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North Cascades Climbing Washington

Mt Shuksan, Fisher Chimneys

I just moved back to Washington from Denver and I was psyched to get out in the North Cascades on return.

I met Byron at the Mt Baker Ski Area on Friday evening and we camped out so that we could have a leisurely start Saturday morning. The road is currently closed up to Artist Point at the Heather Meadows Visitor Center, or Grandma’s Hut as I’ve know it to be called. This added only a small amount of milage/elevation to our destination for the day, the White Salmon camp just below Winnies Slide.

We started at 10:30am and made it to Lake Ann by noon. It was a warm day and we stopped by the lake to have lunch before starting up the trail toward the Chimneys.

The trail past Lake Ann is well established and there are a number of good camp sites about 5-10 minutes down the trail just before the creek crossing. After that the path switchbacks up steeply for a ways and crosses a talus field just before entering the first of the chimneys.

There were a number of groups climbing that day so it wasn’t difficult to see the route from a distance but even without other folks to follow, the path seemed to be well established. We made it to camp just before 4pm.

The next morning we started our climb at 6am. The lower bivy site didn’t have a great water source so we climbed Winnies Slide, the first steep snow pitch, up to Camp 2 where there was a good flow coming out of the Upper Curtis Glacier. We filled our water bottles and then started onto the snow.

The glacier was in great shape and travel was straightforward with minimal obstacles to navigate. We climbed the Hourglass, the second and final steep snow pitch, before traversing on to the Sulphide Glacier. The upper stretch of the Sulphide was also in good shape and we climbed it up to the based of the South East Ridge on the summit block where we took a brief break before starting our climb on the ridge.

There are a couple of notches you can start the ridge climb from. We chose the further right and slightly deeper notch which resulted in some light down-climbing after the first pitch. This put us at the saddle of the second notch. We simul-climbed the route in 3ish blocks. It is mostly 3rd class with a few steeper but unsustained low 5 moves.

We summited at 10:30am and turned around quickly to start the long slog back to the car. We down climbed via the gully which was ultimately going to be much quicker than waiting around to rappel it. The gully down-climbed no harder than 4th class.

Both snow pitches we rappelled on fixed deadman that had been buried at the top of both Hourglass and Winnies. We made it back to our camp at 2pm. A nap was the vibe at this point so we took a brief one then packed up and walked out of camp around 3:30pm

The climb down the chimneys with our overnight packs wasn’t too tricky. The first two “pitches” off the ridge were the most sustained 4th class and it seemed to ease up after that. We were able to down-climb the whole thing without any additional rappels. I think we hit the lake at 6pm, only 4 more miles to go.

Things slowed down for us after this, finally we got to the cars at 8:40pm. Just under a 15 hour day. Not too bad. It’s nice to be back in the Cascades.