East Fork Foss - Necklace Valley, West Fork Foss River and Lakes — Wednesday, Jul. 13, 2022

Highlight: Completed a run/day hike that connected Necklace Valley and the West Foss trail using a route route that gained the ridge up to Iron Cap and traversed that ridge before coming down (and up and down again) to join the West Foss Trail at Big Heart Lake. Lots of routefinding, snow travel, and scarmbling. Gear was running vests, ice axes, and microspikes.

Necklace Valley was beautifully serene with the only thing of note really being the mosquitos and the overgrown brush including devil's club and stinging nettle on certain parts of the trail. After getting past Al Lake we continued up the snowfields towards Tank Lakes navigating generally towards Iron Cap mountain. The snow was generally good to travel up. Once we could see Iron Cap we noticed the ridge approach looked a little complicated and the GPX track we were following suggested dropping down to the the base of Iron Cap before ascending again. We descended the snow slope carefully assessing which direction would avoid cliff drop offs. Once at the base of Iron Cap we started up again ascending up snow slopes and looking for any signs of a faint trail. Any sign we did find soon disappeared in the snow coverage. Once on the summit we turned our attention to the ridge traverse. Immediately leaving the summit on a faint loose exposed trail soon gave way to a more solid traverse on rocks that required class four and sometimes five moves. The difficulty of the travel was most likely heightened due to the snow coverage on the north side of the ridge. After finding a solid slope to descend down towards an area that was shouldered by a still frozen Chetwood Lake, we could again find our way up towards the route that would eventually lead us up before finally heading down to Big Heart Lake and finding solid trail again. 

Stats: 15.5 hours, 27.6 miles, and 8,400 feet of elevation gain