Camels Hump

Camels Hump (8,015ft)

April 3, 2021

Eric and Luke

I’m working on climbing top 200 peaks now that winter is over and I’m no longer working on Bulgers. Luckily there’s still enough snow coverage on many roads to use the snowmobile for approaches. Luke and I both still needed Camels Hump, and satellite images showed good snow coverage on the approach road. With clear skies forecast east of the crest we decided to go for it on Saturday.

This weekend I was perhaps a bit ambitious with trips, scheduling a car 2 car push on Rainier via Emmons Friday then Camels Hump Saturday then a trip into the Harts Pass area Sunday – Monday. But I think I’ve honed my skills at surviving on minimal sleep over the past year, so it seemed feasible.

Friday night I snowmobiled out to the north entrance of Rainier National Park by 9pm and immediately started my long drive east. I’ve found skittles and red bull are the ticket for me to stay awake driving all night. I pushed through the night, got briefly pulled over by a cop in Wenatchee for a busted headlight, then finally rolled into the Twisp River Sno Park at 3:45am.

Luke and I had agreed to start moving at 4am so it seemed I had just barely made it. But I was concerned about doing back to back big days with absolutely zero sleep in between, so I requested a one hour delay to take a short nap.

After my nap I was surprisingly rejuvenated and we got packed up at riding out around 5:15am. The road was melted down to gravel for the first half mile but then changed to mostly a 1ft layer of patchy icy snow. I had my ice scratchers down but we still overheated after a few miles. We packed snow on the tunnel and continued after 10 minutes to let it cool down. At one point a stream had melted a deep canyon in the road and we had to dig out a ramp to get around it. But by 6:30am we eventually reached the Reynolds Creek trailhead.

Interestingly there were other semi-fresh snowmobile tracks there. I’d been to this trailhead in January to climb Reynolds peak and also say other snowmobiles there. I’m not sure what the objective is that attracts skiers back there (it’s not reynolds or camels hump), but it seems to be a popular backcountry skiing area for those with snowmobiles.

We started up the icy snow following old boot and ski tracks. Soon it got patchy enough that we started carrying skis. By about 4,600ft the snow got continuous again and we continued on skis. We crossed Reynolds Creek on a good snow bridge at 4,750ft and continued on the left side of the south fork in nice open forest. We soon crossed back over to the right side and then took a break at the edge of the trees in a big flat basin at 5,600ft.

Here we would diverge from my route up Reynolds Peak from January. There were three gullies leading up to the col between Camels Hump and Reynolds Peak, and we chose the middle one because it was the lowest angle and in the shade. The rightmost one had a recent loose-wet avy slide in the middle and we were a bit concerned about other loose wet slides on the sunny day.

I led the way zig zagging up the gully, then at the top we cut left and booted up a modest slope to reach the east ridge of Camels Hump at 6,700ft. Luke took over booting up the ridge from there, and by 7,000ft we put skis back on and skinned to the false summit.

Unfortunately the true summit looked like a non-trivial distance away. The ridge appeared corniced on one side and steep on the other, so it didn’t really make sense to continue skiing. Instead we ditched the skis and took out ice axes (I converted my whippet to an ice ax). We traversed on the left side of the ridge, kicking steps in the steep slop to stay away from possible cornices on the crest. By 1:30pm we finally crested the true summit and took a break to admire the views.

We dug around for a register with no luck. The skies were starting to cloud up, which made for excellent views of Goode and Bonanza getting caught in the clouds. Soon we started back down, carefully following our up tracks. We noticed that the ridge was actually not corniced near the false summit, so stayed on the crest at the end.

From the false summit we skied fun corn down to the 6,700ft saddle, then shredded powder on the north-facing slope below. We skied all the way back into the trees and then down to the Reynolds Creek crossing at 4,800ft with minimal scooting. At the creek we transitioned back to skins and skinned back down to the patchy snow. We booted a bit in the melted out sections but were able to put skis back on at the end and ski back to the snowmobile.

For the ride out the snow was much slushier and luckily we didn’t overheat at all. I discovered a track on the side of the gravel section near the end, so the ride out actually didn’t require any long gravel sections. By 5:30pm we made it back to the sno park and packed up. Luke headed back to Seattle and I headed over to Mazama for my next trip – an overnight trip snowmobiling up to Harts pass and skiing in the Pasayten with some snowboarders.

Video of trip:

 

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