Part I of my labor day adventure: Why no one climbs snowking Mt.

On Friday night Daniel and I decided to climb Snowking Mountain in the North cascades. I had been wanted to go hiking this weekend for the past several weeks. It was late Friday by the time we got all the planning done, so I decided to just throw everything into bags in the morning and pack what I wanted at the trailhead. It was a great idea, but I ended up sleeping in and then of course I had trouble finding some things that I really wanted, and forgot about others because I was rushed. I didn’t start seriously planning the trip until late, so we were forced to bring only MRE’s to eat.

After a very long drive we finally arrived at the forest road and found that it ended a few miles too early where a bridge had washed out some years ago. So we packed and started walking where the road ended. It was a nice trail, secluded and peaceful, and gaining elevation but not too steep. Then we came to what had been the end of the road. There were remains of a camp fire and at first I couldn’t see any other trail. Once we got to the other end of the clearing we saw the trail. But it wasn’t really a trail. At least not like any I had ever seen before. It was more like a hole in the woods that went almost straight up. So up we went, breaking
brush and climbing stairs of tree roots. It was steeper at more difficult than even the glacier on Mt. Adams. The trees were so thick that I didn’t even bother with the GPS while we were moving. After a while we stopped to rest and get a fix and I realized that we had climbed 1000 vertical ft in half an hour. A look at the map revealed that we had twice as much left just to reach camp and after some discussion we decided to turn around.

Pictures, from Top to Bottom:
Top: The trail that we came out of at the end of the old road
Middle: looking downthe trail after we had come up.
Bottom: About to go into the trail up the mountain.