Quite the adventure as Aferrenberg, ngie, and I got up to the seldom visited summit of Red Mountain West via the Crater Lake Trail, which is at the end of the Money Creek road. The road is rough in places, but we were able to get to the end of the road with a Subaru.
We missed the trail that goes to Crater Lake which starts behind some boulders at the end of the road, and took the well-defined path that took us to the mine. We checked out the mine ruins which were cool. We then followed a path that looked to hook up with the Crater Lake trail, but it fizzled out, so we had to go cross country to hook up with the trail. This trail is a fisherman's trail, so it's a bit primitive and overgrown in places, but had some good tread. We reached the lake on the east side of the outflow. We didn't see a trail on the westside of the outflow and the lake, and were fooled by a trail that went around to the eastside of the lake. This trail ended after awhile, and after some talus we were left with a lot of slide alder and brush to get to the NW side of the lake. We headed up some semi brushy talus which worked ok, but then we ran into heavy brush, as we did a rising traverse under Salmon Red to get to a upper basin above Crater Lake between Red Mountain West and Peak 5331. This was a royal pain getting up, as there were so many open areas with heavy brush in between the forested sections. Would not recommend this way. Our down track was so much better, as it was mostly in open forest, where the travel was significantly better!
Once we got to this upper basin at around 4800ft we ran into snow, and to our surprise we saw some footprints that led us up to the ridge between these two summits, and on up the ridge to the summit of Red Mountain West. Views really opened up on this section, as we were now in the open on snow covered heather slopes. There were two sets of prints, along with a dog, so we speculated if it was two fellow peakbaggers who we had met a couple of weeks ago on another trip, as they have a dog, and who are chasing the same peaks. Sure enough, we found out on the way home, that it was them! Too funny, as there was one previous ascent all year, and then five of us on one November weekend get up there.
Tough Peak to get too, but it had some great views!! After about 30 minutes on the summit, we headed down. We followed our prints down in the snow to where we first saw their prints from the previous day, and then followed their prints straight down which led us to some nice open forest. Terrain was steep, but with no brush we made great time down to the lake. There was a couple sections of brush, and we had to cross a ravine, but we made excellent time down to the lake. Once at the lake, we had one 100ft brush bash through some alder to get to the west side of the lake, and some nice flat open forest. We then found a trail that took us to a very nice camp next to the western shore of Crater Lake. Here we followed the lakeshore to the outlet stream. There was some minor rock hopping, and minimal brush, but so much easier than the eastside of the lake. At the outlet stream we were able to rock hop across, and get on back on the trail. We then hiked back to the car. We missed one turn coming down and had to backtrack a short bit, so beware of that.
We started at 7:45am and finished at 4:05pm. 6.8 miles with 3130ft gain. We had a lot of unnecessary mileage and elevation gain going the way we did taking the eastern shore of the lake with all the backtracking we did, which added a lot of time. Taking the western shore is the way to go, which will save you a lot of time and effort, and a lot less scratches and cuss words!! It will still be a tough trip, as many of the Alpine Lakes Homecourt Peaks are. We used micro spikes and gaiters. Micro spikes were useful not only on the snow, but on the steep duff too.
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