[b00]

Buck mountain 8-12-06 Beautiful scenery, great weather, interesting people and lots of off-trail travel. What a great adventure! This trip is more an exercise in route finding, than scrambling. although you must be experienced to be able to handle and enjoy it.

Panorama from high pass - buck mt 8-12-06

We left trinity at 9:30am and followed the easy trail to buck creek pass. on the way there, we ran into a most unusual gentleman named robert. We came across him about 4 miles up the trail from trinity. He was sitting on the trail with 4 giant trunks, cases and a huge duffel bag along with a 5 gallon water container. At first glance I thought he was working trail maintenance, then I thought maybe horseback. He wore work boots, jeans and a cotton flannel shirt and appeared to be rolling himself a cigarette. He said he started at phelps creek nine days before and would carry his crates and such up the trail a ways two at a time and then go back grab another couple, etc… I tested the weight of one of the crates and I don’t think I could have lifted just that one! He said he was headed to miner’s ridge and showed us his route on his forest service map. I doubt he realizes the amount of elevation gain and loss coming up. At his pace, must be a mile or two a day, I don’t know if he will make it. but, he seems like a nice, if not somewhat different soul, so I hope he does.

robert on the right

after buck creek pass the trail, although not on my map, continues on quite well to high pass. we stopped to make camp about 1/8 mile before high pass at a very pleasant spot with a little bit of water and nice views. Even though we walked at a moderate pace, took tons of breaks and some extended ones, we did this leg of the trip in seven hours. We left camp 5:30am and cramponed up to high pass. the views here were magical - Glacier peak playing hide and go seek, the valley below to our west looking like the ocean with a sea of clouds, the moon shining down on us, the sun starting to yawn and open to us like a cat stretching from a glorious nap.

view from high pass - buck mt 8-12-06

Napeequa peak (8073) looks like a great trip in itself. After shooting photos and soaking up the ambience we looked down across the valley floor to our next intermediate destination, the 6600’ level notch seen from high pass on the west shoulder of berge mtn(either point 7953 or 7948 depending on which map you look at, go figure). We crossed the easy valley, sometimes on a goat trail to the notch. from this notch we traversed some slightly slick moderately steep heather slopes around the west shoulder of berge, occasionally finding a cairn while we continued a rising traverse. Once we were around the shoulder enough, we began heading up and a litte climber’s left up heather, talus and boulders to a 7600’ saddle in the ridge that extends south from berge mt. Here is where we made our most time consuming mistake of our whole trip. Instead of heading left in a descending traverse, we headed a little right and down some very steep heather, dirt and rocks. After descending a few hundred feet, we came to a point where we needed to do ten feet of exposed class 4 down climbing. After finding no better option other than heading back up(which we were not going to do), we secured some spectra cord around a rock horn and used it as a hand line so we could descend to easier terrain below. We headed down and across this valley to a “fence of larches” and down to the pond at 6650’ that stood between berge and buck. We did a rising traverse on easy terrain below and then skirting up just south of buck’s north summit. Once in the 8000’ basin west of buck our next dilemma began, which one is buck’s true(middle) summit. We spent quite a while studying the terrain and the summit ridge directly in front of us looked significantly lower than the one south of it. we got out the gps and the lower summit had close to the gps coordinates listed in the 75 scrambles book. All guide books have some errors, so we thought this must be one of them. the route looked easy up this lower summit in front of us. But, the route did not look easy on the higher summit. Still I thought, since this is only a scramble, once we get up closer to the right gully on the higher summit it will not look as hard. After I weighed in(with the what proved to be the wrong decision), we cramponed up towards the summit. Fortunately my buddy, who is a lot faster on steep snow and very sharp, took another look at that lower summit. From his new vantage point that summit no longer looked lower and directed us to change our course. For him, it was a traverse of some steep hard snow. For me, since I was lower, I dropped down and across the valley and both of us headed up the class 2/3 rock to the true (middle) summit of buck - a small summit block, but enough room for both of us and our packs. The registry showed we were the second party up there this year. Some things that may help in identifying the correct (middle) summit; the summit has a small quartz band near the summit block, when viewed from the 7000’ basin it will look a lot lower than the south summit, the 75 scrambles gps coordinates (according to our gps) are about 1/10 mile off and the terrain will look like an easy to moderate scramble.

Panorama true summit right of center - buck mt 8-12-06

Now armed with much more understanding of the route, we made good time back to camp. We avoided our earlier mistake by taking berge’s sw arm up to near 6900 and traversing over to the pass.

getting back from buck mountain 8-12-06

on the way back to high camp we ran into a couple of nice guys who were planning on doing buck and maybe napeequa. They had come up the shortcut that bushwacks from trinity up between high pass and berge. They said it took them 6 hours. They looked pretty fit. This information reinforced our decision to take the trail – if it took them 6 hours bushwacking and us 7 hours of lollygagging on easy trail to get almost as far, we made the right decision. 12 hours later we returned to our camp. we took everything down and moved camp back down to a noisy and crowded buck creek pass. we left camp at buck creek pass 5:30am and arrived back at our car to find a flat tire 9:30am. Equipment – ice axe, helmet, spectra cord(not needed if on route), crampons(also not needed if on route and if we crossed high pass later in the day) References: 75 scrambles, beckey, wta report from gren bjork, summitpost.org

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- -true summit right of center

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panorama high pass afternoon

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liberty cap

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fence of larches

[Quark]

Damn, that's wierd - Stefan met a gent up in N Cascades (Chelan area I think) several years ago doing that exact same thing as your Robert was doing. He figured it was a meth lab relo project or something. Could be just some guy setting up backcountry travelers to give 'em sumpin' to think about. That'd be funny as hell. I might start doing stuff like that, just for the hell of it.

[RayD]

Robert says he has done this stretch before and was going to Bumping Lake this time. Go figure!

[Guiran]

Great trip! Louis Creek Basin is a really neat place to camp if you come in from the Napeequa Valley side. Feels tremendously remote.

[Get Out and Go]

I met you with my friend as you two were coming out on Sunday morning (See my Trip Report for Buck, Pt 7529, and High Pass) and described your Buck accomplishment. I saw the Subaru with a flat tire and wondered who was going to find that pleasant surprise when they came out. Your last comment as we parted on the trail was that we were going to meet an interesting character up ahead. Yeah, we had an interesting conversation with Robert, to say the least. When we came out on Tuesday, he had made considerable progress, maybe 2 miles from the pass.

[Get Out and Go]

Glad to see the photographic evidence of Robert. Great pictures of the route out to Buck as well.

[Tazz]

great tr BOO. Thanks

[JimK]

Here is Stefan's report of the guy with the suitcase and dufflel: Bob? Scroll down the page. This was a pretty interesting thread on its own.