Back Yard Gem - Cutthroat Lakes and Bald Mountain, 7.14.19, Part 1 of 2
The weather today looked partly sunny and that’s all Neighbor Greg and I needed to go find a hike. We’ve both been to many of the trails on the Mountain Loop Highway, but I’d never been to Cutthroat Lakes or Bald Mountain and Greg had only been to the lakes and that was probably forty years ago. Amazingly, the trailhead is one of the closer ones to where we live and leaving at 7AM we arrived at the trailhead just after 8AM. There was only one other car. This hike is known to be much less travelled than many of the other trails along the Mountain Loop. I can’t imagine why. We had an incredible day today and had the entire place to ourselves until long after heading back down.
The trail gets down to business right away as we climbed through the forest. Soon we began to pass little meadows and marshy ponds as we went up and down and up again climbing through passes and saddles until we reached the area known as Cutthroat Lakes. Here we found a basin filled with alpine tarns scattered haphazardly throughout the little knolls, nooks and crannies. Some were large enough for a good swim, some small and hidden from anyone who didn’t know they were there. A very cool place!
One of the Cutthroat Lakes with Bald Mountain behind
Another set of tarns in the Cutthroat Lakes Basin
Once we reached Cutthroat Lakes, we could see our final destination off in the distance. Bald Mountain was the primary objective of the day so we worked our way through the tarns until we came to the one with an island in it. We had learned that this was where we would find a side trail leading up to Bald Mountain.
The lake with the island
It wasn’t as confusing as the trip reports we had read led us to believe and in no time we were climbing above the tarns towards a long ridge that led to Bald Mountain’s summit block. We were blown away by the beauty of the area leading up to the ridge. We had fine views back down to the tarns we had hiked past as more tarns came into view that we hadn’t even seen from further down. The forest began to give way to flower filled meadows with large boulders of speckled granite scattered about.
Small tarn on the way to Bald Mountain
Once we came out of the trees we had a commanding view of our objective and it looked mightily impressive as we approached. The trail would cross over the east (left hand) ridge and work along the back of the ridge to underneath the summit block.
Approaching Bald Mountain
Once we crossed over behind the ridge we traversed along the rocky ridge line on a fairly narrow trail through heavy brush towards the back side of Bald Mountain.
The trail hugged the ridge just below the rocks
Underneath the summit, the trail climbed steeply through slabby rocks until just below the very top. From there we did a little minor scrambling up the final rock face to the true summit of Bald Mountain. Time to get out your copy of the soundtrack to Fantasia and crank up Night On Bald Mountain! We really felt like we had just conquered Everest or something. It’s not that we haven’t climbed various mountains before but this one was new to us, it had a long isolated approach and just happened to have a very pointy summit. It also had a lot of relief from the footings below. Not only did we look over the entire Cutthroat Lakes Basin but on the opposite side the mountain dropped straight down into Spada Lake.
Spada Lake from Bald Mountain summit
The forecast did say “partly” sunny and we had certainly had our share all day long, but some of the higher peaks and peaks further away were obscured. We did have plenty of great Cascades views and I never get tired of seeing these mountains. They are truly spectacular.
Big Four Mountain
We had really good views of Vesper Peak which Greg and I had just climbed a couple of weeks ago. It was interesting to me because I have shot photos of Vesper from three different peaks just in the last month - Mt. Dickerman, Vesper itself and now from Bald Mountain.
Vesper Peak
The sun would completely bathe an area and then a cloud would pass by and the light would darken a bit but then the sun would reappear and that was what it was like most of the day.
Cutthroat Lakes Basin from Bald Mountain summit
Part 2 will cover the remainder of the trip.