Dome and Sinister Peaks

Dome Peak (8,920ft) and Sinister Peak (8,440ft)

Eric and Matthew Gilbertson

May 18-20, 2018

Matthew flew into town from California Friday morning, and after I finished the last of my school obligations we started driving north around noon. The weather didn’t look great, but we decided to give Dome and Sinister a shot and at the very least spend a few days deep in the wilderness in the Cascades. From reading past trip reports for these mountains, it sounds like a bergschrund can open up later in the season making passage extremely difficult, but this early in the season I hoped the bergschrund would be well-bridged by snow.

By 2:30pm we’d arrived and the Downey Creek trailhead and were soon hiking up the trail. I was surprised to see another car at the trailhead, and we never really figured out where the people were hiking. There was a trail register near the trailhead and a trailcrew had signed in the week earlier, so we were relieved that at least some of the trail might be cleared. I’d heard stories of the Bachelor Creek trail being very overgrown and tough to follow, and we hoped maybe the trailcrew had made it up that far.

We hiked the first 6.5 miles or so on easy, flat, well-maintained trail, with only 3 noteworthy sections where we had to crawl over or under big blowdowns. After crossing bachelor creek on a good bridge, we turned right and headed up the old bachelor creek trail. It stays close to bachelor creek, starting out as a steep climbers trail, but eventually picking up the switchbacks of the old trail.

We hit patchy snow around 3,500ft, and Matthew stashed his sneakers here to change into hiking boots. We gave up

trying to follow the trail through the snow patches and blowdowns, and by 3,800ft the snow was continuous. From this point progress was pretty easy compared to reports I’ve heard. All the bushes and slide alder were covered in snow, and we marched along easily through open forest.

Eventually the route steepened, and we reached a sharp ridge, then dropped steeply down to Cub Lake around 9:30pm. By now we finally needed headlamps for the first time, and we leveled out a spot for the tent on the shore. Amazingly, despite the bad forecast, it only lightly drizzled for about 30 minutes during the whole hike and was otherwise dry. We quickly set up a tent, cooked dinner, and were in the sleeping bags by 10:30pm.

Summit Day

Matthew needed to catch up on some lost sleep from getting up super early for the flight Friday morning, so we slept in (by mountaineering standards), and started hiking out of camp around 6:30am. We crossed some avy debris above Iswoot Lake, then kicked steps up next to some old ski tracks to Iswoot Ridge. I’m guessing the ski tracks were from people on the Ptarmigan Traverse, which exits the same route we had just climbed.

From this ridge we got our first view of Dome Peak. It looked intimidating, since it was the only peak stuck in a cloud in the distance, and we could see cliffs continuing into the cloud, but no summit. It looked like an easy snow traverse to the peak, so we continued up the ridge to avoid a cornice, then started traversing.

At a small cliff we heard some running water, and Matthew scrambled up to top off his water bottle. We soon kicked steps up to a small col at the edge of the Dome Glacier, and then a whiteout set in. The forecast had been for precipitation starting in the afternoon, but it appeared to have started earlier. After a short break, we roped up and started heading up the glacier. One good thing about the conditions were that we could always just turn around and follow our tracks all the way back to camp. There was no threat of snow blowing over them (it was too warm), but it

was too cold for them to melt out that quickly.

We crossed the glacier, catching occasional glimpses as the whiteout let up, and reached the Dome-Chickamin Col at 10:30am. Just then the clouds let up, and we briefly had patches of blue sky above us. We were now at what many groups considered the crux of the route – the bergschrund just below this col on the Chickamin Glacier. Groups later in the season have turned around because the bergschrund was impassible.

I led the way down in my snowshoes, and soon encountered the bergschrund. It spanned the whole width of the glacier, but luckily there was an excellent snowbridge at the top, which I easily marched across in snowshoes. Below the bergschrund, I roughly followed Sean Albert’s GPS track to help navigate through the heavily-crevassed glacier. Luckily the clear weather held as we descended, easing navigation.

At one point I traversed high, trying to take a shortcut, but was stopped by cliffs. Matthew descended to try to go around the cliffs, but a huge crevasses cut across the glacier just below us. Matthew proposed jumping down over the crevasse, but I noted that any route we do must be reversible, and that sounded very unreversible.

Instead, we backtracked and found a good bridge across the glacier, then traversed below the cliffs. Finally, after loosing a thousand feet, we were at the base of Sinister Peak. Most parties on Sinister either climb the exposed class 3+ ridge directly from the Dome-Sinister col, or wrap around to the south side of Sinister and climb up a loose gully to gain the ridge. Since we were so early in the season, there was a snow ramp on the northwest face, climbers left of the col, that reached all the way to level area of the west ridge.

We easily kicked steps up this ramp, topping out at a rappel anchor. Here the route looked easy, so we ditched our

snowshoes, ropes, and climbing gear. The snow extended all the way to the summit, and though fairly steep in a few places, was not difficult. By 1:30pm we reached the summit, and were greeted with a spectacular undercast to the north. Rain showers were hitting the valleys to the south, but for the moment we were in the sun.

Interestingly, the summit register only showed one other ascent this early in the season, the first ascent May 29, 1935. There were no records of any ascents earlier in the year than ours, May 19. Perhaps the snow had buried the summit register in earlier ascents. s

We soon retraced our steps, downclimbing and plunge-stepping the snowslope back to our snowshoes, then plunge-stepping back down to the Dome-Sinister col. Unfortunately we now had to climb 1000 feet back to the col, but luckily navigation would be easy (we could follow our tracks) and the trail would be mostly broken. We did wish we had taken shorter steps on the descent to make the ascent easier, but we still appreciated our tracks.

By 3pm we were back at the col, and started heading towards Dome. I’d seen pictures of the summit of Dome as a very exposed rocky knife-edge ridge, and had brought a bit of rock gear to protect it. We snowshoed up to the ridge, and it appeared much snowier than it had in any picture I’d seen. We ditched the snowshoes where it got steep, then kicked steps over until we were standing about 15ft almost directly below the summit.

From here we could have probably just scrambled up unprotected, but having brought all the rock gear anyways, I decided to use it. Matthew belayed me up, and I clipped a slung boulder, then clipped a cam in and belayed him to a good ledge. We took turns scrambling the extra 10ft along the ledge to tag the true summit, then downclimbed back to the snow.

Dome Peak had been much easier than we anticipated, and the weather had been much drier than we had hoped for. It had been sunny with great views on both summits! But that was about to change. As we descended onto the Dome Glacier another whiteout set in, and it began to rain. The rain continued all the way until we reached our camp, but then mercifully let up.

Matthew built a nice fire near camp that night and we dried out our wet gear.

The next morning we were moving at 5:45am, trying to get an early start to ensure Matthew made his 5:30pm flight back to California. We climbed steep snow out of Cub Lake, then retraced our tracks all the way back to Matthew’s stashed sneakers. From here it was an easy hike back to the car, which we reached by 11:15am, well in time for Matthew to catch his flight home.

Dome summit video:

Sinister summit video:

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