Mount Adams South Climb — Saturday, May. 9, 2015

South Cascades > Mount Adams Area

We had an awesome weekend up on Mt Adams! We left Everett around 3:30am on Saturday, thinking we would get there early enough to set up base camp and do the summit in one day. We got to the trail head at 8:30 am, there were a ton of deer and elk on the forest road when we were heading up so be careful if you go up there in the morning! The last mile or two of the road past Morrison Campground is in pretty terrible shape but we were able to make it in my Hundai Elantra going really slow. The road is snow free to the trail head and so is the trail for about the first mile. We accidentally went left to go up the summer route instead of right up the winter route and ended up having to cut across and go up some steep snow to get up to the south butte and get back on route going up the ridge directly to the lunch counter. We got to the lunch counter around 3pm, which took us way longer than we expected, and after setting up camp we were too tired to even consider attempting the summit. All of the rock shelters are snowed in so be prepared to camp on snow. We found one that was dug out a little and staked our tent with rocks because the snow was so icy. We started heading to the summit around 6:30am on Sunday. Our thermometer read 28 degrees when we woke up at 5:30am. Crampons and ice axes or skies were a must. We wore our crampons from the lunch counter up to the summit and then back down to Pikers Peak. We got to the summit at 11am and attempted to glissade down from Pikers at noon but there was a very thin sheet of ice still on top of the snow and only about an inch or two of soft snow on top of solid ice so we had to rely heavily on the ice axes not to go too fast and slide out of control. The skiers had a great time going down though. We were back to camp at 1pm and back at the car at 3:30pm. We started post holing a lot for the last half a mile that we were on snow. We made it back to Everett by 9:30pm. All in all a great trip! If you're looking to glissade you might want to wait until July when the snow softens up.