[goleary]

With our bigger plans dashed due to questionable weather we settled on a day trip up to Gothic Basin to tag Gothic & Del Campo Peaks. They've been on my list for some time and I had been thinking about an overnight up there, but I'm glad we did it in a day since it was a bit of a zoo up there. So many people. I suppose there were some more secluded spots to camp but with the rain last night I'm not bummed about not spending the night out. It was drizzling and gloomy for much of the day until we were on the summit of Del Campo. We started up the trail at 8:45 and reached Gothic basin in about 2 hours. After a wrong turn (towards the smaller lakes at the beginning of the basin) we did some cross country travel towards the SE ridge of Gothic. we stayed pretty close to the ridge crest on the way towards the summit block. Some fun Slabby scrambling to be had on the way. TBH didn't do much research on the route but found it to be incredible simple, just head straight towards the summit. A short section of class 3 popped us out on top much more quickly than I had anticipated (2:40 from car to summit).

We stopped and took a few pics on the summit before I went to scope the SE side of Del Campo. My Washington Scrambles book by Peggy Goldman has a vague description of a route on this side of the mountain. "A variation for reaching the rock of the upper south face of Del Campo is to climb from Foggy pass at 5480 feet, bearing over onto the face." While scoping the route my partner suggested that the NE ridge of Gothic looked like it might. I scramble down a ways and agreed that it looked promising. We grabbed our packs from the summit and headed down into the unknown. There were a few class 4 moves, some heather slopes and some loose choss on the way down but the route wasn't terrible. we stayed on the ridge crest for the top section and then moved to the NW side (loose) when that looked to difficult. We arrived at a notch between Gothic's main summit and Cast Rocks (didn't look too close, but at least one of these looked doable...anyone been up them). From the notch we had do descend a gully (4th) which brought us into a moat in what remains of last year's snow pack. Following the moat to the left we ended up on a boulder field that provided easy enough travel towards Foggy Pass.

From foggy pass we ascended via the red line in my picture below. It ended up being low 5th class and requiring crawling under some bushes/using the branches as hand hold. Definitely wouldn't recommend trying to go down that way and and going up wasn't great either. After getting back I saw a report from Steph Abegg which had her ascending the blue line in my photo, that is the route I would recommend from foggy pass. Route Photo (Red - our route, Blue - recommended route).

Once we passed the brush we found ourselves on the boulder field below Del Campo's south face. We traversed right towards the standard route and took that all the way to the summit. One short stretch of snow crossed en route.

It took us a bit under 5 hours to get from car->gothic->del campo via this route. We hung out on the summit for some time as a couple other groups arrive. The sun actually started coming out at some point and caused us to think about jumping in the lake far below. I took many pics of (what could be seen) of the surrounding peaks. Clouds and haze were still interfering with visibility in a significant way.

It is quite a spectacular view of Vesper, Morning Star, Sperry & Big Four from atop Del Campo.

On the way down we wandered a bit (skier's) right of where we should have and got cliffed out. Nothing a simple leftward traverse couldn't fix though (marked in blue on the route photo where we should have been).

By the time we reached the lake the sun was out in full force and we found a sweet rock to jump off (10') into the lake. Boy was it frigid, but quite refreshing. I jumped twice. On the way out I took note of how many people were in the basin, many of them overnight campers. One picture I took of one of the smaller lakes has at least 12 tents in it. Suits me that this was a day trip.

All in all about 12 miles, 5k of gain and 8hr40m with ~1.5h of lounging - nice to be able to jump in a cold lake after tagging a few peaks. GPS Linked below, can't figure out the embedded gmaps functionality of the posting tool. GPS Track

[silence]

Nice! Thx for posting!

[geyer]

[goleary]

Thanks Brad! I'll try that next time. And yeah can't say I wasn't expecting it to be mobbed up there, although I figured the questionable weather would scare more people away. Good to see people getting out though!

[olderthanIusedtobe]