Distance: 4.3 mi.
Elevation Gain: 2500 ft.
We left from the Mowich Lake Campground just before 6 AM and made it to the Pinnacle Peak Trail a bit from 9 AM. The maintained trail climbed at a fairly steep and consistent grade to the Pinnacle Peak saddle, which had amazingly clear views out to the south with Mount Adams, Mount Saint Helens, and even Mount Hood visible despite some high clouds. From the saddle we turned left (east) on the unmaintained but well-trafficked trail toward Pinnacle Peak. We were happy to have approach shoes for traversing the slabby ledges toward Pinnacle Peak. At one point we correctly climbed a short slab to a break in the trees above but then completely blew past the climber’s trail toward Pinnacle Peak as I recounted a Trevor Noah joke about tacos in great detail. By the time we realized what we had done we were almost all the way to The Castle. We’re really not used to such straightforward approaches. So we dropped our gear and scrambled back toward Pinnacle Peak. In this direction the side trail north toward the summit was pretty obvious.
We climbed first on steep, firm dirt and then began class 3 scrambling a series of steep, blocky steps. The rock was sticky and fairly solid (not inherently good rock but most of the loose crap has been trundled off), however the exposure was pretty high throughout. I wouldn’t want to be up there in rain. The views of Mount Rainier and the surrounding peaks were pretty awesome, though! And I thought the scramble was worth repeating.
We retraced our steps to return to our gear and then had to choose between the high route or low route approach to The Castle. The low route goes down and around the most exposed portion of the south ridge of The Castle while the high route goes directly over it. Both options had good boot tracks. We decided on the high route, first traversing crumbly, exposed ledges to the southeast and then briefly scrambling a 3rd class gully to the top of the ridge. From the ridge we did a brief downclimb and then easy traverse north to the base of The Castle.
If we had taken the lower route to the Castle (or if we had spent at least four minutes exploring our options from the base) we would have easily seen the bright green webbing at the rappel station on the right (north) side of the ridge, but instead we chose the first chimney we saw straight to the summit. This was definitely not a low 5th scramble and included a hand jam (5.7ish?), but it was a pretty fun climb and luckily Nancy had the correct gear to place protection while I belayed her from a nice platform below.
Unfortunately there was no rappel station on the south side of the summit so I had to belay Nancy across the exposed summit ridge until she found the rappel station farther north. She belayed me across and then we rappelled down without incident. Based on wear patterns in the rock it seems that the lower angle rock directly below the rappel station is the preferred climbing route as well.
After reaching the bottom of the climb we turned left (east) to take the eastern approach trail back down to the Pinnacle Peak Trail. We missed our turn to the left (north) across the east ridge of The Castle and ended up doing a tedious northwest traverse on talus before climbing left (west) a bit to meet back up with the obvious boot track. Luckily we had downloaded a GPS track of this route to help us find it. Finally done making things harder for ourselves, we had a straightforward descent back down the boot track to the main trial, where we turned right (north) to return to our cars.
(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:
- Approach shoes
- Day pack
- GPS
- Harness
- Helmet
- 60 m half-rope
- Trad gear (slings, few small to medium sized nuts and cams, extra rappel anchor webbing)
- Trekking poles
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In case you were wondering…