The spot on the trail where you leave to head up to bumblebee pass. It's not great, but it's as good a shot as I could get.
Thompson Peak, West Ridge
with Josh K, July 31, 2002
Josh has a new digital camera ("I had to sell a lot of stuff on e-Bay to afford it") was eager to try it out. Again, it was nice not to be the only one stopping progress for photos.
The trail runners passed us again returning, the woman well ahead of the dogs and the man. I guess they turned around at the catwalk. I would have thought they’d have given the dogs a dip in one of the lakes, but they didn’t, and both the dogs’ tongues were hanging pretty far out.
And, I learned that Russ and I had taken the wrong turn off the trail. Bumblebee pass is earlier than we’d taken, on a drainage dry by midsummer, as Nelson says, at a sharp bend on the trail. And there’s a bit of a climbers trail heading up the hillside.
Down the other hillside isn’t steep at all, unlike the route that had turned Russ and me back. We headed across, and up the scree on the other side towards the left side of the mountain, for the west ridge. The higher we got, the crummier and slidier the scree got. I kept as far to the right as I could, to use the rock wall for handholds. We stopped at the notch for some lunch, at a great view, seeing Rainier to the south, Stuart to the east, and even Glacier Peak to the north. Below us was the pretty bowl below Thompson, with a little tarn, and a larger lake below, and two tents. So we scrambled up to the start of the climb and got kitted up. Josh led, of course, and I belayed him. I watched his moves, and it seemed easy enough. I even stopped him for a photo. He got all the way to the end of the rope; there wasn’t a spare foot, before he yelled down "you’re on belay" so I removed my belay, got the rope out of my ATC, and started up.
And stopped. I couldn’t make the first move. You go off to the left, up a steep sort of narrow ledge, and I just couldn’t make the step up, with no handholds to support me. I stood there for what must have been five minutes, until my right foot was cramping in its awkward spot, and Josh was pulling on the rope, thinking (he said later) it must have been stuck someplace. I actually considered grabbing the rope and pulling myself up to the ledge, but the rope had too much give, so that was out. Finally, I yelled to him to give me some slack, and stepped back to look. And saw another spot, higher up, for my right foot, and made the move easily up, and I was climbing, a little abashed. I cleaned the gear as I went, with no problems, following the rope up the face, and got to Josh in just a couple of minutes. We swapped gear and he headed up again. While he was climbing the first pitch I heard voices, and wondered if they were people up there that Josh was talking to, but no, we were apparently the only people on the route, and so far as we could tell, the only ones on the mountain. The talking came from the tents below, but I never saw any people. We had assumed there would be no problems with communications, since there was no wind, and we were the only ones on the route. But as he climbed up and vanished out of sight, his voice faded quickly. I yelled when he had half the rope, and sat and waited. And waited. Then, it seemed like he was pulling the end of the rope, but he paused, and then it pulled some more, and that was the dead end of it. I sat there, waiting, below the belay, which was a long spectra cordalette wrapped around a very large horn. I waited, and yelled to him a couple of times (no response) and waited, and finally moved up to the belay, to see what would happen. The rope pulled. Maybe he needed more rope to get to the next belay station, or maybe he was ready. So I unwrapped the cordalette, wadded it up and jammed it into my pocket, and took out the backup piece, and slung it. Then, finally, I headed up, praying that we wasn’t moving very slowly up a difficult bit, and just about to fall. And, I got to him with no real problems. There was one slightly difficult bit, a vertical wall about eight feet high, that was about at the limit of my abilities, I think (Josh said it was about 5.7) The third pitch was easy; we were to the left of Nelson’s route, so we missed the "easy fifth class slab" but it wasn’t too difficult. The fourth pitch went pretty quickly, with a couple of moves that forced me to pay attention, and then we scrambled over to the summit, easy fourth class stuff.
I felt like I was climbing much better by the time we were finished; I would have liked a couple more pitches. Summit photos, no summit book, no cellular service for either of our phones, and we put away the climbing gear and headed down. Got to the summit right around 4:00. Eight hours, longer than Nelson says, but so what. I don’t see how we could have done it much faster; we hiked in pretty briskly, and aside from our 20-minute lunch (and a couple of photo breaks), hadn’t really stopped at all. I followed, I think, faster than he led, so we couldn’t have saved much time there. It may be that if there was more snow in the bowl, the traverse over would have been quicker, but not by an hour!
The descriptions of the east ridge I’ve heard call for a rappel down, and there were a couple of rap stations just below the summit. We didn’t use them, we downclimbed instead. My attitude, generally, is that if God didn’t want you to rappel, He wouldn’t have put a webbing nest there, but I was grateful for the downclimbing, because it was good practice for me. There were only a few scary spots, probably fifteen feet total, and the rest was pretty routine.
As we got off the ridge and onto the scree slope, things got pretty nasty. Descending the scree was just nasty. It’s dirt and small rocks, and it slides and slides, and you can’t go down without just a miserable time. We were both in tennis shoes, so it wasn’t much fun. I don’t think the east ridge route would be worth doing, it’s just a mess. THAT’S the part I would have liked to rappel down.
Finally, we got to the base of the scree, and crossed over to the bottom of the basin, to the most beautiful little alpine stream ever. We were both out of water (I’d only brought one liter, because he had a filter) and we were pretty thirsty. Rashly, I decided I didn’t need to filter the water, and filled my bottle up from the little waterfall, and gulped it down. God, cold mountain streams taste good!
So we messed around a few minutes, drinking and eating, then shouldered out packs and headed up bumblebee pass.
We were halfway down the other side before I remembered that I’d meant to take a photo or two from the top. I should have gone back, but didn’t. So, we hiked out. There were tents at the lakes we passed, and a few people on the trail. It took a damned long time to get back; we weren’t back at the car until about 9:00, well after pitch black. I was glad I’d brought my headlamp.
We ran into a guy with a dog and an overnight pack about half an hour from the trailhead, asking about campsites. I felt pretty bad telling him that the lakes were a good hour and a half ahead of him, and it wasn’t until after we left him that Josh said something that reminded me that he probably wasn’t as tired as we were.
Man, that walk out is slow. It took a good half hour longer than I thought it should have. Finally, finally, an hour after we started hearing I-90 distinctly, we got to the parking lot, and my headlamp picked up the taillight reflectors of the cars. Was I glad! And, as so often happens, as soon as I realized the hike was over, my feeling changed from "when will this end?" to "well, that wasn’t so bad."
So, I opened the top of my pack to get the keys off the key clip. And, they weren’t there. I took every single item out of the top compartment, and they weren’t there. Before we’d left the car, I’d taken the non-car-key ring off, and put it in the back of the car, ostentatiously saying "lookit me saving weight!" But where were the car keys? Had they fallen out of my pack on the summit, or at one of the stops when I’d changed the film in the camera?
It occurred to me we might be able to get into the car, because I’d left the front windows partway down. But with no keys, that wouldn’t get us too far. And I couldn’t call Heidi to drive up and rescue us, she was supposed to be out with friends, and I had her cell phone.
Sure that it was a waste of time, I started emptying my pockets. I had to look like I was doing something, after all, and the only other thing to do was to empty the entire pack onto the parking lot. And, they keys were right there, in my left shorts pocket. Sheesh. Bullet dodged.
There's a lot to be said for climbing in the Snoqualmie pass area; including 45-minute drives home, rather than three hours from Cascade Pass or Leavenworth, or Rainier, or four from Hood.