Monte Cristo Peak

[mattp]

An old college buddy and I went to ski up in Glacier Basin on this spring weekend (May 18-19) with a forecast for rain showers. At 4:20 on Saturday afternoon, we left the car in a gentle rain. There was about 3 feet of snow at the parking lot at Barlow Pass. We quickly got tired of taking our skis on and off and we didn't want to trash our skins on the road, so we just carried them into the Monte Cristo townsite, stumbling along in the slushy snow. At cocktail hour, we found a dry patch of ground on which to set up camp in the townsite, although the area was pretty solidly covered in 4 feet of snow. At bedtime, a mouse kept trying to climb into my sleeping bag.

 

On Sunday, we skinned up and over the hump below Willman's Spires, and then on up the Glacier Basin headwall to a col between Monte Cristo and Cadet Peak. I climbed up higher for a view, but my buddy made it clear that this was as far as he wanted to go, so I took in the view: Glacier Peak rose up into the clouds to the NE, and the Chiwaukums did the same to the SE, but the peaks to the W, all the way out to Three Fingers, stood proud and tall. In the basin, some water ice lingered on the cliffs below Willman's Peak, and enough snow was plastered to the NW face of MonteCristo itself that it would make a moderate snowclimb right now if you could catch it when frozen. Even though it was a cloudy day, enough snow filtered through and it was warm enough to trigger avalanches from cliffs on all sides of Glacier Basin, and we sat there for a bit, watching the show. After enjoying a couple of runs in VERY slushy snow with large but very slow surface slides accompanying every turn, we headed back to retrieve our luggage and slog out to the car. Skis were more useful on the way out the Monte Cristo road than we had found them on the way in.

 

View of Wilman's Peak, Wilman's Spires, Del Campo Peak, and Vesper Peak; Doug Swan skiing:

 

[nolanr]

You can see Gothic, too. Sounds like a good trip.

[Bronco]

GAPER TR:

 

Me and a buddy decided the weather would be "interesting" saturday 6/8 and headed out for E. Wilmans Spire.

 

Drove through Granite falls in light precip at about 5:20am, as we traveled through Verlot the rain picked up a bit. Between Verlot and Barlow Pass it poured hard enough to make me feel sorry for the campers everywhere along the side of the road, everything was soaked.

 

In the fog and rain, we missed the parking lot for Monte Cristo and parked about 50' in front of the gate to the road. As we sat there drinking coffee waiting for the rain to let up we noticed it had turned to snow, and we were only at 2,200'. We hopped on our bikes and were able to ride about 70% of the first 2 miles with one wipeout, ditched the bikes in the woods and walked from there over intermitent snow and wet, rough road. The snow appeared to be 4' deep in places still. All snow from the Town of Monte Cristo up to Glacier Basin, we took the same approach directly up to the bottom of the Wilmans peaks (as mattp took) rather than the longer trail up through Glacier Basin.

 

Anyway, we climbed up into the clouds with intermitent snow flurries and sun breaks. Good cramponing through 6" of "cotton candy" new snow over a very firm base. Several small storm cells added to that amount, then the sun would come out and drop little sluffs off of the surrounding rock faces creating some pinwheels, although not huge ones. By now we had worked our way up into the final snow gully below the E. Wilmans spire (you can see it pretty clearly in mattp's photo above). The sun came out and we stopped to take in some of the peaks around us. I heard the distinct rumble you don't want to hear in a gully like that. To my relief it was only a rowdy herd of Pinwheels gathering speed as they rolled down to us. I warned my partner to "brace yourself" as some had suddenly veered over and were attempting to remove me from the gully. "go home posers" was definetly audible to both of us as the now flying debris slapped us around like a bully in a bar.

 

As things settled down I checked on my parnter who was cleaning snow out of his collar and I looked for the opportunity to set up a running belay to finish the gully. My parnter however, comented that he was having second thoughts about continueing. Just as he finished speaking, a large slab let loose about 60' to our left that traveled to the floor of the valley (about 2000') I thought about how I didn't want to add to the list of lives the mountains have taken this season already.

 

So, we headed down into another storm cell and it actually got bad enough to make us take cover under a big boulder until God's sandblaster got turned off. Ouch! Glissading down was fun, we stopped to do some "alpine bouldering" then roughneck combat mountain biking to the truck (trying to force the other combatant off the road, into trees, creekbeds or snow banks) At the truck there was a notice that the sheriff was wanting to tow my truck for "blocking the gate" that I had parked 50' away from. I thought that would be nice to return to, a 30 mile bike ride to Granite Falls However, In our haste and the poor visibility that morning we had driven right past the parking lot for the trailhead. oops! Pretty fun trip, plenty of snow in Glacier Basin still if you're looking for some skiing. (although a lot of it is avvy debris)