Stehekin River Trail, Cascade Pass

Many trips are all good and some are mostly good. Although this falls into the latter category, if you are interested some amazing country and eventual solitude this one has got it. I say eventual solitude because you need to hike the Cascade Pass trial to get to Trapper Mountain (TM, no to be confused with Trapper Peak). The trail up to the pass if well graded and in excellent condition. It grinds on and on gaining <2k in 3 plus miles. The pass has been beautifully restored to accommodate the hordes of tourists who come up for the views. We quickly had a bite and continued east down the Stehekin trail. After a short while one turns of towards Pelton Basin on an equally well maintained trail. There are a few camp sites in the trees that sadly don't get enough light in my opinion. Various trails wander down hill (perhaps the easiest near what is now signed as being for water or the toilet) to the river.

Getting to Trapper Lake at the base of TM requires going cross country slightly SE (down river) in Pelton Basin. Once you've crossed the meadow and are heading up hill again look for two stream cuts on the left side of the talus field. The right hand one of these goes up and follows a faint trail through small trees along the edge of the talus field. Once you've gained the high point there is an amazing bivy site and a small pool of water. On our visit there were bear tracks up to the edge of this bathtub sized pool. The trail continues due east to the saddle between Pelton Peak and point 5973'. For all practical purposes the trail ends here. We found the best way down (if you could call it that) was to the far west end of the saddle. We skirted below the rock toes towards gentle snow which will take you southward. One goes up and over a treed bulge and onto the old glacier just north of Hurry-Up Peak. No crevasses to worry about here. This takes you down to Trapper Lake. There is an official camp site about 50m from the west end of the lake. A large rock is suitable for stashing your food on as we saw no less than 7 bears on this trip.

Once you crossed this saddle into Trapper Basin you might as well be in Alaska! It is fantastic, big walls, hanging glaciers, braided streams running through a brushy meadow... WOW! We climbed Trapper Mountain (look to cascadeclimbers.org for a trip report of the climb itself, not yet up as of 9-29-08) via the north face. Roughly the route goes up the left leaning snow gully, then across the face at mid height on a ledge and then up the dark cleft to just right of the summit. I wouldn't recommend this climb to anybody but the most experienced. The descent itself took hours of down climbing perilous terrain. Just sit back in camp, enjoy the amazing views and laugh at the fools who climbed that crazy face.