Tomyhoi Peak attempt

We’re lucky to have four seasons in Washington, each offering different opportunities (and limitations) for outdoor enthusiasts. Fall is my favorite season for backpacking - the temperatures are comfortable, bugs are (mostly) gone, but the high country hasn’t yet been buried in feet of snow and is still easily accessible.

This trip came in October right after the first non-trivial snowfall of the year. As Kimberly, Deeptanshu, Tim, and I set out on the trial, creeks were trickling all over with snowmelt, the fall colors were popping, and the high peaks had a light coating of fresh snow. Photographic conditions were perfect.

We’d dayhiked the Yellow Aster Butte trail before, but this time the plan was to camp for one night while Tim and I would also make an attempt on Tomyhoi Peak, a scramble objective just one mile south of the Canadian border. As we hiked up towards our camp, Mount Shuksan made her appearance, somehow looking even more majestic than I remembered. I think the thin layer of fresh snow made her glow extra bright, while leaving visible the glacial crevasses exposed by summer’s melt.

We set up camp by the tarns under Yellow Aster Butte. We were in luck - it wasn’t busy at all and we had plenty of campsites to choose from. Deep and Tim camped down by the water while Kimberly and I selected a higher spot with a clearer view, a decision we’d pay for later with gusty winds at night.

After setting up camp, Tim and I started hiking up the trail towards Tomyhoi Peak. High elevations were covered in a few inches to a couple feet of fresh snow, which made route finding a bit trickier but walking up loose rock much smoother.

Looking to the east we could peek into far-away ranges of the North Cascades. I was glad to have brought my telephoto lens, and waited for the clouds to part to snap some shots.

We’d read that the summit route traversed the small glacier before scrambling some gullies to gain the ridge leading to the false summit, but first we tried scrambling the ridge directly. We soon met up with an impassible gap in the ridge - I guess that’s why people start on the glacier!

We turned tail and backtracked onto the glacier. We’d brought crampons, but the fresh soft snow on top of the glacial ice made them unnecessary this time. We eventually found what we think was the right gully to access the summit ridge, but decided scrambling it was too sketchy as it was too slabby with fresh snowmelt making for slippery rock.

So we called off our summit, retreated a short way down the trail, and set up our tripods for sunset. Plenty of mountain paparazzi was to be had before we hiked back down to camp in the dark.

The next morning, we woke up early to catch the sunrise. The overcast cloud layer gave us only a few minutes of morning light, but it was worth it!

Quoting Fred Beckey:

Mt. Shuksan epitomizes the jagged alpine peak like no other massif in the North Cascades… it has no equal in the range when one considers the structural beauty of its four major faces and five ridges…There is no other sample in the American West of a peak with great icefall glaciers derived from a high plateau, and in the Pacific Northwest it is the only non-volcanic peak whose summit exceeds timberline by more than 3000 feet.

No summit this time, but great fun with friends. And writing this at the end of 2022, this was still one of my most photographically productive trips.