Earlier this week a buddy from work asked me if I had any interest in doing some hiking. I used to hike a ton and I was excited to get out and trek through some of the beautiful Northwest forests again. Three of us ended up going and the story begins...
Today I went with a couple buddies from work and attempted to climb White Chuck Mountain in the North Cascades. We started at the car at about 8:45am and trekked a couple miles along the ridge to the base of the saddle between Northwest Peak and White Chuck. Visibility was about 50 feet due to clouds and heavy fog.
Once we were directly below the saddle we started hiking up the steep incline to get on top of the saddle. With almost no visibility, we could not tell at all if we were going in the correct direction. Once we got to a certain point, previous hikers directions told us there were two options; to hug the walls and follow the rock shelves around and up to the summit, or to climb all the way up the saddle and follow the ridge to the summit. We chose the shelves and proceeded to do what I consider to be a pretty technical climb. By about 12:00pm, we got to the top of something. We couldn't see anything at this point other than the silhouette of what looked like another peak about the same height as the one we were on. We decided to call it a day and say that we reached the top.
We started heading down and had extreme difficulty following the trail. There were times where we found ourselves having gone the wrong way and being stuck almost on the face of a cliff. There were points where I was very afraid, I am a novice climber and some of the situations we found ourselves in, I don't think I should have been in. Eventually we got a tiny bit more visibility and could see the path we wanted to be on about 50 feet down a pretty steep face. We hiked along the face and dropped down under a snow pack and emerged on the trail we were looking for. After that, I found myself doing a controlled slide on my butt down a rock face with tons of loose rocks. Once we reached the bottom of the rock climb and got into more of a hike again, I felt so much better. By around 2:15pm we were back at the car and changing into clean clothes.
It was definitely a good workout and a fun hike. I could have done without the part where I thought I was going to die. After the fact, I'm glad I got out and do the climb. I'm still not sure where we ended up and I wish we could have seen the views from the top but sometimes the weather doesn't play along.
Click on the picture to see other images of the hike.
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