[b00]

hawkins mt 6-14-09

our route

very pleasant walk in nice area. since i had done hawkins twice before from the west, we started at deroux campground and followed the excellent trail across the nice bridges and past the junction with the trail up to koppen mt(left for koppen, right for hawkins). we ran into a couple of friends who were headed over to do koppen and deroux peaks. they said it was a fun route with a nice glissade off of deroux. the trail followed deroux creek, crossing it (no bridge, but easy) one last time at ~5000'.

thinking this could possibly be the last water, i filled up. i was wrong. there was water every few minutes. we followed the trail to just before the gallagher head lake and then took the road around the south side of hawkins. when the road ended, we headed up some easy snow to hawkins sw ridge. then up over the false summit to the easy summit, class 2. our very moderate pace made the summit in 4 hours. the register lid's threads are stripped, so a new register is needed.

the thimble

i wanted to do the thimble, hawkin's east peak. only one in our party joined me as we headed east from the summit down the ridge to the saddle between the two summits. i did a descending traverse on very easy ground, dropping only about 40' to just below the thimble. my buddy took a moderately harder and slower higher traverse. both approaches worked. we both knew there would be little chance of summiting because thunder and rain, but we wanted to go until we were stopped. we ascended some moderately loose scree and snow up to the base of the thimble and then scrambled some class 3 wet rock to a little saddle on the south side. here the wet black lichen made continuing unsafe so we turned around. it looked exactly like klenke described on summitpost.org. while descending the sun finally returned and the snow was perfect for boot glissades :>) used ice axe, but probably did not need it, some just used poles. a helmet is a good idea for the thimble. fun day! :>)

pano-2.jpg

pano-1.jpg