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A car2car adventure to bag an iconic Enchantments peak
Our day started out with me snoozing our alarm in the car not once but twice. We slept at the trailhead the night before, rolling in at around 9pm so we could tuck ourselves into bed and get some good sleep with the plan to wake up at 4am.
I had read some past trip reports on this climb and it seemed that the total trip time average was between 11 and 14 hours so I wanted us to get as early of a start as it was reasonable since we’d need to drive back the same day. We also chose to do this on a Sunday, and given that we live the weekend warrior lifestyle, I didn’t want to put us in a hole for going to work on Monday.
We eventually got ourselves rolling and out to the trailhead just before 5am and I felt like absolute garbage. I severely underestimated my apparent dependence on caffeine and we both felt pretty tired on the 4 mile approach to the lake.
Once we got to the lake, we got a good view of what we were setting out to do for the day. We saw clouds were hanging out at the summit, but we crossed our fingers that the forecast that suggested the clouds would clear by mid-morning would come to pass. I’ll never get used to that feeling of seeing your objective in the distance and thinking ‘How tf am I going to get up there???’.
We skirted around the lake, and played leap frog with a couple groups who were all out to bag Colchuck as well. The boulder field was straight forward to ascend, and we got to the glacier in about 3.5 hours. Here we transitioned to our mountaineering boots, got our crampons on, got the ice axes out and ate a quick snack before heading up the glacier.
The glacier was in great condition! I was surprised that were was a recent light dusting of dry snow, but nothing that impacted our traction or our efficiency in our ascent. In my research for this trip, I did debate if we should bring the skis and once we were on the glacier I was glad we didn’t for 2 reasons: 1) I was primarily wanting us to get time on feet for our Rainier training later this year and skiing the descent would have been cheating and 2) the glacier was so firm and icy that skiing it would have been so shitty that I’m glad we didn’t opt to carry the extra weight for a bad ski day. But we did see remnants of some seemingly old ski squiggles so it’s not entirely out of the question in the future.
Not a lot to write home about on the glacier itself, the snow was good up until right under the col where the snow got a bit deeper, but nothing a good kick step couldn’t handle. When we got above the col, we took our crampons off and started the rock scramble. I’ve seen some reports that call this a Class 2 or 3 scramble and that rang true for me. If anything felt too complex, then you could easily find another route.
We shared the summit with some folks who taking their friend up a glacier for the first time, took some pictures, and had a snack and sat for a bit. Our overall time to reach the summit, including our transitions, was just over 6 hours.
After about 20 minutes, we started our descent. Going down the scramble back to the glacier was relatively low drama and going down the glacier reminded me why the Enchantments are such a special place. We opted to keep the crampons on for descending the glacier, some folks reported that they glissaded down but Max has PTSD from hurting his butt glissading that this didn’t seem like the day to re-open those wounds.
Once we got off the glacier, we de-cramponed, transitioned back into our trail runners and started the sufferfest of getting out of the woods. Descending the boulder garden was easily the worst part of the day. It was a mix of shitty, slippy scree at the top and then some wobbly medium sizes rocks that really made you question how your ankles could possible survive something like this, but alas, with much focus and some yelling, we made it. The 4 miles to leave from Colchuck lake to return to the trailhead was a long, mentally draining descent, and we tried to shuffle/jog out as best we could with the size of packs that we had. It’s truly had to match the feeling of seeing the cars again after long days like this.
We celebrated our successful day in the woods with Leavenworth’s finest cuisine: bratwursts and gingerbread cookies.
We decided to drive up Saturday evening so that we could maximize on sleep. I definitely don’t know how we would have woken up early enough in Seattle, drove to the trail head to start early enough, have a big day in the mountains and then drive home. We chatted with some folks on the mountain that chose to do this and they were not pleased at all with their decision 😬
🥾Gear
Would we do it again? Yes! This was a fun and rather pretty straight forward climb. The glacier was in good condition, crevasses aren’t an issue so there’s no need for rope, and the scrambling to the summit is straight forward (Class 2, maybeeee Class 3 at most).
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