[Randy]

"Beave", Mike Collins and myself had an interesting outing up to Lynch today. Lynch Peak (7280') lies just north of Mount Daniel and Pea Soup Lake. The situation started off bad. I rolled over, looked at my alarm clock and noticed "5:37". What the ...! I rolled back, then back over again to go for another look, "5:38"! How could I sleep through two frickin' alarms!?! Thankfully, Mike and "Beave" were still in cell range and I was able to hook up with them in Issaquah, and after several apologies later we hit the trail at 8:45, an hour later than we had hoped. Anyhow, we made quick work of the trail that leads to Peggy's Pond where we took a brief break before heading for higher ground. From the pond, we trended NW aiming for a saddle at ~7000' just west of Point 7081'. The route to the saddle was all slab work and rock, much of it loose. From the saddle we traversed above several, small snowfields before glissading down part of another larger one. We avoided several crevasses before breaking out onto more rock and slabs. We simply kept traversing and traversing (dropping as we went) until we rounded the corner at around 6300' just above Pea Soup Lake. The lake is much more removed from the ice age than the latest maps would have you believe. From a little bench just to the east of Pea Soup, we dropped gear and packs and set off up the hill (north) toward Lynch 1000' directly above. The south slope consisted of talus and scree and presented few difficulties, no worse than class 2. We made the summit somewhere between 4 and 4.5 hours after starting out. There is a register, but we found it in pretty poor shape. We signed in and then sealed the film canister in a new zip-loc bag for safe keeping. By this time the weather was starting to really sock us in, visibility faded, and the snow started falling. We set off quickly in an attempt to reach Dip Top Peak just west of our current position. We downclimbed about 450' towards the gap separating the two peaks, but by this point the weather was moving in too fast for our liking and every nearby high point gradually disappeared. With all the work we had left to do we deciding to call it quits and get back down at a decent hour. We climbed back up a couple hundred feet then traversed east then down back to our gear. We could see the smaller Hyas Lake nearly 3000' below and decided to make a b-line straight into the valley where we could hook up with a nice trail that would take us back to the road. The first two-thirds of the route went well enough, all things considered. But that last 1000' was pretty horrible. Ugly little cedar thickets with lots of brush and cliffs mixed to make it all the more fun, not to mention everything was soaking wet. Well, we eventually made it down to the PCT, which we walked about a mile to the south until we were almost right on top of the smaller Hyas. From here we dropped about 500' feet through more heavy brush until we got down into the flats just north of the lake. After 15 minutes we found the lake and then the nice, wide horse trail shortly after. It was a relatively uneventful walk from here back to the car. 9.5 hours car to car.

[Randy]

A few shots from the trip...

dip top and lynch

daniel

hyas lake