[Stefan]

Stefan & I rendezvoused in North Bend at 6:30AM for a climb of Goat Mountain.  After a quick fill-up of my car we were off up the North Fork Snoqualmie.  The last couple miles of road before the Bare Mountain Trailhead had a trace to an inch of mixed snow and ice on it.  Driving it was fine in the morning but a fresh spackling of wet snow during the day had made it much slicker. (I almost skidded off the flattish road at a bend on the way out; and I was only going 15 MPH!).



We parked here on Lennox Creek Road 0.8 miles before the Bare Mountain Trailhead.  Elevation: 2,000 ft.  We were off the road by 8:00AM for this all cross-country outing.  No trails for us fools.  No way.  By 8:15AM I had finally managed to get across Lennox Creek.  Those boulders high enough above waterline were icy.  Those closer to waterline were wet.  Add to that the long spans between boulders and you've got a recipe for kerplooshing.  But I concocted a way across that avoided a dousing of my insoles.



Our initial objective was this spur ridge. The first section of forest from the creek was fairly open and we were making good time.  Then, at about 2,700 ft, all hellbrush broke loose.  Will hell ever freeze over?  Yes, and I think it had right there on that spur ridge.  The underforest was slowly transforming to an overforest.  What's an overforest?  Why that's when there's more brushy open areas than large trees overhead.  The added insult to being foist into this hell was that we'd have to unfoist ourselves at the end of the day to return to the car.  Vine maple was everywhere.  The good news was the vine maple was devoid of leaves.  The bad news was the vine maple was not devoid of fresh clingy snow.  This drenched us thoroughly--me more so than Stefan because he had snow bibs on.  We were slowed by our need to knock the imbruing white stuff off of each bush before proceeding.  We even donned our jackets to stave off the wet.  In about 2 hours we managed to climb up to 4,000 ft.



Then, miraculously, as if ascending Jacob's very ladder, we broke off the ridge and into open heaven country.  We expected to see goats at any time.  Ummm, I guess goats don't graze these slopes...in winter.  At about 4,400 ft we headed rightward (west) toward the upper north basin.  While Stefan forged ahead I applied floatation.  I then followed.  He was sinking in about eight inches on average.  I was sinking in quite a bit less than this.  Finally, at about here (c. 4,600 ft), Stefan saw the error in his ambling ways and put his floaters on too.  While we were there I snapped a few photos before the dark clouds off to the west enveloped us and dissolved our views into a white-noise of falling snow.  In particular, nice shots of Mt. Phelps and our second objective (Pk 4640+) after we'd successfully mounted the goat...sans Vaseline on our pods, of course. 



I leap-frogged Stefan as he fastened his snowshoes and plowed upward--zigzagging as necessary to take the acclivity of least enmity.  The upper basin is steeper than it might appear on maps.  It would also pose a significant avalanche trap in worse conditions.  Even in our conditions it wasn't totally safe.  The snowcover was either fluffy drift powder or scoured crust.  As Stefan chugged to catch up, I veered right in attempt to take a higher bench because it looked flatter from below than the middle bench I was currently on.



Class 4 snowshoeing up a 20-ft small break in the rockband is what was encountered.  The unforeseen problem was the ice crust underneath the 6-8 inches of powder.  As I struggled to keep my floaters from fleeing down the slope (with me still attached), I grasped at the ice crust underneath.  With ingenuity, I used my trekking poles to poke holes in the crust.  I was then able to insert three fingers into each hole as a "hold" and claw my way upward looking like some ugly giant-sized praying mantis. Though it was only a 20-ft 45-degree step-up, it still took me 15 minutes.  Meanwhile, Stefan looked on with amusement.  While he chuckled (I'm sure he was chuckling back there) he took off his snowshoes and simply booted it up the slope.  Yeah, aren't you clever! 



After that little bit of technique experimentation (Stefan's was better than mine), we had no more troubles to the final northwest ridge, reaching it a hundred yards short of the summit.  By this time the weather had really socked us.  It began to snow.  Gone were all semblances of distant views.  Jacob's Ladder had temporarily ascended into the base of a cloud.  Would God be floating on the cloud's upper deck?  We wouldn't get the chance to find out, for the summit of Goat Mountain (5,580F, 1060P) lacked the faith to prairie dog its head through the top to find out.  It had taken us 4 hours to make the summit.  Once we broke out of the brush things went rather quickly.  This Godspeed fortune had us eyeing Pk 4640+ to round out the daylight.  Stefan reconnoitered the best way to get to it (by first descending the way we came up then traversing to the saddle) and I agreed.  In about 45 minutes we got to here thinking we were at the saddle a little to the north.  Our main concern was the condition of the ridge traverse?  How many gendarmes would we encounter.  When we had seen it earlier there didn't appear to be any ridge sentries guarding the way.  But then again, trees have a devilish habit of obscuring these things.  Hopefully, our goat wouldn't be got by kidding our bid for Big Kid.



It was 1:40PM when we set out along the ridge.  Within minutes we encountered a goliath gendarme (visible as the small closed 4,200-ft contour south of the saddle.  Stupidly, we tried traversing around its east side.  Any fool can look at the map and see the terrain is less-steep on the west.  To extricate ourselves from underneath that dunce cap, we had to do some blocky, snowy Class 3 scrambling to regain the crest on the other side.  The saddle seemed to go on forever.  And why were we still descending?  Finally, when our scruffed faces had chanced to sprout new goatees, we began to ascend again.  There were a few other gendarmes encountered but these were circumtrudged without the need to show our climbing credentials.  But we neared the summit eventually. The summit of "Big Kid" * (Pk 4640+, 520P) was the most uninteresting places to be.  It might have been nice if we could see anything, but the clouds and snowfall saw to that.  But one can't complain about such things in winter.  I could think of a few choice toponyms to apply** but we ultimately decided on Big Kid because it is a junior summit to Goat. There is another bump on the continuing ridge northwest of Big Kid that could be called Little Kid.  Little Kid (4,160+ ft) comes within one 40-ft contour of having 400P.  It had taken us an hour (an hour!) to traverse the ridge from where left our packs.  It would take us an hour to reverse the route.  By the time we got back to our packs it was 3:35PM. 



From the saddle we couldn't simply head downhill because there is a canyon of uncertain difficulty east of Big Kid's saddle.  So instead we'd have to arc around the basin back to the spur ridge we'd come up--back into hell.  We angled across and down as best we could to cut off some of the distance.  I guess this proved beneficial, but the devil was not about to let us out of his lair without making us work for it.  With his pitchfork he prodded us across a series of streams.  What's wrong with that, you ask?  Well, every one of these streams was a slabby watercourse.  The slabs were striated with either slick snow or slick running water.  We fell on our arses a number of times trying to gingerly step down or across the snowcovered ones.  Sometimes we purposely slid down them (mini glissades).  You see, the streamcourses were just steep enough to be a problem but not steep enough to say, "Hey, I aint crossing that, it's suicide."



I was happy to see we could see without headlamps until as late as 5:15PM.  Where were we at 5:15PM?  We were about right here (c. 3,100 ft).  How long could it take us to descend 1,200 ft to Lennox Creek?  Geez, I could descend that in 30 minutes.  Ah but it's now dark and slippery and brushy.  Did I mention dark and brushy?  You'd think with headlamps you could see in the dark better.  This is true for the general vicinity of your person (distances up to 20 feet).  But in dense brush one's depth perception might as well be chucked.  All we could see were about ten limbs of vine maple at a time.  And every 20th limb had it out for an eyeball.***  Another lame anomaly about descending in damp conditions in the dark is that one's breath creates a translucent fog in front of one's face.  This severely limits visibility: the 20 feet ahead of you gets reduced to the 5 feet in front of your 10 toes.  Furthermore, if the humidity is really high (as it was for us), the heat from one's face alone will create a fog.  The Catch-22 is that the only way to alleviate the problem is to walk faster (to push through the emanating fog as it forms); but the faster you walk the more prone to stumbling you will be.  Lastly, when descending near a forest-hemmed stream in the dark with headlamps, it is harder than when daylight to leave the creek for open forest.  It seemed to me, no matter what effort I applied, I kept finding myself in the streambed.****  My eventual solution was to traverse sideways until I could no longer hear the stream.  But by this time the noise of the main creek (i.e., Lennox Creek) was beginning to drown out all others.



I was ahead of Stefan for the last few hundred yards to the creek.  I arrived at Lennox Creek and simply walked through the water.  I was so wet by this time I didn't care.  Up on the road on the other side I naturally took it the wrong way to find the car.  But I figured out my mistake after a short distance and turned around for a nice downhill jog to the car.  Stefan was already there with his naked chest illumed by his headlamp. Ugh!  I didn't need to see that.  It was 7:00PM!  11 hours car-to-car.  If we had not been up for a scrum with the Big Kid we would have been back at about 4:00PM.  But, if you want to get things done in winter, you've got to expect a late return from time to time.  Neither of us were complaining.  I had a 24-ounce Budweiser and Arby's on my mind.  Stefan had homemade meatballs on his.

Paul K.

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Art is an adventure.