When: Sunday May 10th, 2009
With: BoeAlps BCC Team 7
Goals: Peak-Bagging in a safe manor
Peaks: The Castle (6640'), Pinnacle (6562'), Plummer (6370'), Denman (6006')
The team arrived at the Longmire parking lot in the Rainier National Park at 6:30am. After a bit of waiting for our last team member to show up we headed to the second parking lot, sans team member, to the Narada Falls lot at about 4600ft. Once our shoes, gators, helmets and essential gear was dawned we headed to an extremely steep pitch to a different switchback of the road. Note: The road is closed for vehicles, so we climbed straight up the switchback. As we were walking to this “trail head” our last team member showed up.
After the straight up steps we walked along the road for about 1.5 miles before stepping up a large bank heading to our destination. Team Double Black had kicked some great steps that we followed all the way to Castle (another 1-1.5 miles). We were thankful of the great steps—the last time we tried to use their steps they had ruined them by downstepping in their up steps and they were basically worthless.
By 10:45 we were at Castle, coming from the south east face. We really pulled out some efficiency in setting up the ropes. I attribute that to help from Mike Z (a guest instructor) who set up the ropes and rappel station while Stefan manned the climbing belay section. The way up was a low class 5 rock but for safety and experience we had a belay for this section.
Everybody climbed the peak with speed and we had rappelled down and were done with the peak in record time.
By the time we were all down the first peak, another BoeAlps team had just gotten to Pinnacle Peak. We circled around Castle and approached Pinnacle from the south side, up an easy gully.
View of Pinaccle
Since the other team was working on Pinnacle we decided to move on and tag Plummer Peak. It is a little less than a mile away from Castle and was a pretty simple ridge walk to get there. We approached the western portion of the south face and used another teams traversal steps until we got to the steep section. Then we made our own steps to the summit with Mike and Kyle in the lead. As we approached Plummer we saw an epic cornice. We made sure to stay far away from the edge on that summit!
When we summited we once again pulled out the ample summit treats. It was Matt’s birthday so I stuck my emergency candle in my group of peanutbutter/chocolate bars so we could truly celebrate his birthday.
At the summit of Plummer we pulled a quick debate of going back to Pinnacle or heading to Denman. Denman was downhill, which meant we’d have to go back up to get to Pinnacle, and we didn’t want to kill ourselves. Alas, before we could talk it through, some of the group was already on their way to Denman. By 1:08 we were at Denman, after Ryan kicked our steps to the summit.
We only stayed at Denman enough for another cookie (or two!) and then were headed back to Pinnacle. No team had gone this way, so Leanard, myself, and Matt kicked steps up the traverse back. Right after I stepped out and Matt took over, there was a slight discussion of taking the high road or the low road. Matt started taking the high road but the low road was much more direct and less work, so some of the team started in that direction. Moments later, the high roaders kicked some snow and soon enough our team had created an avalanche!
All day we had seen huge pinwheels where the snow had started out as a tiny ball on the top of the mountain, but had turned to tractor tires in no time.
When we got to Pinnacle, the other team had barely cleared out—it was good that we had done the extra two peaks! Once again we initiated a Saffron-Direct approach and all started scrambling up the low 5 pitch. Our line of scramblers was much faster than the other team, who climbed it one at a time and used a prussic to go up the rope. There’s always a trade-off of time and safety. Our team is pretty confident in our climbing abilities so we didn’t feel it was necessary to be tied to a rope.
Once we got to the summit we noticed the clouds were getting even darker (since we left Plummer they were trying to take over, unsuccessfully). Scared of rain we scooted off the summit, practiced an arm rappel down a small section of rope and then half of us rappelled down a vertical spot of rock and the other half did a longer arm rappel down the up-hill route.
The other team was nearing the Castle summit at this point, using the ropes we had set up. (We had just used the ropes they set up).
On the way home we were able to use our favorite downhill technique—glissading. Glissading is where you do a controlled slide down the mountain, and save tons of time and energy! Evelyne is by far our fastest glissader, she knows exactly how to balance her weight to create the least drag, and flies down the mountain. We made our way back towards Reflection Lake (and the road we came on), following a north-east heading.
We got to the parking lot at exactly 5pm (the goal time) and not 2 minutes after our arrival it started to rain. Fortunately, it was only a light, intermittent rain, so the other team still on the mountain didn’t get drenched. They came down about an hour later. Then we were off to a great restaurant whose name I have forgotten, but it’s in a red building, and was located a few miles outside of the park, and there were tons of cars parked on the side of the road by it! The homemade blackberry vinaigrette dressing and blackberry butter for the bread is absolutely fantastic and definitely recommended.
Overall the Tatoosh Wilderness was a ton of fun. I think I want to go back in the summer and do all 12 peaks as a long weekend camping trip!
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