Distance: 12.4 mi.
Elevation Gain: 5500 ft.
We were spending the weekend in Skykomish and thought this would be a fun nearby ascent with good weather and (hopefully) good snow conditions. We drove up the bumpy road to the Lake Ethel trailhead and were very glad to be in Brad’s high-clearance vehicle for some of the deep trenches in the road. There were a handful of mosquitoes buzzing around the trailhead. We got on trail at 8:45 AM and boy howdy could this trail use some love. I’d estimate that there were about 30 downed trees across the trail en route to Lake Ethel, and plenty more dead ones just waiting for a stiff wind to come by (I would definitely avoid this trail on high wind days). The climb was pretty steep for the 3500 feet to the lake. We reached the clear-cut area at 4,000 feet at about 10 AM. We had to cross a logging road multiple times and the trail was sometimes a bit hidden on the other side, but it was always there. We reached snow right when we re-entered the woods at 5,000 ft. We switched from trail runners to mountaineering boots for the soft crust in the woods, but we weren’t post-holing too bad.
We parted ways with the Lake Ethel trail, which heads south to the lake, at about 5400 ft and continued west along the ridge toward the Chiwaukums. We had a brief descent at about 5800 ft, then climbed a steep east-facing slope to gain the east ridge of North Chiwaukum. The snow in the upper slopes was a bit softer but the postholing wasn’t too terrible. Snowshoes would be helpful on a warmer day. We could also see that Lake Ethel is still frozen over.
We continued southwest, past a brief scramble and lots of traversing low angle snow, until we reached the east ridge of Middle Chiwaukum.
We pulled out ice axes for this snowy knife edge until we could safely get onto the rocks to the summit.
There were faint boot tracks for the final easy scramble and we reached the summit just before 2 PM. After spending a few minutes on the summit enjoying the views of the Chiwaukums and other nearby peaks, we retraced our steps down the ridge. We then decided to summit North Chiwaukum via easy dirt slopes, which allowed us to avoid a longer snow traverse. We reached the summit of North Chiwaukum at 2:30 PM. We continued down the east ridge of North Chiwaukum until we met our up tracks and followed those back out.
We switched back into trail runners at the snow line (sweet relief!) and then made quick progress of the remaining 2500 ft to the trailhead. We tried to make some of the branches less stabby on our way out, but a chainsaw would be much more effective! We reached the trailhead, which was exponentially more buggy, at about 5:30 PM.
(Download the free Gaia GPS app on your phone to view tracks and then get a Gaia GPS membership if you want offline access. Discount below!)
Gear Used:
- Aluminum ice axe
- Gaiters
- Glacier glasses
- GPS
- Helmet
- Mountaineering boots
- Trail runners
- Trekking poles
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