May 28 Black Peak

To culminate a fine North Cascades weekend, Linda R accompanied me to a deluxe tour to the high point of the SR20 day trips. Not wanting to risk dicey weather, waited until we had two full days of accumulated fatigue to do the big day. Met the Zap rule of skinning from the Rainey Pass TH. Still able to ski/skin across Lake Ann--just a bit of care where one steps on or off the lake. The long glide from the pass down to Lewis Lake was generally firm although the entire area is filled with debris which prevents an ideal high traverse line. The clouds all seemed to part on the skin toward Wing Lake to show a spectacular day (neither of us old schoolers have yet to purchase a digital camera, alas).  The last 200' of the upper Wing cirque (?) required very steep steps. Would have gladly traded a short axe for the somewhat pointless whippet since self belay was more needed. Once on the upper lip at 8100' a 10 minute scramble to get into the main south gully. After a short bit of skinning, the steepness required more booting. One 5 minute dance on talus, due to non continuous snow, returned us to the steps where the final snow finger topped out at about 8800'.
The views don't get any better than this! Since both of us had summited on previous trips and the plastic ski boots don't like the tricky final scramble, we celebrated with some of Mama's brownies and just dreamed of all the great trips in times past and future before us.
Some sideslips mixed with steep 40 degree+ ish turns on nice corn made the gully quite exciting. Nice widening 35 degree made it very tempting to keep going down the valley right where we had to stop and head over to the lip down back to Wing.  Good spot without cornices on the lip for the first few steep turns and then perfect corn on down.
When getting back to the ridge above Lake Ann could see a party had skied down off Maple Pass on the west facing slopes and left some very nice lines through the cliffs to the Lake. Kudos!  Nice fast run out onto the Lake on more creamy goodness and then shuffled on out. After record levels of pollen covered skis experienced at Easy Pass area on the 26th, happy to report clean bases. Must have something to do with the presence of Larches. White gas certainly comes in handy when needed on extended trips. Probably less than 5 miles apart as the crow flies.
730a to 530p.  Good mexican food on old Main Street in Arlington--char broiled steak and fajitas!
Accomodations note: camped at Easy Pass TH Sat nite and around midnight a group of yayhoos came in and decided to test their guns with about eight shots. That, along with getting quite moist on Birthday tour exit Sunday, redirected us to Lone Fir for Sunday night. Seemed like almost everyone there had skis on their vehicles. Water not turned on yet.