Mt Barney Survey

Mt Barney Survey

Hiking up Farewell Creek

Oct 19, 2025

15 miles

Eric and Comma

Results: Elevation 7832.5ft +/-0.3ft NAVD88

I was hoping to survey one of the remaining few WA Top 200 edge case peaks before survey season ended with the onset of deep snow. The original plan was Corral Peak, and we drove up towards the trailhead Saturday night. But the snow was deeper than expected and I hadn’t yet put snow tires on the truck. So with a few miles to go before the trailhead and travel expected to be very slow going on the trail, we decided to bail to another objective with lower mileage and higher chance of success.

The route

Mt Barney was a nearby Top 300 peak, and had a trailhead below snowline, so we switched to that. Sunday morning around 5:30am we hiked up the trail up Farewell Creek and soon hit snow line around 3300ft. The trail deteriorated from a past fire and we soon found our own route in deepening snow. At the col between Barney and Peak 6794 we continued up the SE ridge of Barney to the summit by 12:30pm. I mounted my dGNSS receiver on the boulder, which had some wire and a wooden post. On the quad this is marked with a triangle, meaning it was a surveyed benchmark. There was no monument on it, though.

The receiver on the summit

I logged data for 30 minutes before we headed down. We made good time following our up tracks, and got back to the trailhead by 5:30pm. On the drive back Washington Pass had a lot of snow, which slowed things down a bit.

I processed the data with TrimbleRTX (OPUS is down because of the US shutdown). The elevation is 7832.5ft +/-0.3ft NAVD88. LiDAR was off by 0.9ft here since it likely missed the sharp summit boulder.

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