Dust In The Wind - Goat Rocks Wilderness, Surprise Lake, Warm Lake, Gilbert Peak - 8.9.20 - 8.12.20, Part 3 of 3
As is the case with a lot of summits, the views from Gilbert Peak were expansive.
Looking down the length of the Goat Rocks Crest. The peak at the far end is Old Snowy which I climbed last September on my solo backpack.
Mount Rainier
Old Snowy
Goat Citadel
Tieton Peak and Cold Lake. The dad from the family said that as recently as 1990 the Conrad Glacier went all the way to the shore of the lake. That’s a lot of receding ice in a fairly short period of time.
I didn’t linger too long at the top. I thought Greg and I should stick together on the mountain but due to loose rock it was actually better that he descended that section before I did. Once we were below the scramble section he visibly relaxed a lot more. We stopped on the giant plateau for lunch before descending back to camp.
Greg splitting rocks
Gilbert and the plateau
An interesting view of Surprise Lake far below Warm Lake
The ridge of Klickton Divide, Warm Lake and Surprise Lake. We followed the divide almost to the end before dropping back down to Warm Lake
Hugging a moat along the divide
The whole shebang from Gilbert Peak to Warm Lake
By the time we got back to camp the wind was really picking up and it was a bit chilly. We knew that the forecast had called for a deteriorating weather pattern for that night into the next day or two. My altimeter watch uses barometric pressure to gauge the current altitude. I can use it a little bit to predict changes in the weather. I had set the watch at the lake in the morning to what I knew was the proper altitude but the altitude was rising even at the lake and had been for about a day. That meant that pressure was dropping allowing the altitude reading to rise. The wind made sense as it flows like water from high to low pressure. It also meant a front was coming in. As the afternoon progressed the winds grew even stronger, at one point strong enough to knock you over if you weren’t firmly planted. It did die down just long enough to cook dinner but then picked right back up. By 7:30 it was howling so we headed for our tents.
That night the wind just raged. It would howl and whistle like a wounded animal. You would hear it howl up the valley and then WHAM!, it would lay into the tent like getting hit by a freight train. Neither one of us got much sleep. There were times the wind was so strong the tent was bent almost to my face but the stakes and the tent held their ground. I’m going to write an email to MSR to let them know the Hubba Hubba tent (Greg and I both use that model) is one hell of a tent. I have no idea what speed the gusts were but it was pretty intense. The downside to all this is that even with the rain fly on and zipped down as low as it will go, the wind just blew tons of ash and dirt into the tents.
During a lull in the hurricane
In the morning I slowly shook the volcanic ash and dirt out of my eyebrows, the insides of my nostrils and my ears. My sleeping bag was covered in a gritty film of dust and dirt. So was everything else in the entire tent. Greg’s was the same. We had planned to spend two more nights here. An entire day was devoted to hiking way down the valley and over to an area on the farthest end of the basin. There is a gorgeous setting of meadows below a really huge waterfall coming out of an even higher basin that holds a small glacial tarn called Cold Lake. I was looking straight down on it from the summit of Gilbert. However, with the changing weather, colder temps and sense of immense satisfaction from summiting Gilbert Peak, we decided it was time to bail and our thoughts shifted to Famous Dave’s Rib Feast.
We decided to hike all the way out from Warm Lake by dropping down out of the alpine zone back to the loop trail and continuing around to complete the lollipop loop. It was cold and cloudy that final morning. I had never needed a fleece base layer and a down puffy with a backpack before but that’s what we started off wearing. Luckily, once we dropped off the ridge where the lake was, things calmed down and we shed layers quickly. Even the clouds were a blessing as the light on the flowers was more diffused which made for even better flower shots. Four and a half hours later we made it back to the car, tired but extremely pleased that a couple of senior citizens could accomplish so much.
Greg hiking past a small tarn
Wildflowers galore!
A sea of color
So the trip was a huge success. Despite the change in the weather and opting to cut short what could have been a six day trip to four days, we felt like we had gotten a really good sampling of that part of the Goat Rocks Wilderness. We never needed to apply any bug spray, the temperatures were great every day except the evening of the windstorm and it was thrilling to do such a challenging peak climb which I hadn’t done in a long time. As always, Greg was a great trail companion and we do very well together on backpack trips. My soul refreshed, I am already looking forward to whatever the next adventure brings!