North Chiwaukum, Middle Chiwaukum & White Pine Creek — Friday, May. 21, 2021

Started at the White Pine Creek trailhead. Road is snow free to the trailhead. Road is pretty rough in spots and is overgrown in a few spots.

I took the White Pine trail a little further than needed before back tracking and heading straight up. On the way down I met the main trail at the 2nd little creek crossing. This is where you should head up if you are game for this adventure. It worked today, but it was tough. I pretty much went  straight up the spine following game trails as much as possible. There is so much deadfall to negotiate and it is super steep. There are some open spots with some pretty nice views and also some steep open slopes around 3200 ft or so. After this it is back into the forest with all the deadfall. I put spikes on at 4800 ft as it was all snow the whole way. I actually left them on all day, all the way back to the main trailhead, as they helped with the super steep descent.

Up around 6000 ft the views really opened up. The north side of North Chiwaukum and the ridge above 6000 ft is all cliffs, so I had to stay back from the edge heading up. There was some new snow last night, but it must have been windy as the summit of N, Chiwaukum just had some wind blown snow, as below this coming up there was about 4" of new snow.

North Chiwaukum has some excellent views. 360 degree views with Middle Chiwaukum not to far away. I was pretty tired from the grueling assent, but decided to try and go over to Middle Chiwaukum. Getting over to the base of the summit block was easy enough , but the final knife edge climb up to the summit was one long cornice. The cornice was all new snow from the last week, as I could take my hiking pole and go right thru it. It was not stable. I went up about 100 feet and was going to try and get up to some bare rocks to avoid going on the knife edge ridge up higher were the runout from a slip would take you over a cliff. Just then the wind picked up and it started to snow and I looked behind me, and oh crap, some dark clouds were coming at me. Dang that was fast. I better get off the mountain. So only 250 ft from the summit, I hurried on down. Once over to the saddle between North and Middle Chiwaukum, I decided to traverse over instead of going back up to N. Chiwaukum. Big mistake as there was a lot of side hilling on a slippery slope. I got the ice axe back out again, and had to self arrest multiple times getting back over to my track. Luckily the white out that I was fearing never materialized.

Coming down was no bargain either. The new snow had wiped out my tracks, so I used my GPS to help keep me on track. Also going down I punched thru the snow a couple of times, which was not fun. This slowed my progress down as I did not want to go fast and risk punching thru and getting my leg stuck going full speed down. Going down it is also easy to get off track, as I got off track multiple times.

It was a great adventure, but not sure if I will go this way again to get to Middle Chiwaukum. Going up was tiring, but not that bad. Going down was horrible. Good hiking pants are a necessity. I may try this way again, but would want to do it with two cars, one parked at the Lake Ethel trailhead for the hike out.

I lost my ice axe on the way down somewhere below 3000 ft. If someone finds it, let me know. 8.5 miles RT / 4900 ft elevation gain

More Information on this Trip Report

• https://caltopo.com/m/N70S