[TR] Mt. Baldy - Gray Wolf Ridge - Mt. Walkinshaw- 5/24/2004

[OlympicMtnBoy]

Climb: Mt. Baldy - Gray Wolf Ridge - Mt. Walkinshaw-

 

Date of Climb: 5/24/2004

 

Trip Report:

After a very late Sunday night I didn't get started until noon on monday from the Dungeness TH. The first mile to the intersection with the Royal Lake trail and then the Lower Maynard Burn trail went by pretty quickly. The trail was mostly snow free all the way up. I was feeling lazy so I took a nap at the first summit on the way to Mt. Baldy and then made Baldy by around 4.

 

Continuing on the easy ridge I donned my gaiters for a bit of snow on the way up to the Gray Wolf Ridge summit and after a short break I started towards the second summit. Here the going got a little nastier as the nice easy ridge walking deteriorated into a horribly friable rocky ridge, or a crusty posthole adventure. There had been footprints on the way up to the first summit but no one had recently gone to the second summit and by late afternoon the snow was soft. Mostly I stuck to the ridge line but it took a bit longer than I expected. I made the second summit and then found a relatively nice spot to camp near the Gray Wolf - Walkinshaw saddle around 7:45 PM. 6600 feet of elevation gain in a half day with a full pack seemed good enough for me and I slept pretty well after melting some snow for water and cooking dinner.

 

Along the whole ridge I encountered a very cold wind but it died down a bit towards evening and wasn't so bad at the saddle. With proper bivy site location I was able to get both the sunset and sunrise from my bivy sack.

 

The night was clear and cold but the sun warmed me up in the morning and made for a nice leisurely morning (ie, 10AM). After breakfast I packed my bivy sack up and headed across the saddle and up Mt. Walkinshaw.

 

Just as I was leaving camp the sky began to darken and as I was walking on the broad saddle the wind picked up a bit and it started to snow on me (or maybe it was very tiny hail). I started up the rocky ridge but my confidence begain to wane along with the nice weather. I had intended to continue on to traverse to Mt. Clark and Mt. Johnson but I decided to drop my pack and just scramble up to the summit and then retreat from the saddle.

 

The snow was a bit more solid now and made for pretty nice step kicking except for one little bit where I hit a harder ice layer and wished I had brought crampons. It was nice to find some more solid rock to scramble on too. I made the summit around 11 am. The snow stopped and I kind of wished I had brought my pack to continue on. Instead I had a clif bar and snapped some summit photos. The summit log up there had gotten wet at some point and is looking pretty trashed (the metal on the ring binding is rusting away, but I read a few entries (back to ~1975) and added my own. If anyone heads up there, take a new little notebook and a ziplock. The register was placed by "The Truckers", anyone know who they were/are?

 

A few cautious steep glisades and some down scrambling got me back to my pack and I walked back to the saddle and began heading down to the royal lake trail. I mistakenly thought it would be easier to glisade down a snow field but got funneled into a nastly gully that involved lots of sketchy greenery moves down wet crumbly rock until I could escape to the forested slop and make it to the trail.

 

I headed up the rest of the way to Royal Lake, intending to camp there and maybe do Petunia Peak or something but it begain to rain in earnest at that point and the peaks above me totally disappeared into the cloud. It was only 3:45 PM after my late lunch break so I decided to hike the 7 mi out and have a cold beer and a warm bed instead.

 

So the full Needles Traverse still awaits me, but the first part sure was fun. The route from Walkinshaw to Clark didn't look bad, especially with that much snow still up there. A couple people in the summit log mentioned coming from there as well.

 

Sadly I lack a digital camera, or a scanner, but someday I'll try to post some pics. :-)

 

Gear Notes:

Aluminum Ice Axe

Bivy Gear

 

 

Approach Notes:

Start at the Dungeness TH, take a right towards Royal Lake, right on the Maynard Burn trail, left on the closed road, left up the poorly marked trail and then follow the ridge.

[CPOly]

Nice work OMB, sounds like a great trip.

[PhilU]

Wow, nice report! A lot more interesting than my trip a few years ago, what with the snow and more extended peak climbing you did. That gully down to Royal Basin can be brutal!

[johndavidjr]

I understand you say it was trashed but it possible to guess about the number of names that had been in Walkinshaw register since whenever (1975?).

[OlympicMtnBoy]

Yeah, PhilU, that may have been the crappiest part of the trip in the gully there, next time I'm fighting the forest instead.

JDjr, there is a tiny spiral bound notebook in there, maybe 25 pages, plus a couple of little scraps of paper. It's hard to say, but I'd guess maybe 50-75 entries. The first entry was marked 197- with the corner of the page gone, and the next couple pages were really faded, the first one I could read was 1975. Looked like the most recent was Aug 2003. I'm sure there have been a few parties up there that didn't have any paper to sign and add, but I don't think it gets climbed terribly often.

I keep thinkin about it now, I gotta get back in there and do Clark and Johnson and some of those spires.

[bremerton_john]

Clark, Johnson, Sweat and the others are really worth doing, and surpisingly few people give them much notice. When we did Sweat a few years ago the summit register had only a handful of names, and the most recent had been like 6 or 7 years before us.