Indian Creek #1502,Airplane Lake,Mt. Saul

On Saturday Brian Gruber and I headed up from the White River TH at 6:00 for a Mt. Saul adventure. There are a couple other trip reports in WTA, so if you are interested in repeating this, I suggest you search the index for them.

Saul is a beautiful 7000+ peak located between Glacier Peak, Clark Peak and Mt. David. The route up to it travels a famously nasty climber's trail, but is worth the effort.

The trail from up from White River TH is completely dry and is in fabulous condition. In fact, on the way back we passed a guy walking up the trail with a garden rake cleaning every last pine cone from it. Really! Anybody have a clue what that's about?

At about 1.5 - 2 hours up the main trail, you turn north and go up a climber's / fisherman's trail. It goes straight up, through lots of brush, over a dozen logs then levels out even with Airplane lake for a final westward boulder hop traverse of about 200 yards to the outlet.

The best route to the summit is to make a bees line from the outlet to just right of the low point on the ridge east of the summit. Too much to the west will get you in some cliff bands. Once on the ridge go straight up the middle of the ridge to the summit. There is a band of rocks a bit of the way up the ridge, but you can easily get through them and on to a lovely alpine slope. I give this advice in hindsight after having not exactly done this ourselves on the way up and ended up working harder than we needed to.

On this Saturday, in a very very dry year, there was almost no snow on the ridge. Just a few little spots to play in. Normally on this date you would probably still need an ice axe.

The summit itself was pleasant with views from Adams in the South to Whitehorse in the West and the south end of the Chiwawa range in the east.

The highlight of the trip was on the way down, where we stopped at the lake for a swim. Airplane lake has a peninsula on the north side that has a soft beach and no bugs. The water was exceptionally warm, (maybe due to the low snow this year). We could have stayed in the water for 20 minutes without getting cold. This is of course very different from most lakes where swims are measured in seconds not minutes.

The lowlight of the trip was in getting off trail on the way back down from the lake. There are a bunch of ""sucker paths"" branching off the main climber's path. Somehow we got on one that took us too far east. Instead of back tracking, (which next time I will do), we decided to go diagonally down and to the west, figuring we had to cross the path. We eventually did, but the scratches on my legs are proof that the going was not easy.

Once back to the main trail we were swarmed with bugs, (why people hike and camp in these lower elevation bug ridden trails is a mystery to me).

90 minutes later we were back at the trail head. All together the time was about 12.5 hours. 14 or so miles and about 5000 gain.

Here are some more detailed notes for anybody planning on going to this area:

First, read the other trip reports. The 9/7/2003 trip report talks about finding the climber's trail. It is accurate, but let me add that the correct campsite is the second one on the left side of the main trail. Also, once the main trail level's out, there are several clearings before you get to the camp site, so don't be too impatient. Next, the red tape mentioned in the 10/7/2001 report is completely gone and orange paint mentioned has been mostly scraped off the trees. The trees were left with ""blazes"" and bits of orange paint covered bark on the ground. If I do this again, I am going to bring red tape and flag a few sections. There are several places where the route is really hard to find. Our experience was that it was easier to follow on the way up then on the way down.

Have fun!