Burgundy Creek, Silver Star Mountain — Sunday, May. 23, 2004

May is not my month... This trip started as one of my goofy plots to ""sneak"" off and go climbing between my classes which end at 11:30 on Monday, and start at 1:00PM on Tuesday. At first, things went quite well; when I left class early at 10:30, the weather looked very nice. As I headed east through Concrete and Rockport though, it started to cloud up. I could still see Eldorado at 8900 feet just before Marblemount so I guess that was a good sign. I decided to go to the ranger station and see what their weather report said. ""Possibility of afternoon showers both east and west of the crest."" So I stuck with my original plan of heading east to Silver Star following conventional Cascades weather logic, although, if I had just looked up for 20 seconds I may have reconsidered seeing as though the clouds were coming from the east. I'm a dummy. On the way up to the passes, I was shocked to see that there was no snow until just before Rainy Pass (like a quarter mile or less) and little more at Washington. The weather looked more or less the same up to Washington Pass where a big dark cloud hung over the Liberty Bell and Silver Star group. The correct pulloff is directly across the valley from Burgundy Creek and Silver Star Mountain and there is a small cairn there on the downhill side marking the start of the climbers route. There IS a climber's trail the whole way, although it is faint in spots and sometimes confusing. If you ever find yourself swimming through thick dead pine branches (as I did), then you went the wrong way. Follow the cairn marked path through the boulders about 200 feet down towards Silver Star Creek and then into the forest at the valley bottom where there are snow patches. Try desperately to follow the faint tread here as it leads you to the correct creek crossing, avoiding brush. Where the path meets the creek there is no longer a log, but there is one about 10 yards upstream (in plain sight); good safe crossing. The creek could be forded probably but is moving fairly swiftly right now. Relocate the tread on the other side and follow it. At one point, still in the valley bottom but away from the snow patches, there is a relatively large cairn (6 or 7 rocks). At this point it is best to turn left instead of following the more obvious tread going straight. Do not go all the way over to the bank of Burgundy Creek. After a little ways, there will be another, not so obvious left turn that I marked, probably temporarily, with a stick-arrow. Once the valley bottom is left, the tread becomes much more obvious and is an easy to follow snow free climbers trail for the next couple thousand feet. By the time I was hiking through this area, the weather had cleared slightly and I was even getting some sun breaks which dramatically raised my spirits. Eventually the trail flattens out and almost as soon as it does so, the snowcover starts. Keep going straight through the easy open forest and eventually you'll be below the obvious wide gully that leads to Burgundy Col. At this point, a number of factors started conspiring against me. There was some fresh loose snow over the hard snowpack and it was getting deeper fast. I start to worry about this sort of thing when there is more than about 6 inches of fresh. Where I stopped there was only 4 but I could only guess that, on the north glacier on the other side of the col, it would be deep enough and steep enough to be very concerned. Also at this point the weather had turned again and it was lightly snowing. The final straw was when I saw a slide coming out of a gully to the south. Admittedly, it came from terrain that was very different than the climbing route, but seeing as it was relatively cold and I was by myself, I decided not to push it. Significantly, it appeard that the gully had been melted out unitl this recent batch of fresh snow. So I headed on down as the weather cleared and then clouded up again, and headed back west to see what I would find. As I got away from Rainy Pass, the weather dramatically improved and I realized that I had made the wrong decision in coming east. After some photography from the Diablo Lake overlook, I pulled off at the trailhead for Pyramid Lake (where the highway washed out last fall) and prepared for a night in my car. Just as a side note, although the sign for the Pyramid Lake trail is gone, the trail does not appear to be damaged by the flooding. ...to be continued... Flags: This is a climber's route, not a hiking trail. Don't expect easy travel.