Judging by the summit register on West Craggy, most people who do these seem to be Bulger chasers, as who else does long drives to climb loose piles of talus? But there are other reasons to do this hike, such as beauty, wildflowers, tremendous views, solitude, and route finding fun.
We slept in the Honeymoon Campground near the trail head in order to get an early start. The first couple miles are on an old mining road, that actually leads to an old mine, the copper glance. The mine seems to be breeding a tremendous number of mosquitos, so we did not linger to investigate. At about 5800' in a lush flower meadow we left the trail to follow a ridge to the summit of Big Craggy. Most of this scramble is very pleasant once we left the bugs behind but the last vertical 700 feet are loose and steep, so I would only recommend this scramble to a small party that wears helmets and stays together. We traversed the summit ridge tagging all the high points but did not find any register. The descent to the saddle with West Craggy proved fairly easy. Climbing West Craggy from the saddle involved some fun route finding around and through various cliffy bands and gendarmes, but we found a route with no exposed or tricky climbing. At the West Craggy summit we did find a register that had been placed by Mike Torok. We read through the register which showed that these obscure peaks are only climbed about a dozen times a year, and most people listed their Bulger stats.
We had noted an easy looking route down from the low point of the saddle so retraced our steps to the saddle and scree plunged down to some larch groves, boulder fields, and a quarter mile of mosquito plagued bush whacking to get back to the trail at about 6800'. The trail beyond the point where we had left it had lots of blowdowns. The first people we saw all day were sitting in the meadow where we originally left the trail, who seemed to be miraculously immune to mosquitos.
5400' vertical gain and loss (up 4600', down 800', up 800', down 4600') and 13 miles. 12 leisurely hours.
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