Overnight to Bean Creek Basin via Beverly Turnpike, Mary's Peak, Bean Peak with Earl Peak on day 2.
This was my first scramble in a long time, and the longest one I've done maybe ever. Luckily my friend was patient and encouraging, and we managed to bag two of the four peaks we'd initially intended on the first day, then finished up the third on the way out.
Beverly Turnpike trail is in fair shape. The crossing of Bean Creek was totally fine -- I did switch into Crocs for it but it wasn't deep or even moving too fast. There are probably 30ish trees to get around, ranging from 4 inches in diameter to maybe 15inches. There are a couple jackstrawed piles of trees but nothing too hard to cut as far as I could tell.
Fourth Creek is fine, harder to see than Beverly Turnpike and not a well-laid out trail but you can get up it.
We skipped Bill's Peak in the saddle between Bill and Mary because there was snow on the north aspect we weren't sure we'd feel good about and didn't want to expend the effort just to turn around short of the summit.
The way to Mary's was pretty straightforward. You can stay on snow on the northern side (which we did once we got halfway up) or stay mostly on rock on the south side. Snow was solid and the final scramble is easy enough.
Going between Mary's and Bean was the trickiest part. I am not a climber and have scrambled only as much as to the summit of Si or Mount Pugh, so don't have a lot of experience doing extended scrambles. At the top of Marys we evaluated our options, looking for bailout routes if the traverse got too hard or if we weren't going to be able to finish. We also continued to ID bailouts along the way. We ended up heading down below the last couple of rockpiles (I'm positive these have a fancier name but can't remember -- maybe it's gendarmes?) and traversing the ribs below Bean's summit to the notch on the east side of the peak.
Initially we'd wanted to go to Volcanic Neck but after scrambling to Bean I was sort of over getting out to Volcanic Neck. From where we were, we would have had a scree-ey hike or a walk across some steep snow. It was late in the day and my friend was out of water, so we decided to head down into Bean Creek Basin and establish camp, then re-evaluate whether we wanted to hit Earl for the sunset hike.
We decided to do Earl on the way out, since there is a trail to the top from the south side which branches off the Bean Creek trail. This was fun, if pretty steep. I wonder if it was a former lookout trail. There are some steep-ish snow patches just shy of the saddle below the ridge trail to Earl. We wore microspikes on the way down and it made those crossings way easier.
We saw a lot of people on the way out from Earl - maybe 35? I was surprised to see so many but then again it was Saturday and lovely.
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