[Justus S.]

Silica Mountain (~5400ft) I needed an easier training hike to get in shape. I decided to hike up Silica as its just a few miles and around 3k gain. I drove up Beckler River road then up the road to Evergreen LO. Parked at where the road crosses Evergreen Ck. The map shows an old abandoned road that goes up alongside Evergreen Ck. This abandoned road is overgrown with alders etc… so not very pleasant. Fortunately, it is early season so things haven’t really leafed out and there were a few snow patches. 45min to one hour brought me to where the road would have crossed the ck. I thought maybe it would end here in a brush field, but it turned out to be a nice fern meadow which was full of new lilies. I crossed the meadow and went into the woods on the far side then proceed a short bit and crossed a small ck /gully. It was then about 2hrs of forested slopes up to the summit. The woods were good with some brush but nothing too bad this early( a few nice view areas also enroute). Most of the up was snow free, 90%? The summit is treed with one nice view of the Monte Cristo area. What you want to do from here is continue north a few hundred yards (down and up) to get to a nice open ridge with near 360views. I hung out here for about one hour enjoying all the views and sunshine. Gravity assist got me back to the car in about 2:15 from the summit. Great springtime summit. Really enjoyed this one.

Lilies in meadow

Some snow, Nearing Summit

Summit View

Viewpoint

Keyes Sloan

View toward Glacier Clark Whittier

Del Campo

Glacier Peak

Bear

Sloan

Map

[Stefan]

how are you still using TOPO! ?

[RichP]

Great looking summit. I'll have to try this one.

[Justus S.]

Stefan, Yeah, I got a PC recently after years of only Mac and no TOPO! so I copied my copy from an old hard drive, no need for CDs. I had version 2.6.8. This version was very basic I liked how you could run it on any PC from any usb flash drive, sd card, etc. You didn't need to install anything. I still have the CDs even though I'll probably never use them again. The internet makes most of this dated, but I still like the look and basics of the 7.5' series TOPO! maps.