Mount Olympus - June 24-25, 2023
Chris prepares our “Butter Baguettes”: A baguette sandwich with butter, salami and provolone. This robust sandwich holds up well in a pack.
Michael suddenly doesn’t like slogs
Day 1:
After grabbing fresh bread on the way and preparing sandwiches on the hood of the car the Baguette Boys started their first of two long walks around 11am on Saturday. The relatively flat Hoh River Trail greeted us with a lush, green landscape and ever present sound of the river. The start the trail was fairly crowded with day hikers but as we got further from the parking lot the crowds thinned down to backpackers and fellow climbers. A stranger’s complement of Chris’s hair at mile 3 kept morale high and the first 14 miles cruised by except for one section we called the “fun house”. Suddenly, the well defined trail disappeared at mile 8.5 as we found ourselves climbing over blowdowns, taking precarious bridges over creeks and trying to stay upright in wet mud. Turns out the trail had washed out, and we were supposed to cross the river and avoid this section all together. Whoops. Powered by salami and cheese sandwiches we continued on to mile 14 where the trail begins to steepen for the final few miles to our campsite at Glacier Meadows. This change of terrain was surprisingly welcome. The final challenge of the day was down climbing a loose slope using a ladder and ropes. It was slow moving but stable, however unprovoked rock fall from the next gully over prompted us to move through it efficiently. A short hike after the ladder led us to our campsite. We set up our bivies, repacked our summit bags, made some dinner, filtered water, and called it an early night, planning for a 12:45am wakeup.
Day 2:
With 4 solid hours of sleep leading into the day we made a quick breakfast and began our summit push at 1:30am with clear skies and stars above. We made our way up to the lateral moraine where the trail ends and we found ourselves staring down a loose collection of rocks to the Blue Glacier 300 feet below. We continued as far along the moraine as we could before starting to traverse down, spacing out, thinking light thoughts and moving with care. This is not a place we would want to be with any parties above or below, but soon enough we found ourselves on snow and roped up.
Travel along the lower Blue Glacier went quickly as we soon found ourselves following a heavy boot track over some sections of bare ice and stepping over a handful of small cracks. The climb up to the upper glacier via Snow Dome went quickly (one foot in front of the other) and we soon found ourselves traversing towards Crystal Pass with dawn light creeping along the horizon. It was at this point that we heard a voice crackle over the radio “...It’s going to be a beautiful morning…” Great. Someone else is on the 5.10 channel too, why do we choose such a popular channel? We continued up and over Crystal Pass without much need to circumnavigate the usual bergschrund-crevasse combo. Once on the other side we made our way up to the false summit as the sun began to rise behind Mount Baker in the distance. Once again we heard a voice on the radio “...This is the rabbit team from the top of the Roman Wall…” Wait a minute, rabbit team… roman wall… the familiar voice of John Crutcher? Could we really be hearing the WAC basic course on their graduation climb 100 miles away on Mount Baker? After hearing Rachel reply to John we no longer had doubt. It didn't seem possible but we were in fairly clear radio contact with WAC BCC through our summit and most of the way down the glacier.
A quick transition to rock over the false summit led us back on to snow to make the final traverse above the bergschrund to the base of the summit block. We racked up and made our way up the short 5.4 step and soon found ourselves on the summit with 360 degree views of the Olympics, Cascades and the Pacific Ocean. We celebrated with Butter Baguettes and a Fruit by the Foot race (which Eric won handily). We had the summit to ourselves for our entire stay, no other parties making their way up the glacier down below. There was something special about standing on top of a beautiful landscape like the Olympic Mountains with no other people around except us. You feel small compared to the vast terrain below, but also capable, knowing you had the skills and experience to make it there.
We made a short rappel from the summit and roped back up for the descent. As we made our way back over Crystal Pass we passed the first of 4 parties coming up along the upper glacier. A duo going Car to Car led the pack having started at 11pm the night before. The descent back down the glacier went smoothly and we even spotted one of the measurement poles placed by the national park to measure the snowpack on the glacier. (As described in Bill Baccus’s lecture this spring!) We soon found ourselves back at the base of the lateral moraine. This time we had the benefit of daylight to guide us, and we found a relatively stable “trail” back up that was only 10 feet above our descent route. Back at camp we rested and dried out our damp feet and housed a bag of fritos (can’t be carrying extra weight back down) as we mentally prepared for the 18 mile slog back down the valley.
We mentally broke the exit into checkpoints to maintain our sanity. Checkpoint #1 came quickly as we made our way back up the ladder past the washout just below camp. Checkpoint #2 was shortly after at Elk Lake (Elevation 2,600’ - it’s amazing how something so low could still be so far from the trailhead.) Checkpoint #3 was the bridge that marked the end of the major downhill, only 14 miles of relatively flat trail to go. Checkpoint #4 was a ranger station where we would have a place to sit and take a break to refuel, at the ranger station the car to car team lapped us while they were jogging out. This was also around the time that Chris formally announced he had entered the pain cave. The final major checkpoint was getting back through the slow moving “fun house” (ducking over and under blowdowns turns out to be a welcome distraction from the barking of sore feet). From there it was a mile by mile, step by step, grind to the finish. We took a couple brief breaks to filter water and get off our feet. Chris took a short dirt nap with about 5 miles to go and started rationing the last of his gummy bears, 1 per mile. We knew we were getting close when we saw someone in sandals hiking the other direction. We figured they couldn't possibly have made it far in those. Eventually the day hikers grew in numbers and the parking lot came into view. Just over 30 hours from our departure the previous day we arrived at the car, there and back again. We celebrated with a fist bump, customary chocolate milk, and a bag of potato chips. A huge success. Onto the next one.
