Distance: 21.6 mi.
Elevation Gain: 10200 ft.
Rodrigo and I had several plans for an exciting weekend, most of which were not looking good due to the weekend forecast so we eventually looked further east or south. We settled on the peaks in the Oval Peak area. The forecast looked good, but a little windy. This forecast proved to be spot on.
We left Seattle at 5 am on Saturday for the long drive to Twisp River Road. We made a brief stop at the Mazama store to get some additional breakfast and last minute snacks for the hike. We continued on and found ourselves at the West Buttermilk Creek Trailhead. The road was in good condition. We started up the trail around 9:15 and quickly made it to the creek crossing that has been redirected from the original crossing to a down tree upstream 100 feet or so that was pretty easy to cross, though someone uneven.
We found the first mile of trail to be in pretty good shape, as it appeared someone had cut out some logs. The following 2 miles however consisted of constant log hopping and occasionally detours from the trail where many burned trees were down. It didn’t slow us down too much but it was definitely more work. After about 3 miles the downed trees stopped and the rest of the hike to Fish Creek Pass was quite easy.
At the pass we had a quick lunch and dropped most of our overnight gear for the scramble up Star. We descended to Star Lake and made our way up to the notch just west of pt. 7912. There was an obvious path through terrible scree here and once at the notch we were able to follow the pass to the north toward the west ridge of Star Peak. The path disappeared into large talus and it was rock hopping all the way to the summit. Not difficult but it seemed to go on forever.
We didn’t take too long on the summit and retraced out steps back to Fish Creek Pass where we loaded up our overnight gear and headed up the ridge toward Courtney Peak. Easy hiking/scrambling the whole way up, arriving at 3:30. We decided to descend the northeast ridge toward Buttermilk Ridge, where we dropped out packs and made the quick scramble to the summit and back.
We enjoyed dropping from the Courtney-Buttermilk Saddle back to the trail, which would have been absolutely amazing if the larches were in full color. We met the trail just a little bit west of where the old abandoned Scaffold Ridge Trail splits from the main trail. We made our way down looking carefully for this trail but didn’t see the cairn that others had described. We left the main trail and worked our way up and down the slope looking for the trail following some GPS tracks I had downloaded. We eventually fount the trail and lost it and found it again. The trail disappeared into boulder fields and areas with downed logs but we found it again shortly, usually by descending. The trail got more well defined as we made our way to the south basin of Oval.
We finally reached Lake 6936 at 6:15 and set up our tent at the south end of the lake. It was a great little site with views over the lake. We made dinner and crawled in to sleep but the wind kept building toward sundown. At around 9 it was just howling and seemed like it would only get worse. There was no way we were going to be able to sleep so we decided to get up and see if we could find anything better. We went just 100-200 feet northwest and found another good spot that was more sheltered in the trees. It wasn’t fun moving camp this late but this was a great decision as our new site was pretty good and we each managed to get at least some sleep.
We were awake by about 6 and did a quick breakfast and were on the move by 6:30. It was easy travel up through trees until we reached the south ridge of Oval. Lots of large rock hopping on this gradual ridge finally brought us to the summit at 7:40. We didn’t linger long as we were eager to get home early. We retraced out steps and were back at camp by about 8:40.
We packed up camp, had a quick second breakfast, and the followed the creek from the lake back town to the trail. We trended right from the creek to avoid some of the steepest terrain and were back on the trail before 10. We cruised back to the burned area and got used to tree hopping. The last bit of trail seemed to go on forever of course, but we were back at the car at 11:30.
We drove back to Winthrop and had a lunch at the Old Schoolhouse Brewery and then proceeded back to Seattle.
(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!)
Recommended brew: Natural Ice Only the finest on this trip!
Gear Used:
- Backpacking tent
- GPS
- Helmet
- Sleeping pad
- Summer sleeping bag
- Stove
- Trail runners
- Trekking poles
- Water drops/filter
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