International Glacier Attempt

International Glacier Attempt

Eric Gilbertson and Jason Hummel

March 21-23, 2026

45 miles boating, 5 miles hiking, 15 miles skiing, 4 miles dragging boat on road

Jason Hummel is working on a project to ski all ~300 named glaciers in Washington, and he’s getting prettly close to finishing. International Glacier on the Canada border is one of the ones most difficult to access, and still remained to be skied. The glacier is in the Chilliwacks on the northeast side of Mt Rahm, and I’ve made quite a few trips into that area. The optimal approach I’ve found is to boat up Ross Lake.

Ross Lake does not have any public road access, but motorized boats are allowed if you can get one there. The Ross Lake Resort offers a water taxi service, but it only runs mid June through October. It is also expensive, at $500 round trip to Silver Creek.

I have a zodiac boat I’ve used to climb all the Bulger peaks in the Chilliwacks in winter, and it works well and allows me access any time of year. Usually I start at the Ross Dam trailhead and triple carry the boat, motor, fuel, and other supplies a half mile down to frontage road. Then I assemble the boat, deploy the retractabl wheels, and drag it another half mile down to Ross Lake to put in. So that was our plan for this trip.

I’ve made several trips up Silver Creek in winter to access peaks, and the route works well. Our plan was to use that approach to Silver Lake, then climb up to the col at the head of the International Glacier between Devil’s Tongue and Rahm. Then we’d ski down from there and return to camp.

Winter had just ended so I was no longer interested in Bulger peaks and I was excited to go back into that zone. A few days before the trip I learned that a rock slide had closed Highway 20 near the Ross Dam trailhead, and it was now gated at MP 130 at Colonial Creek Campground. But, I had a backup plan. I’ve also accessed Ross Lake from this location by putting the boat in at Diabolo Lake, then boating to Frontage Road and dragging the boat on wheels up the road. It takes about the same amount of time as hiking the boat in the trail from the Ross Dam trailhead. This method doesn’t work well if the road is snow covered, but that is not an issue anymore now that it’s spring.

To make the trip more interesting we decided to bring Jason’s ebike and use it to either drag the boat up the road or ferry gear. I’d never involved both a bike and the zodiac in the same trip, so was excited to try it out. Our weather window was precip ending late friday night and then dry until sometime Tuesday morning.

It had been over a year since I’d used my boat, so Wednesday I did some bucket testing in my garage, and Thursday I took it out for a few hours on Lake Sammamish. Everything seemed to work fine. I decided to use the gas outboard instead of the propane because the gas motor seems more reliable and easier to fix if any issues happen to arise. Issues always come up with outboard motors on Ross Lake in winter conditions.

Saturday morning we met up at Colonial Creek campground. I had a little issue getting the motor started but figured it out eventually. We were loaded up and moving by 10:30am. I paddled out through a bunch of flotsam and then motored through the water fence and up to frontage road. There we took out and assembled the bike. We first tried to just tow the loaded boat with the bike, but it was kind of awkward with no front wheel on the boat. So instead Jason ferried loads of gear up to the highpoint of the road while I dragged the boat up.

The boat gradually got easier to drag as Jason came back to take more gear. At one point two guys on an ATV drove up the road past us. They must have been either dam workers or resort workers. They didn’t seem surprised at all to see us dragging a boat up the road, so I guess they must be used to stuff like that.

At the top Jason ferried gear down to Ross Lake while I continued dragging the boat. It took 2.5 hours to get everything to Ross Lake, and after a short break we were boating up by 1:30pm. We made good time going at around 5.5mph, and the weather was nice as expected. We rounded Cougar Island, went past Roland Point and then Rainbow Point. I saw two stumps sticking up a few inches above water near Devils Creek but pretty far away from shore. This is the sketchiest area for submerged stumps. The water was at 1560ft that morning, which is about the threshold for worrying about stumps. Between 1550ft – 1560ft there will be some stumps sticking out, but much above 1560ft I don’t have to worry about them.

We took the usual 3.5 hours to Silver Creek, getting there by 5pm. We unloaded, dragged the boat 10ft on shore, and tied it up to a stump. We then walked gear over to the campground and had a snack at the picnic table. I stashed a bit of food in a bear bin and then we started up at 6pm. This year there was a lot of log debris at the outflow of Silver Creek, making the crossing relatively easy.  On the other side we bushwhacked a short bit through easy forest before picking up the old miners trail. The trail is in pretty good shape, and we followed it for 2 miles until the cabin site just after a stream crossing.

Unfortunately it was dark by then and I didn’t see the cabin site. It offers a small flat area to camp, but we instead kept bushwhacking another half hour until finding a spot at the start of snowline around 3000ft at 9pm.

Sunday morning we started moving at 7:30am and booted a bit in the snow but soon put on skis and skins. The woods were mostly open with easy travel, and by 11:30am we reached the base of the headwall. Snow coverage was much deeper than I remembered the other times I’d been there in Jan and Feb, and this meant the climb would be easier. We stayed on the south side of Silver Creek, then crossed over on some avy debris and started making our way up the steep face.

We worked our way up to the base of a south facing avy slope in a gully between tree bands. We then skinned steeply up the left side. Up higher we briefly booted in the old growth forest, then at the base of a cliff cut right into a gully. At the top of this gully we cut left into more trees and then the slope eased. We traversed up and left, reaching the ridge at the edge of Silver Lake by 4pm.

The view was amazing across the large frozen lake looking up at Ag, Redoubt, and Custer. Silver Lake is at 6800ft and I think is the largest lake of that size and elevation in Washington. We still had plenty of daylight left to tag our objective, International Glacier. We ditched our overnight gear there, then skinned up to the base of McNaught Peak. When the slope increased and got icy we switched to crampons and kicked steps up to the McNaught-Toothpick col. It looked corniced, so I inched over to the side to get a good view.

The dropoff was very sharp on the opposite side, at least 100ft straight down to the glacier below. It had melted quite a lot since old maps and pictures we’d seen. I’d brought a short climbing rope and we looped it over a cornice to start sawing just in case that might help, but then we soon gave up. Even if we sawed that off, it was too sketchy to get down to the glacier. Even with a full 60m rope to rap down, it would be sketchy with all cornices to get past and under.

It appeared the best way to access the glacier to ski it would be from the other side. But we didn’t have time for that on this trip. So we decided to bail. We put skis on and had a fun ski back down to the lake, and set up camp near the outflow. I’d camped there before in February and knew the outflow generally melts out to running water in winter. Indeed, that was the case, and we had a good dinner of ramen noodles.

While the night started out calm, it didn’t last long. By 10pm the wind picked up, and our mega mid tent was getting jostled pretty hard. Shortly after midnight I opened my eyes and saw stars above me! I thought the tent had blown away, but luckily it was just one corner that had come unstaked. I’d used rocks to anchor the corners, but the wind had been too strong.

So I crawled out of my bag in the gale, found bigger rocks, and made all the anchors triple strength. The tent held up the rest of the night, and the wind gradually calmed down by 4am. I don’t think too much sleep happened that night for either of us. We had a few more objectives up in the area, but the updated weather forecast on my inreach was predicting a big storm to hit the area starting around 4am Tuesday. That could be bad news for our plan of boating out on Tuesday. I’ve been on Ross Lake in heavy wind and rain and waves in winter, and it can get pretty sketchy. So we decided to accelerate our schedule a bit to get out before the storm hit.

We skied a bit around Silver Lake, then by 10:30am packed up and headed down. It was important to not go too early since we needed the sun to soften up the icey slopes for us to ski out safely. The ski out was fast and fun. We quickly got down to the main gully system, then wove our way through the steep trees and were back to the base of the headwall by 11am. Below that the terrain leveled out enough that we transitioned to skins. We skinned down to around 3000ft, then picked up our stashed hiking shoes at our old campsite.

By 2:30pm we reached the old cabin site, then made it to Ross Lake 2 hours later.

Interestingly, now the boat was halfway in the water! The water had gotten raised by 4ft over the past few days, which was very unexpected. Usually the Seattle City Light lowers the dam level progressively over the winter and spring to prepare for the spring melt and runoff. So by April it should be at its lowest. So I’m not sure why they suddenly raised it by 4ft. Luckily this wasn’t a problem for us, though, since we’d dragged the boat so far out of the water.

By 5:30pm we were loaded up and pushed off into the calm lake. The motor started on the first pull, and I’m really liking the gas motor much more than the propane now. My propane motor usually takes at least 10 pulls, and I’m always nervous it won’t start (sometimes it hasn’t started and I’ve had to paddle back the length of Ross Lake). We made good time down past Little Beaver and Cat Island, but by Lightning Creek the wind and waves really picked up, and the waves started spraying us in the boat.

I steered over to the eastern shore and we got out to put on some more layers. We then pushed off and continued down lake. As it got darker I would navigate by the rough outline of peaks on the sides, and occasionally looking at my GPS watch. One benefit of the lake being several feet higher was now I knew I didn’t have to worry about the stumps, since they’d be under a few feet of water now.

Luckily the wind soon died down, and we had a mostly calm ride back. Interestingly, we saw a campfire going at the Green Point campsite, and I thought this meant maybe highway 20 had been open to Ross Dam trailhead for people to hike in. But I later learned it hadn’t been opened. So people must have just hiked in the extra road miles to get to the lake. By 9pm we got through the water fence and were soon at the take out.

Jason got the ebike and shuttled gear up the road while I started dragging the boat. We were pretty efficient, and within an hour had made it back down to Diablo Lake. We then loaded back up, put the bike back on, and started down the lake. Everything went smoothly until we got through the water fence on Diablo Lake. Within a mile of the takeout we started encountering floating debris of logs and sticks. It was really hard to avoid even going at the minimum speed.

At one point a stick got caught in the propeller and the motor shut off. I tried to restart it but it didn’t start. I suspected it could be a flooded carburetor, which is an easy fix. But, we were only 0.5 miles from the takeout and needed to go slow anyways to avoid the flotsam. So I just decided to row back. The going was kind of slow since we were heavily weighted down, but by 12:30am we touched down on shore. We quickly unpacked and started driving home, having beaten the storm by a few hours as hoped for. I made it back to Issaquah by 4am.

 

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