Gothic Basin — Friday, Jun. 16, 2000

North Cascades > Mountain Loop Highway

Gothic Basin - Del Campo Peak I had been talking with my Dad for about three weeks before Fathers day trying to nail down our annual Father's day outing. Having a 2½ year old and a 2 month old doesn't allow me to get out hiking/climbing very often especially in the last 3 months. We still hadn't finalized our plans, only that we were going to climb something off the Mountain Loop Highway since we would be spending the weekend at my parents cabin on the Mountain Loop so Grandma could help out with the kids. I threw a quick pack together Friday after work, packed everyone in the car and headed up to the cabin. I had expected we were going to be going up Dickerman, Pilchuk or Forgotten, but instead we decided on Del Campo. My dad hadn't been up there in a while and wanted to try it again, I hadn't been up it yet and it was supposed to be a beautiful day. We got started hiking about 7 or so the next morning and the trail was mostly in great shape until we started hitting snow. It was a beautiful day bright blue skies and views for miles, but I wasn't looking forward to heading across the snowfields in this sun. We got off route at the first big snowfield cutting across a large open slope with a large rock wall waterfall at the top. Since the trail didn't appear to come on the other side of the snowfield and our map didn't exactly show the trail we pulled out our ice axes and headed straight up the snowfield. The snowfield was more of a large avalanche chute with a large rock wall waterfall at the top. We cut off to the left side of the waterfall through some very thick brush/trees and ended up scrambling up some small creek beds until we reached snow again. I was not looking forward to going down that little section of brush and hoped no-one else followed our footsteps up that snowfield. Once we made it back on the snow we just traversed around the base of Del Campo and headed up to the notch. We had a few pit stops every now and then to re-apply sunscreen. The rock scramble was uneventful although I would highly recommend helmets since there was a lot of loose rock. We made it to the summit around noon and the views from the top were great, from Baker to Rainier to the Olympics. We made a quick phone call back to the cabin and had lunch. The summit register was full, we managed to squeeze our names in on the back cover and noted 4 people had been up yesterday but no-one else had signed it this year. The register book said if it was full to bring it down and return it to the Mountaineers, so we reluctantly decided to do so. I'd never noticed the ""Return to The Mountaineers… when full"" statement before and I hated to leave the summit with no summit register but decided to anyway. Coming down off the rocks and starting down the snowfield we ran into some fellow Boealpers ! Kathy H, Aggie, and some students from this year. I was relieved to be able to hand the summit register to Kathy at this point and let them either leave it on top or pack it out and send it in. I was also happy to not be going down in the uphill steps as the first thing Aggie mentioned to the recently graduated students is this is why you don't go down the uphill steps because you might run into someone you know on the way back down! They also mentioned something about our interesting route choice, as they had followed our steps up the snow chute around the waterfall. We did take a much better route on the way down, and were back at the car by 3:00.