9 October 2009 - Silver Peak

I had another vacation day to burn before the end of the year and I couldn't find anyone else with a day off during the week, so I took Friday off and hiked up Silver Peak. Octavian and I climbed this years ago about this time of year, but we got stuck in a white out. The wind and snow were forming icicles on our noses and it was downhill in all directions when we finally ran out of trail, so I'm pretty sure we made the summit but I had no idea what the view might look like. This time the visibility was a bit better, but I still didn't really get the grand views that other trip reports rave about; I didn't even catch a glimpse of Mt. Rainier. The views to the north and west were pretty dramatic though. It was particularly impressive looking across Interstate 90 to the peaks of the Alpine Lakes region.

I'm still not exactly sure of the route I took to the summit. The trees in Olallie Meadow have grown a lot in the last 10 years and I wasn't sure which trail head we went in last time so I just went to the farthest trail crossing I could drive to. There are a bunch of roads up here and they cross a lot of trails, so the whole picture is kind of confusing. On top of that, the proximity to so many jeep trails and snowmobile routes contributes to a lot of vandalism, so most of the trail signs are shot up or knocked down. I followed the trail for a quarter of an hour or so and then turned off in the general direction of the peak when it looked like the trail was heading too far east. I traveled on game trails and a few faint boot tracks, essentially following the easiest path just inside the timber on the east side of an old clear cut. Eventually I found a good track heading up the northwestern ridge of the peak and followed that until I lost it in the scree. I tried following the ridge itself, but got cliffed out so dropped down into the middle of the bowl and found another boot path heading toward the summit. The final approach crossed the ridge a few hundred feet below the summit and met up with the track coming up the west side from Annette lake. Neither the north or the west side looks like it gets much traffic and I didn't see another soul until I actually got on the summit and could see the main trail coming up the south ridge.

Coming down, I followed the main trail down the south ridge and then to the east until it hit the PCT. I took the PCT back to my car in Olallie Meadow.

I'm a few months late with this report and the details a bit hazy so the pictures over here in the Picasa album are probably a better guide than what I've written here.