The Northern Pickets is my favorite area in the North Cascades. Actually, it is my favorite place period.
To be honest, one of the appeals of the area besides the craggy peaks is the “price of admission”. It doesn’t cost money, it will cost you a bunch of sweat and a whole lot of discomfort.
The Northern Pickets are not easily obtained. After a half day of trail, there is 2 days of hard off-trail travel. Bushwhacking, river crossing, steep forest, dirty gullies, and endless boulders.
I have now done 4 out of the 5 approaches to the Northern Pickets. I can definitely say there is no easy way in. Not even sure I can say there is a preferred approach. It’s all pretty miserable. But the views make it all worth it.
We planned 8-days for our traverse. If everything went right, the trip would only take us 6-days without summits. But no trip to the Pickets has ever gone exactly as planned.
Our “gereactic” climbing party of 5 was made up of Beth (78), George (70), Jim (66), me (60), and Andrew (32). Andrew really drug down our average age to a reasonable 61. We are pretty sure we are the oldest group to do the Northern Pickets traverse.
Even though every day something went wrong, we still had a great time. So glad to have gotten in there one more time.
Day 1, the water taxi was 2 hrs late and the temps were so much hotter than expected. So glad camp had a creek right next to it.
Day 2, started great and then we couldn’t find a log across Big Beaver creek. After a couple of hours of working our way through a swamp, we finally found ourselves on the other side but there was a whole lot of brush between us and the climbers path.
We did make fairly good time climbing the steep forested hillside.
We found a good spot to cross the upper creek and then came across a flat spot in the forest for camp. We were super lucky to find this camp.
Day 3, we were making good time up the climbers path, across the creek, and up the boulder field.
The heat had us looking for shade at every break. When we headed up to the ridge crest, spirts were high.
They were quickly dashed by the horrible dirt, rock, and snow in the gully. We were super lucky no one got hurt in there. The views at the ridge crest brought smiles back to our faces.
After a break, we started a long traverse to Luna Col.
What a glorious camp at Luna Col!
Day 4, started with a climb of Luna Peak. We actually got all 5 of us on the summit.
After lunch, we worked our way down the snow heading to Luna Lake. Everything was going quite well until we got cocky and decided to drop directly to the lake.
Soon we were cliffed out and had to retreat back up hill. Yuck! We didn’t retreat far enough and found ourselves hanging off of tree branches trying to get down one last slab. It worked and we stumbled in to camp shortly before dark.
Day 5, we got a late start but we didn’t have that far to go and the terrain looked quite good.
We were making good time and only had a couple hundred feet to drop to reach the snow field below then we ran into very loose dirt slope.
Our only hope was to rappel a dirt gully full of loose rocks. Wholly Cow! When we all reached the snow safely, our nerves were shot and we decided to work our way across the snow and then look for a camp.
We were now at least a day behind schedule. Good thing we had planned on things not going right.
Day 6, turned out to be a fairly good day. Lovely travel. Great views.
We ended up reaching the Challenger Col too late in the day to climb Challenger but at least we would make it out of the Pickets in time to catch our water taxi.
Our camp on Wiley Ridge was beautiful. I absolutely love the camps on Wiley Ridge.
Day 7, start well as we worked our way across Wiley Ridge. We had time to climb Little Beaver Peak.
We found the summit register Fay, Beth, and I had left here almost 13 years ago on my very first Picket adventure.
I wanted to try a different route on Wiley Ridge to see if it was better than the route I had done on 3 previous trips. Needless to say, it wasn’t faster.
Then I couldn’t find the route off the ridge and we ended up in very steep brush… again. We slipped our way down 500ft before the hillside backs off a little bit making the forest hike a little more tolerable.
After several hours of hiking through the forest, we came upon the trail. We had all survived.
No major injuries just a whole lot of scrapes and bug bits. We had a 3 mile hike down the trail to Luna Camp and a creek. I couldn’t get there fast enough. I jumped in clothes and all. A creek never felt so good.
Day 8, we had 9 miles of trail hiking to reach Ross Lake and Big Beaver Landing. Jim and I hiked together trying to ignore our blisters.
Good thing, we had ear buds and a lot of comedy to listen to. My phone died before we reached the lake but Jim’s had just enough juice to get us the rest of the way.
For some reason, we all had smiles on our faces when we reached the boat dock. Had we had a good time or were we just so happy that it was over. Not sure we even know.
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