[cartman]

Andy was driving into Seattle after a 2000 mile road trip from Colorado to climb here for the summer and having never climbed in Washington wanted to get into the mountains ASAP. As in within 12 hours of arriving ASAP. I wanted to get in the mountains Wednesday cause it was my birthday. We'd never met before, but I knew talking to him on the phone that he sounded like a solid partner, and he was that and more. To introduce Andy to the North Cascades I suggested a rarely done objective - Blackbeard and its neighbor, Kidd. If only we knew the marathon we were getting into... We left Seattle at a reasonable 6am to arrive at the first substantial dirt pullout after passing the sign for Swamp Creek. An easy 200' forest descent brought us to Granite Creek, running fast and high with the spring melt. Iron had mentioned a good log upstream when he did these peaks 3 years ago to the day, so upstream we searched and within ten minutes found a bomber log good enough to walk across the creek on.

Crossing the critical log over Granite Creek

From here we gradually aimed for the creek that drains the basin between Kidd and Blackbeard. Good travel through the mostly snow-covered forest floor and at 4800' we had our first views of Black Peak's impressive East Wall.

First views of Black's East Wall

We crossed the creek draining the large basin below Black Peak on a good log. Turning uphill here through more easy forest we spied the gully draining the basin and entered it at 5500'. We started to boot up it,

The gully at 5500'

but saw above that it narrowed into a rushing waterfall, so exited to the other (south) side onto a forested rib and booted up snow on the rib. Good travel, and this gave us a view of what we would have had to deal with had we stayed on the north side of the creek:

Looking across the gully

Also gave us some good views of the surrounding area.

Vista

Cutthroat

Views east

Corteo

Higher the rib widened and opened up onto more open snowfields, and our first good view of Blackbeard.

Blackbeard

The route essentially goes up the flank of Kidd. We trended right as we went up where it looked good to attain the saddle between the two peaks,

Andy and Blackbeard

all the while watching the views open up more the higher we climbed.

Sundog

Golden Horn and Tower

Corteo's cirque

Hardy, Golden Horn, Tower, Needles

We'd been chatting all along, me giving Andy a primer on the Cascades and climbing in Washington, and he asking questions and letting me know his goals, so we hadn't made a particularly fast pace to here. We decided to climb Kidd first, as we were already partly up it above the saddle and because we could now see that the best route up Blackbeard was not the saddle ridge (too gnarly), but the next ridge to the right.

Blackbeard, another perspective

Coming down that ridge would put us in position to cross the basin back to our up track well below Kidd's summit area. So up we went, making a bit better time now.

Kidd

Up Kidd

Andy nearing the false summit

Views to the west started to show as we climbed Kidd's easy slopes to its false summit.

Fisher and Arches

The Tack and Graybeard

Andy at the false summit

From here it was a fun and interesting ridge run to the true summit with outstanding views all around, making sure to stay well away from the ridge cornices and summit snow mushroom. All the cornices on Kidd and Blackbeard seemed to be formed from easterly winds as they all were overhanging to the west.

On to the true summit

Andy and the summit snow mushroom

We reached the dry summit of Kidd, 7215'. I decided ahead of time to call this unnamed peak Kidd to stick with the pirate theme and because this peak is Blackbeard's slightly smaller kid neighbor. The summit was close to the massive Black Peak and gave a great perspective of many surrounding behemoths.

Black Peak

Corteo from summit of Kidd

Repulse

Fisher

Katsuk and Mesahchie

Graybeard

Repulse, Fisher, Mesahchie, Kitling, Graybeard

Kidd summit

And more to the north across the highway.

Hardy and Golden Horn

Hardy to Tower to Whistler

No register found here. With time now pressing, we didn't dally too long and made our way back along the ridge and down the easy snow slopes to the upper basin, where we made a rising rightward traverse to our objective ridge.

On to Blackbeard

This ridge was mostly snow to start, but became dry and standard Cascades mixed choss and krummholz as we worked our way up the route of least resistance, mostly class 2 with a few class 3 moves. Soon we were on the summit of Blackbeard, 7241'.

Fisher, Arches, Katsuk, Mesahchie, Cub, Kitling, Graybeard

Photogenic Corteo

Highway 20 below

Kidd from Blackbeard

Andy looking from Jack to Hardy

These peaks are an excellent example of a phenomenon I've experienced numerous times in the Cascades--that a smaller peak gives better views of surrounding giants than the views from the larger peaks themselves. These two peaks, especially Kidd, are ringed by Cascades 8000ers. Including distant peaks, I counted nearly 20 8000'+ peaks visible, and many more 7000' peaks. Even Hozomeen was visible on the distant horizon. As we relaxed on the summit, Andy opened up the summit register. I knew from iron's report that Dallas Kloke had placed the register and made the first three signed ascents with various partners.

Blackbeard register

Mike and Carrie's ascent three years ago was the fourth, and I knew Fay, Deb and Eileen had summited via a camp at Wing Lake. We were only the sixth party to sign in,

Sixth party to sign

and I would not be surprised if there have been few if any other ascents of this peak; partly because of so many other larger objectives nearby, and perhaps partly due to the fact that neither of these peaks quite makes the 400' prominence mark. I'm certain Kidd has seen even fewer ascents, perhaps less than five. However, now it was getting a bit late. We needed to get down as fast as we could so that just maybe we could find the log across Granite Creek before it got really dark. We downclimbed our route on Blackbeard and booted across the basin to our up track on Kidd's slope, and down the rib to the gully, and then down to the log crossing at 4800'. From here it was only 600' vertical to Granite Creek but close to two miles, and though we tried to stay on our track it faded into the duff-covered snow and we lost it about half way and just walked across the snow via the path of least resistance. Despite our efforts it was essentially dark when we came near Granite Creek, with a bit of a dropoff below to get to it. Knowing that the creek draining the basins was behind us, we started upstream looking for the log. After a while it seemed we had gone too far; we had seen nothing that would afford any hope of crossing the creek. We went a little farther to be sure, but no luck. So we started back to the west, looking every fifty feet for any sign. Suddenly I saw a couple of boot tracks that didn't seem to be recent and decided to see where they went; sure enough, there was our log. I think Andy was more excited than I was, maybe wondering what I'd gotten him into on his first Cascades foray. Took more than two hours of searching but we found it. Someday I need to get me one of those fancy Geepus gizmos, that would have saved a lot of time and effort. In retrospect we could have built a short series of snow cairns to mark the way. Or just started earlier and moved faster. The 200' of gain back to the highway was easy, and let us out at the second dirt pullout after Swamp Creek, where we walked a quarter mile back to Andy's truck. We took our time winding down and eventually hit the very quiet and dark North Cascades Highway. With a break or two to catch a little sleep, we ended up at my place in Seattle just after 4am. Quite the mini-marathon! And by a stroke of luck Andy's truck gave its all to get us back, because the next day it died for good here in town. Fortunately, he found another easily to get him on his way. This was a fun adventure, and I had a great time on my first North Cascades trip of the year with a fine new partner. Blackbeard and Kidd are ideally situated for outstanding views, the terrain is moderate, and there is enough routefinding to keep one engaged. Andy got his introduction to the North Cascades big time, will have a great time in his AAI courses, get to climb some Cascade classics, and hopefully we can team up again before he leaves for Colorado later this summer. 8 miles, 3500-4000' gain Eric J. Johnson

[Magellan]

Great stuff, birthday boy! Lots of GPS stuff available on smart phones.

[wildernessed]

[iron]

sounds like jack should be the next peak on your list...

[Brushbuffalo]

Outstanding

[ree]

Thanks for the memory, Eric!!! That was a fun trip. You had so much more snow than we did. I remember there was one patch of snow to get our water! Yipes. We talked about your trip report on our recent outing. Glad you put it up.