating. I'd brought rock shoes for this, though I didn't think a route rated 5.0 would need them.
Brad, who's a much more competent rock climber than me, tried a couple of ways up the south side of the summit block, and I wandered around to the right to see what was over there. Turns out the easy way up is around to the right, the east side of the block. I've only climbed one other route that was rated 5.0 (on Sharkfin), and I thought this was harder than that. The handholds were gratifyingly firm, though, and smooth, obviously used a lot.
Mt. Stevens, from the summit of Unicorn.
Tom at the summit of Unicorn.
The summit was a bit of an anticlimax, not dramatic at all, except of course for the fabulous face of Mt. Rainier looming over us, as it had all day. It was about 1:30 or so. So we descended, Brad quickly and me slowly, whimpering, wishing I had a tail I could tuck between my legs, but made it to the base of the block, where we snacked, and then headed back down.
We descended pretty much from the notch, and the rock was less crumbly there. There were three people coming up the snow slope, with crampons and ice axes, as we descended. Once I got to the snow, I decided to put on MY crampons (why else had I brought them?) and take the snow down, but without an ice axe for self-arrest, my ski poles didn't feel all that secure, and I was fairly slow going down.
From above, the path out to Snow Lake looks pretty easy, but you actually end up heading down a long, fairly steep, scree slope. The rocks were tippy, and covered with snow so it was all a bit more tedious than I would have liked. I found that when I paid attention, I could walk safely, but as soon as my mind wandered, which it does a lot, I'd step on a four-foot rock that would tip like a see-saw. I would have to say that this was the toughest part of the day. The climbing up isn't nearly so hard, or tiring, than the endless stepping down from one rock to the next, over and over.
Snow lake was pretty, or at least the north end of it is. The south end, which we approached first, was low and bordered with brownish guck. It had a skin of ice on it, maybe half an inch think.
Then, finally the road, after a mile (1.2, actually) of hiking on the trail, passing a few people coming or going. We headed up the road, our thumbs out, and after getting passed by a couple of cars, a big white Ford SUV (an Excursion?) stopped for us. It was a Latino family of four, and I was surprised to see that there was a third row of seats in the far back. It did feel awfully good to sit.
Summary It was a fun outing, and took much less time than I'd expected. In retrospect, we could have tagged another peak or two, maybe Border Peak. I might be persuaded to do it again, but only from the east, starting at Snow Lake and finishing up at Reflection Lakes. From what I'd read, Unicorn seemed like the most challenging climb of the lot, and so I wanted to save it for last.
I'd probably bring a light 30m rope for rappelling down of Unicorn. I didn't feel the need to be roped on the climb up, though it is pretty exposed, but I'm something of a coward on the descent.