Vesper Peak, seen from partway up Sperry Peak. There is a regular trail that heads up the left side, which we found on the descent, but on the way up we just scrambled up the beautiful granite rocks.
The drive with Max was chilly enough that I had to keep the vent off me. What a sad surprise after a week of heat and sun -- every evening, Mt. Rainier had looked like a painting.
So, I took Max up the Sunshine Mine trail (east of Big 4), and ended up climbing Vesper Peak. Max's first summit! A few feet below the top a group of about 3 kids had camped.
The trail goes up a long rocky vally, passing under the north face of Sperry Peak, then up over the pass, and terminates at this gorgeous little lake in a bowl created by a ring of peaks -- Vesper, Sperry, and a couple of others. Jeff Smoot calls this Lake Elan. Up on the ridge that connects Sperry and Vesper, you can see Big 4, and the ridge that connects them looks to me like a backbone, remarkably bare, exposed rock.
There were a lot of marmots out, and Max would go chasing up the hillside after them, then back down to plunge into the icy tarn, just having a great time.
I initially wanted to try to get up Sperry, which looks bigger and more dramatic, but the face was too steep for Max. (I've later learned that either the east or west ridges are an easy route up; maybe someday we'll try that.) So we hiked up Vesper, an easy scramble. On the descent, we managed to find a proper trail that leads sort of easterly, but it was no more easy than the scrambling, in my opinion.
There were a few people there (I saw maybe two dozen that day) and it was kind of overcast, so when the book says this is a rarely used trail, I guess that's relative. There were probably 50 cars at the Mt. Dickerman trailhead.
Second outing, September, 2001.
I took both dogs up here on a drizzly day in September. Max was staying with us at the time, and he has a lot more of a wanderlust than Maisie does, so he needed to get out. Part of the point of it was to test an idea I'd picked up in Ray Jardines' Beyond Backpacking which is that an umbrella is the best raingear for hiking. So I took a folding umbrella along.
Against all odds, we actually weren't the only ones up there; there was a car of about four guys we saw at the trailhead, and a guy and his girlfriend (I assume) that we passed on the hike up the bowl.
The umbrella actually worked quite well; it's lighter than a shell, and it provides plenty of ventilation. I suppose if you were bushwhacking it would be a bad idea, but for hiking in open ground like this, it was perfect.
The problem was that I stayed comfortable, and Max is usually hot, so he was fine, but Maisie, who's pretty small, ended up getting pretty well chilled by the end of the day.
We got over the pass, and into the bowl, and scrambled around a bit, and tried to head up. The rain turned into snow, and Maisie was pretty miserable, whining and anxious, so we headed down.
On the hike out, I stopped and picked a bunch of blueberries that were ripe along the trail. This turned out to be a bad idea; because it meant the dogs just sat there waiting. It wasn't a problem for Max, who is hot most of the time (on the hike out, he waded through a chest-deep stream to cool off) but Maisie got pretty well chilled. She stayed cold all the way home, and Heidi wrapped her up in a fleece blanket, where she slept all the way through the night. I felt pretty bad, afterwards, that I'd made her so miserable. But I learned an important lesson about small dogs, and the square-cube law in action.