Mount Wow's name alone was enough to interest me, so when I had the opportunity to join a party headed there, I jumped on the chance. Thanks to Archer, Tuan and Andy for letting me join you!
We parked just outside the MRNP gate and hiked in around 9am. There's a faint trail near the Boundary sign just outside the park, but you'll want to continue INTO the park, where a park exit lane splits off near a park building. It's an obvious trail and shortly after starting upon it, there will be a sign stating that this trail isn't maintained. The trail is an old segment of the Boundary trail that used to be used to monitor the MRNP perimeter long ago. As far as I know the only other existing segment is near the Carbon River entrance (used to climb Florence Peak). If you know of more, let me know
The trail is just how I like it, steep and through fairly open forest. You gain ~500 feet and then drop about 250 to a stream crossing, then steeply up again. There are quite a few blowdowns, most are easy to get over and have all the branches trimmed off but it does increase the difficulty of the hike somewhat. Trail, true to name, follows the Park Boundary pretty closely! We reached the ridgeline around 4100 elevation and headed right onto the ridge, which had intermittent trail and some areas with significant blowdowns.
We stayed on the ridge over some minor high points. The ridge is narrow at times and had a fun scrambly bit with a class 3 downclimb that I enjoyed. Around 4800 elevation we dropped about 200 feet and contoured on a mix of game trails and forest hiking to reach the SWish ridgeline of Mount Wow. There are a LOT of game trails and scat in this area. We found a nice view of Mt Adams along the ridgeline when we finally gained it, but it doesn't show up in my photo. :/
Once on the Wow ridgeline we eventually found a little snow, and a herd of mountain goats on the cliffs nearby (sorry, no photos)
and followed the ridge to the Mount Wow summit, which was unfortunately socked in with clouds We did a little class 3 ish scrambling on crumbly rock to reach the final summit area.
Archer's signature move is a summit handstand, so she did some handstands and we turned around.
Here's what we should have seen:
On the way back we contoured a little higher elevation, then hit some annoying slide alder and descended to the same area as before. Along the way we found a recently killed deer.
Overall trip is about 8.5-9 miles, 4500-4900 gain (range from our various GPS recordings). It took us about 8.5 hours, including about 2 hours of breaks throughout the day.
As far as I know the only other existing segment is near the Carbon River entrance (used to climb Florence Peak). If you know of more, let me know
The Boundary is in good shape from the Mowich Lake road all the way to the August Poch saddle. One of your pics looks down to where I made it last week, but turned around 500' below you coming up from the West Side Road. Glad you made it.
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