[lovetowonder]

I've been wanting to get up Silver Peak for years. The stars finally aligned this week. A few of my coworkers wanted to hike to a lake, set up hammocks, and drink wine. I thought that could be fun if I could scramble a peak before spending hours hanging out at a lake. Silver Peak + Annette Lake ended up fitting that description perfectly! Katie and I started at the Annette Lake TH at 8am Tuesday morning. Uneventful, pretty trail up to the lake.

Reached the lake around 9:30am.

Two ahead of us on the trail. We stopped to chat for a minute before turned left/east uphill. I had read there's a turn off for the peak before reaching the lake but I didn't see anything obvious so we turned off behind the campsite area. We quickly gained elevation and followed a climbers path through the trees and brush to a small talus field.

We followed carins through a small talus field, a bit of brush, and into a much larger talus field. This field continued all the way to the ridge. The lower portion had a rough "trail" marked with carins but this eventually petered out. Our ascent up the talus took a while and was a bit tedious but I had been well-warned from previous TRs so was expecting it. What I wasn't expecting were the hordes of mosquitoes... oops! I should've known better than to forget the bug spray at home. I quickly put my cap and long sleeve on to avoid the blood thirsty creatures but I still brought home a dozen+ itchy bites.

Finally we gained the ridge and were rewarded with views. A nearby goat curiously checked me out when I first reached the ridgeline but we didn't see him again until he was higher up the ridge from us. Then upward for us to the summit. We followed the faint bootpath on the west side of the ridge.

Soon we were at the top of the peak. The forecast was less than ideal so we were grateful for the high cloud layer which allowed us to still have views. We could see Baker, Glacier Peak, the Olympics, Daniel, Stuart, Rainier, and Adams along with countless smaller peaks. It was really nice to have just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away for a minute.

We spent half an hour at the top taking in the views, playing name-that-peak, signing the register, and eating lunch before heading back down the way we came. We didn't see anyone else above the lake.

Soon (not really all that soon, the talus field felt like it took a while) we arrived back at the lake and found our friends. We spent a few hours hanging out and chasing the clearly-well-fed-chipmunks away from our packs.

We all hiked out together in the rain. This ended up being a super fun way to get a scramble in and hang out for a few hours at a lake with some great people.

[puzzlr]

It's good to see some photos from the big talus portion of this route. I've often wanted to go this way for the audacity of climbing up all that rock. But always given in and gone the "easy" trail route from Olallie Meadows.

[Malachai Constant]

That route is great if the snow is hard enough to climb and glissade down. If to soft it slides. It gets to be a horror show of choss when it dries out. I have had it great about 1 out of 5.

[joker]

I love doing some variant of that route from above on skis right after road access opens to near Windy Pass on FR 9070. Bonus points if someone else has done it already the same day so I don't have to kick fresh steps By that point, we usually can't quite make it down to the lake, but we usually get down at least as far as where the brush starts to overtake the talus slopes. I have no interest in repeating it once the snow is gone. That's a LOT of talus stomping and there's a really decent trail on the other side . But for those who are more keen on such things, it's certainly a good way to have a side of the mountain to yourself for the afternoon. And there are some really nice trees along that slope.