May 16, 2004, Ingalls Pk

Our original plans were for Ruth Pk near Mt Baker but the weather looked grim so we smartly changed our minds and drove over to Cle Elum, in the rain. It was raining in Cle Elum? Hey! That's not what they forcasted. We decided to go have a wet ski and drove to the trailhead anyway. We got lucky and the weather cleared up as we drove into the mountains.

The road is clear to the trailhead. We followed Burgdorfer's directions and took the summer trail to Ingalls Pass carrying our skiis  which wasn't much fun. As we ascended we eyed a south facing bowl that looked like an obvious and desirable descent route.  Dropping into Ingall's Lake basin we had some fun turns then traversed under the lake and began to skin up to the col between the peaks. The snow was very sloppy and we experienced much ski slide when side hilling. The visibility was in and out but unfortunately got worse over the course of the day. We never saw much of Stuart. At the col we dropped our packs and scrambled up to the summit. After little rest and a snooze in a whiteout we down climbed back to our packs and began tentatively finding our way back. We found nice skiing on steep slopes. At 5600' we found an up-track and began skiing up to find the south bowl we'd seen on the approach. Unfortunately we crested too soon and were too far east for the bowl, separated by a large rock buttress. We skiing down and portaged one 100' section of rock. We followed all the old ski tracks down to 5300' or so where we  took off the skis. We descended patchy snow until we hit the Esmeralda basin trail. We followed the trail back to the trail head.

Clearly the best approach is to go up the Esmeralda basin trail to around 4600' and then up to the snow. That will yield a trip with much less traversing and more turns.