Trip Report

At some point while planning this trip, we realized that everyone coming along was game to try and climb the route car-to-car. We drove up on Friday and got to bed early in the evening to get ready for the big push. Sleep was interrupted by several mosquitoes and one sheriff's deputy.

We left the Heliotrope Ridge TH at 1:20am on Saturday. Two hours later, we were roping up at a snowless terminal moraine of the Coleman Glacier. As we chatted with another car-to-car party we had caught up to on the approach, a (compact) car-sized block of ice rolled past, much closer than we'd have liked. One of our party decided to turn back here; the other four decided that since it seemed to be a block calving off the bottom of the glacier, it was worth seeing if things were more stable higher up (they were). We set off, not following the established boot pack, with the other party following us in the dark.

Online trip reports and the ranger station had spoken of a circuitous route and poor route conditions, we but found a stable, relatively direct line most of the way. As reported, it was September on the glacier this July. There was a lot of crevasse jumping, and a few times, our feet punched through snow bridges over the smaller cracks. The weather was bluebird until we hit the Roman Wall around 9300'. Above that, we had high winds and low visibility. When we hit the viewless summit, we turned back immediately, saving our summit treats for the relative shelter of the ridge between the Coleman and Deming Glaciers. Car to summit in 8 hours; car to car in under 14.

On Sunday, by the maxim that one should climb at least as many days as one drives, a secondary mission objective was in order. We stopped at Mt. Erie in Anacortes, WA, where we did some top rope rock climbing overlooking the San Juans and the Olympic Mountains. Good times!