A few of us climbed Mt Stuart over the last weekend with a two night stay to give ourselves plenty of time to make the climb and descent.
From the TH up to longs pass was well maintained but from longs pass down to ingall's creek the trail was steep and at times difficult to follow and brushy. You can really tell when a trail is only maintained by mountaineers as they pretty much go straight up or straight down the mountain sides, maybe they think switchbacks are for wussies?
We started late and so didn't set up camp till about 7 pm. I should note: there is an excellent campsite about 50 feet downstream as soon as you cross ingalls creek. It's obviously a prime piece of real estate and has been used by many campers, thankfully we got into town when it was vacant and nabbed it. There were ripe huckleberries along the trail leading down to the creek and we took our time picking along the way.
Summit day we woke up and hit the trail about 8 am, kind of a late start but we figured we had all day. The cascadian couloir route trail junction with the ingall's creek trail was very clearly marked with orange tape, thanks to whomever did this, and we had started our ascent. Very quickly hit the bottom of the couloir and the rest of the way up we were in granite heaven. The trail up is very steep and at parts not very clear which route over the boulders is easiest, don't underestimate the severity of this route because of the class 2/3 rating. It is steep; you will most definitely be using your hands a lot.
Right where the trail hooks left at the top of the couloir there is a small snowfield where we were able to fill up on water again. You don't need to cross the snow field, in fact the trail ascends NW along the edge of the snowfield for a hundred feet or so. This section was also some of the loosest scree we encountered which led to much cursing at the 2 steps forward 1 step back nature of scree.
We summited around 2:30 and spent about 15 minutes at the top before starting our descent. The part immediately above the snow field, about the last 400 feet, was where the route really had some class 3 sections. Once we had gotten past this the rest of the descent went pretty smoothly and we got back to camp by 8 pm for a total of about 7 hours up and 5 hours down.
We slept in the next day and then grumbled as we made our way up the short steep trail to longs pass before the easy 2.2 miles out to the TH. For comparison, I felt this climb was easily more strenous and difficult than when I climbed Mt St Helens earlier this year. Even though St Helens had more elevation gain, we did the winter route, Mt Stuart felt a good bit harder to me.
Ah I almost forgot to mention: the smoke from the Jolly Mountain fires was bad after about noon, the mornings were pretty clear but by each afternoon the smoke had rolled in and visibility dropped way down.
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