[rstoddard24]

Prologue I've been wanting to check out ice lakes ever since I was rejected from the enchantments lottery yet again last summer. We had agreed on ice lakes as a backup, but then had to change plans due to fires closing both Phelps Creek and Entiat River trailheads. This year the stoke level was high for ice lakes. I recruited a decent sized group and the plan was a relaxing, boozy weekend camped near the upper ice lake with some casual scrambles of the nearby peaks for anyone who desired. Naturally as the weekend approached, some dropped out, and we had a group of 5 - and then the night before 3 more flaked due to "the heat", "the smokiness", and "opportunities for cragging" :P Bora and I both knew that the idea of a relaxing, social weekend was out the window, and it was game on to see if we could link the 5 Bulger climbs in the area in a 3-day trip with entrance/exit at Phelps Creek TH. Spoiler: we didn't make it, but still had an epic weekend and climbed Maude, Seven Finger Jack, and Fernow. We left Seattle Friday around 6:30pm to make the drive out to the Phelps Creek TH and made a new plan on the way. I told Bora to bring glacier gear just in case we wanted to pioneer a route crossing the Entiat Glacier (from ice lakes) to approach Fernow/Copper from the Entiat Meadows :P Copper is way the heck out there, so our plan revolved around figuring out how to get that one on day 2 so it didn't have to be combined with the approach or exit. In the end we decided the Entiat glacier route was low chance of success and not even worth bringing the gear. Instead, we intended on going for Fernow-Copper from the Leroy basin side (meaning a successful climb of Copper would essentially mean climbing Fernow twice). The plan was: Day 1 drop overnight gear at Leroy basin, climb Maude + 7FJ, grab gear and camp high near tarn at 7300'. Day 2: Fernow-Copper-Fernow from 7300' tarn, move camp to upper ice lakes. Day 3: S. Spectical Butte and exit. Very ambitious; we knew the chances of Copper we low but we had to go for it. We stopped for tacos in Monroe, then stopped to help some dude whose van had broken down in the middle of the road deep down the Chiwawa river road. We immediately regretted stopping - his story definitely didn't add up. He said he had hitched a ride into town, called the sheriff to get a tow, then hitched a ride back and was now stranded. Huh? Anyway, we jumped his car and got away without getting axe-murdered. We concluded he didn't mean us any harm, but has lying about everything to cover up his involvement in a backcountry meth lab based close to trinity trailhead. In any case, we eventually got to the Phelps creek TH at 10:30pm, got out of the car to pretty thick smoke and even thought for a hot sec that our friends who bailed might have had some wisdom. Day 1 (Apprach + Maude + 7FJ) We woke up at 5am, left the TH at 6, and had a pretty uneventful hike down the Phelps Creek train -> Leroy Creek trail, and made it up to Leroy basin at 8:05. We didn't realize we were moving so quick, I think we were just super excited! We shuffled gear into our flash packs and ate some snacks, then headed to climb Maude via the easy route (saddle to ice lakes). The trail is pretty nice for awhile, then it disperses a little in the bushes (each time on the trip we hiked this section our navigation got progressively worse..). Just below the 6800' saddle I punched thru the tinyest of snow patches and cut open my knee on a rock. Of course, since I am the biggest wuss and super queasy I got super dizzy and had to sit down for a moment. It really wasn't that bad, but a good eye opener to be more careful - the snow patch seriously looked like there could not possible be anything under it but it was not messing around! I cleaned and patched up my knee just so I didn't have to look at the blood anymore and we continued up to the saddle. Once we got to 6800' saddle we found a more established trail again, then got to the ice lakes saddle (~7700') at 10:05am. The route up Maude was easy class 2; made it up in at about 11:15am where we found some other people on top (weren't expecting too since we didn't see them climbing!). They were super friendly, and even gave words of encouragement when we told them our ambitious plans . It was pretty smoky, couldn't see beyond the spectical buttes check out the photos:

After relaxing and eating lunch for ~30min, we set our sights on 7FJ. I hadn't put much thought into how to connect the peaks since that was not in the original plan. I remembered summitpost listed a shortest connection thru the col (class 3 + steep snow). It looked possible, and we agreed to cautiously check it out. We downclimbed a moat for about 200' and took a look around....exposed, loose class 4 with 1000' more to descend before traversing to the col...no thanks. We climbed back to the NW ridge and I remembered that summitpost also listed a class 3 gulley to connect to 7FJ that would save some elevation and was more direct. We chose the first prominent gulley off the NW ridge (which I now see is not the typical W gulley route). Pretty loose, with one or two class 4 moves got us down to the 7200' contour where we had an easy traverse to the 7FJ climbing route at 2:15pm (took us 2.5 hours to descent the gulley). We passed two dudes who where coming from 7FJ heading for Maude! We exchanged notes...we recommended to go up the standard route Although, I don't think we lost much time, it would have taken use at least 1.5 hours to descend standard route, and we saved 1000' of climbing so saved time for the climb. The climb up 7FJ was more fun than Maude. We opted for solid class 3 climbing in many places to forgo loose class 2. It is a really unique mountain, hard to see the high point until you are up there; it looks like it is going to be exposed but then it is just class 2 ish. Got to 7FJ summit at 4pm and got to look at the more photogenic side of Maude, and look on the Fernow which looked intimidating:

Looking back up the Maude gulley

7 Finger Shadow

We also got a look at the Entiat glacier route that we had considered pioneering. It looked doable...just the snow-steep rock transition looked pretty sketchy. We joked that it could be done with a double-rope rappel from a snow bollard to get past the steep rock (joked because we practiced snow bollard anchor in our mountaineers course, but does anyone ever use them?).

Looking at Entiat glacier route

Entiat glacier photo from later (7FJ-Fernow col)

We took a completely different way down which ended up working out despite having to do a little routefinding. I think it took us longer to downclimb than to climb (typical). We made it back to our gear at Leroy basin, and decided that it would be laborious to set camp up near the 7300' tarn; we knew hiking that would be much faster with a light pack and would only add about an hour. So, we found a very cushy (if buggy) impacted campsite and set up for the night, then got in the tent at 8pm after gorging ourselves with food and sipping hot cocoa.

Day 2 (Fernow) We woke up at 4am, and saw some stars! Less smokey than day 1. Looked clear to the NE but smoky to the SW. Great, Fernow/Copper are NE! We were not stoked to start the climb in the dark, so sipped coffee and lallygagged until heading out at 5:35am. The climb up the basin below 7FJ was straightforward and pretty fast, we made it to the 7800' saddle at the basin head at 6:37am. The coolest part was seeing 15-20 deer hanging out on the snowfield in the basin when we got there; when they saw us they dispersed in every direction. Looking over the saddle, we could see the 6600' bench far below but the snow is very steep here. Our set up was ice axe with trail runners and no crampons/traction, so our motto was we were willing to go out of the way to avoid steep snow. We had downloaded gps tracks from two other trip reports, one took the 7500' saddle due E of the tarn, Matt Lemke and co. took the low route downclimbing to 6800' NW of the tarn to traverse around the cliff bands. We left 7800' saddle to took for the route to the tarn, and found two big cairns marking the route down (still well above the 7600' saddle tho). We started down at the cairns, but immediately found ourselves off route and downclimbing class 4. This definitely woke us up a little! On the way back we easily saw our mistake - right after descending there is a right turn to a loose class 2 path (we added an additional cairn for someone who went where we did). Fernow and the tarn valley looked beautiful in the smoky morning light:

Looking back at basin with all the deer

looking at top of 7500' saddle

Class 4 downclimb

The route down the 7500' saddle due E of the tarn was also too steep to do without crampons, so we opted for Matt Lemke's route. The next section was the crux of the climb: traversing over to 6600' bench. The downclimb was on blocky talus and pretty easy, but after rounding the cliff band at 6800', the rock quality continues to deteriorate and we found ourselves on cement-like steep dirt that was difficult to get traction. This was mentally frustrating and also took a long time. The climb up Fernow was easy in comparison to this traverse. We left the 6600' bench around 8:20am, and made it up to the high saddle at 8700' at 10:10am. We followed the beta from another report: climb just to the right of the waterfall, then get on snow at 7000' bench, climb up a snow finger to get back on rock (still to the right of the waterfall), keep climbing and cross the water at ~7700', then climb up to 8700' basin. We went all the way to the saddle to look around, pretty nice vertical relief down to entiat meadows!

start of traverse, not so bad here

The rest of the climb is pretty fun. find the chockstone gulley, climb up then the route is pretty well cairned. Involves traversing some ledges and up a loose gulley, end up on the E rib. We missed the class 3 finish and finished on class 4 rock (solid though), but we saw the class 3 route for the descent. If you look hard enough it is there ha. We got to the summit at 11am and decided it was far too late to make the trip over to Copper. It seemed in the best scenario (meaning the traversing at the bottom of the Fernow glacer was a go), we would still be descending Fernow in the dark. no thanks. We stayed on top of Fernow for a full 45 min eating and enjoying the hazy views. We found the summit register; we were the 11th party to sign this year.

Now that Copper was off the table, we took our time descending, more or less back the way we came. We enjoyed a short glissade on the 7000' bench, and still had a sh##ty time traversing the 6800' dirt even tho we took a slightly lower line. I guess I recommend bringing crampons to take one of the snow routes to avoid this - although it doesn't save any elevation it is much more direct and saves a nasty traverse. In any case, after the "crux" we had a nice walk back to camp in Leroy Basin.

nasty traverse section

Class 4 downclimb ends between two small snow patches (easy class 2 just to the left)

Day 3 (S. Spectacle Butte "attempt") The plan for day 3 was to backtrack to Ice Lakes and go for S. Spectacle Butte. We left camp at 5:11am, and had some challange navigating to the Ice lakes saddle (even though we had done it before easily). Somehow the bushes looked different this time We got to the Ice Lakes saddle at 6:18am, where we enjoyed the best views of the entire trip, with the red sun rising in the dissipating smoke over Ice lake and the Spectacle Buttes. We noticed we were only 700' below S. Spectacle Butte summit (but still a long way away!)

only view of Glacier pk

We set a conservative turn around time of 11am, since that was the time we summited Fernow; we wanted to give ourselves enough time/energy to pack up camp and hike out. We had a lot of fun navigating the Ice Lakes basins...there was the "leap of faith" (jump over lake outlet stream) and the "snow deep water solo" (snow traverse with a wet run out). We found the unmaintained ice lakes trail and hiked down to 6400' for the traverse over the S. Spectacle SW ridge (I think this is the best contour to traverse). The going was OK, but about 1/3 or the way through the traverse we found a snow filled gully with water running underneath, way to sketch to cross. We went high to get around and found super-sketch steep dirt to traverse. Bora's feet were sliding since his trail runners had gotten trashed from the trip and were losing their traction. At this point it was 8:30am and we would be pushing the turn around time, and we also didn't want to try class 4 climbing on the Spectacle SW ridge with trashed footwear, so we called it. We headed back to the upper ice lake for some lunch, relaxed in the sunshine and jumped in the icy lake We hiked back to take down camp and hiked out, made it back to the car at 3:20pm.

saddle leads to Entiat glacier

one last view of 7FJ

Asics v. Altras: not all trail runners created equal

Epilogue Is it possible to link these 5 peaks in 3 days in/out of Phelps Creek TH? maybe. To do this your strategy needs to be totally different - being willing to carry overnight gear for high camps/bivies. I think it would look like Day 1: approach, S Spectacle, Maude, camp at 6800' saddle near ice lakes. Day 2: 7FJ + Fernow, bivy Fernow East ridge. Day 3: Copper and backtrack (downclimb fernow and out). Bringing crampons to cut the Fernow approach would help too. As fun as it is to make ambitious plans and think of creative ways to link peaks, its also nice to have a solid reason to come back to these places. Ice Lakes basin has beauty that rivals the enchantments without the crowds, and I am already excited to return. Plus, we have to pioneer the Entiat glacier approach for Copper

[olderthanIusedtobe]

Nice! I've only been to Ice Lakes once. Really should return again. I remember it being beautiful.

[Distel32]

[jboealps]

Nice Report - I wish there was a way to rate hard dirt. d1, d2, d... Some of the most dangerous "climbing" I've done was on hard dirt. ( or steep wet heather.) Crampons come in handy on hard dirt. And one can also do a "dirt arrest" with a good ice axe on steep dirt. Traversing across the steep dike from Lower Ice Lakes to South Spectacle Butte is the crux to the entire climb. We got the rope out there. You guys moved very fast, good work. Jerry

[silence]

Nice!