Trip Report

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OwnerMITOC Gallery Administrator
Creation Date2007-04-03 20:25:28 UTC-0400
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Expedition to Mount Olympus
Matthew and Eric Gilbertson
Matthew and I were looking for a Spring Break expedition to rival last year's Katahdin trip, and we found the perfect mountain to conquer - Olympus. It's the highest mountain on the Olympic Peninsula west of Seattle, and though only 8,000ft it's rugged enough to mistake for something in the Himalayas. The part that makes it a great expedition is that it's in the middle of Olympic National Park, about 20 miles from the nearest trailhead, and it's (sort of) possible to get to and from the trailheads with public transportation (since Matthew and I are too young to rent a car). The normal approach is a 17.3-mile flat hike through the Hoh rain forest and up to 4500ft base camp at Glacier Meadows, but unfortunately for us some bridges on the Hoh road had washed out last fall and the trailhead was closed to the public. Our next option was to start at Sol Duc and hike 22 miles up and over some formidable 5000ft ridges to get to the Hoh rainforest, then up to base camp. This sounded like a fun challenge, so we decided to go for it.


March 25: On Sunday morning we caught an early plane to Seattle, then took a bus and ferry west to Port Angeles. We met some rangers at park headquarters who strongly advised us against our plans, warning us of 10ft of snow, avalanche danger, and impassable trails just to get to Glacier Meadows. We thought it over and decided to assess the conditions for ourselves when we got into the backcountry, to stay in the trees on the steep slopes to avoid avalanches and to turn around if the conditions were too dangerous.
We eventually made it to the Sol Duc trailhead by dark that night and pitched a tent after taking a super expensive taxi ($90, whose expense we vowed to avenge on the return trip...)


March 26: We had transported all or our sharp pointy gear like crampons and ice axes in separate dufflebags to get them through the airport safely, and we stashed these and our town shoes in the woods to pick up on the way out.
On Monday morning we finally got to start hiking. The trail started
out easy until we got to snowline at about 2500ft, where we had to change to snow shoes. Somehow the snow would be 3ft deep in some places and non-existent in others, so we had to tiptoe over the dirt/rocks in our snowshoes quite a few times. Amazingly Matthew, notorious for breaking snowshoes, kept his in perfect condition while one of mine lost a few teeth (don't tell the MITOC gear managers). For quite a while we were actually following the trail, until 4 miles in at Deer Lake when it completely vanished. It was quite surprising how abrupt the snowline actually was. One minute we were dodging a few minor drifts here and there, the next moment we were walking over the tops of 10ft trees. This is when Matthew's topo maps came in handy. It turns out Hayden library actually has all the USGS quads for the country, so Matthew made some copies, laminated them, and presto - cheap backcountry maps (click here to see the maps). If you would ever like to borrow these gorgeous maps, talk to Matthew.


From the lake we could see a big bowl around us where the trees were starting to thin out on the steep slopes and the scenery was more alpine. We spotted a saddle that the trail should hit, so we started toward that. What we didn't see until we almost fell in was a little stream that had somehow carved a 15ft deep Grand Canyon of snow in front of us, basically like a crevasse. I would have expected there to be snow bridges over this, but apparently the area doesn't get cold enough for the stream to even freeze, it just gets inundated with feet upon feet of snow. So basically, during all of the tremendous snowstorms the Olympics get, the little trickle of a stream carves through the snow and leaves towering walls of snow on either side. The layers in the snow told the snowfall history for the entire winter.
There was no way to directly cross snowy chasm, so we were forced to follow the stream to its source and cross where the stream was thin enough for a snow bridge to form. We headed for a ridge above the stream and started traversing around the bowl. Pointy ridgesare actually very difficult to follow in the winter in the Olympics because one side will have huge cornices that could cleave off if you step on them, and the other side has really steep slopes in the trees. This ridge, which would have taken half an hour max in the summer, took several hours because we had to traverse the steep tree-covered side using ice axes and crampons (walking over the cornices would have been way too dangerous). This was made even more difficult with our 75 lbs of gear apiece. We eventually made it to the saddle a little before dark, and decided to set up camp. On our traverse we had caught a few glimpses of a formidable glaciated mountain in the distance which we presumed was Olympus, but it started snowing by the time we reached camp one so we would have to wait another two days to see our mountain.


March 27: It turns out the snow that night was about the only precipitation on our whole trip - absolutely astonishing for the Olympics. The next morning was sunny and we got a glimpse of our route ahead, which looked pretty tough. The trail continued along the ridge and the side of a huge avalanche slope up to Bogachiel Peak, then around another bowl and down the other side. There was no way we could safely cross that avalanche slope, but it looked like a possible route completely in the trees if we dropped about 1000ft into the next valley and climbed up 1000ft to the next ridge. It was going to be rough, but Matthew agreed it looked safe enough, so we went for it. The tough part was descending into the valley, because sometimes we would get to the edge of the trees only to find ourselves on top of an avalanche slope, so we would have to traverse to go around it. The descent was steep enough that we had to go down backwards using our ice axes and crampons in the snow. For the ascent on the other side we were in the strange position that we had to wear snowshoes while climbing 45-degree tree-covered slopes with ice axes, because with crampons we would be swimming through 3 feet of fluff on top of any hard-packed snow. It took us basically the whole morning to get down to the valley and climb the up other side. The top our ridge was about 5000 ft, ironically higher than base camp at Glacier Meadows, though we still would have to cross the Hoh valley to get to base camp.


From the ridge we descended some moderate snow slopes to Hoh Lake (completely covered in snow though I doubt it was actually frozen), and continued south following its drainage. We had to switch out between snowshoes and crampons about every 10 minutes because the snow was either 10 feet of powder or hard-packed 45-degree slopes. After several hours of constant switching, we soon became winter-footwear experts - snowshoes on some terrain, snowshoes + ice axe on others, and sometimes just bare boots. Occasionally we would encounter a deep snow-canyon carved out by a tributary to the hoh lake drainage, and luckily we always managed to find a snow bridge to cross.


We descended to snowline at about 2500ft and at last we met up with the trail again when it was now safe enough to follow. I guess the storm that washed out bridges on the Hoh road was also damaging up in the mountains, because around every corner we would find huge 200-year-old trees over the trail. Despite these nuisances we thought it still prudent to follow the trail, now that we were out of the snow. These massive trees were a sign that we had reached the Hoh rainforest, a valley that receives over 100 inches of rain a year and has trees up to 550 years old. The valley was spectacular, with moss hanging down 3 feet off of everything and most trees at least 5 feet in diameter. The valley also had our first flat trail of the trip, and we could finally put on a decent pace.


We got to the valley bottom around 4:30pm and kicked it into gear, hiking about 8 miles up to Elk Lake by dark. This was back up at the edge of snowline, and our topo map showed a shelter conveniently right next to the lake. Well, the map was kind of right, except that a five-foot-wide tree had fallen squarely on the poor little hut, smashing it to splinters. Camp two would be in a tent again that night.

March 28:
Our original plan had been to make it to Glacier Meadows that night, giving us Wednesday and Thursday as possible summit days. Since we didn't know anything about the two miles between Elk Lake and Glacier Meadows other than it was steep and tough, we decided against a super-alpine summit attempt from Elk lake, and gave ourselves the next full day to make it to base camp and practice crevasse rescue.

Accordingly, we slept in the next morning and started up the trail around 9:30am. From our topo map it looked like the trail followed a very steep bank of a drainage from the glacier, and we figured it would be safest to try to stay on the trail instead of bushwhacking. Not far from Elk Lake the trail began traversing a 45-degree angle slope in the trees far above the drainage. This was one place the rangers had warned us about. It was amazing how the slope was so steep that the only snow on it happened to accumulate on the little terrace that the trail had formed, so that the snow completely smoothed over the trail at the same angle as the mountainside. In the summer you could cover the half mile in ten minutes; for us it would take two hours of intense concentration. To get across we had to carefully travel sideways, planting the ice ax, kicking in a step, then planting the ice axe again. At times we actually followed mountain goat tracks, though we weren't lucky enough to see any mountain goats. There were two places along the trail where we had to cross narrow avalanche slopes, and luckily the slopes had slid in the previous days, dumping all their snow while no new snow had accumulated. Still we crossed quickly one at a time and dreaded the return trip.
By noon we made it to Glacier Meadows. There were several shelters (and a privy) buried under about 7 feet of snow, but we decided to hike up just a little farther to get as close to Olympus as possible before our summit attack. We would revisit Glacier Meadows the next day. We chose an awesome spot in a saddle looking down on the Blue Glacier, our summit ascent route. It was early afternoon and a sunny day, though Olympus was still actually hidden behind another mountain, Panic Peak.
From our base camp we practiced how we would cross the glacier the next day. We reviewed roping up, building anchors, building z-pulleys, and self-arresting on some slopes next to our tent. Our handy little weather radio somehow got a signal and the forecast for Thursday was mostly sunny, freezing level 6000ft - spectacular for a summit attempt.
March 29 : Summit Day. This was it. Ten different modes of transportation, 4 days of travel and a bunch of preparation just to get us to this one spot. And we were ready. We set out on the Blue Glacier at 6:15am, and watched the bright stars fade into daylight over Mt Apollo to our east. Matthew was in the lead, with Eric at the back end of the 100ft rope caterpillar, ready to self arrest if Matthew took a wrong step into a crevasse.
The nice, smooth, glacier was like a superhighway compared to the miles of technical terrain we had covered so far. However, with no real sense of perspective, we felt like we were moving pretty slow. The surrounding mountains thousands of feet above us looked like mere hills in the early morning light. But we crossed the two mile sheet of snow in good time and finally, at about 7am we could actually see Olympus. Our mountain. This felt like an accomplishment itself--3.5 days of hiking before we could actually even see the summit of our mountain. Although we still had 3000 vert ft to go, we felt like we were just about there. We could taste the snow of the summit.
We followed the directions of our guide book and steeply ascended a massive snow dome. The dome itself wasflat at the top, with snow extending nearly a mile in each direction. You almost felt like you could play some kind of sport since on it, it was so big, you could probably fit a soccer field on top, just take off the crampons please.
The snow dome placed us at the base of our final pitch to the top. (Check out the route we took here.) We struggled up the 45 degree slope in snowshoes and felt like we were swimming in as much as 3 ft of crusted fluff. After hopping over a little bergschrund and doing our steepest snowclimb ever, we popped over the final lip to the summit massif. We were immediately blasted by a 50mph breeze scouring over the snow and stinging us in the face. To our right and up a rather long 4th class pitch was the "true summit" at 7969ft. To our left was the so-called "false summit"--elev about 20 ft lower. I don't like the name "false summit," instead we went with the guide book and referred to it as "Five Fingers." We decided that we valued our safety more than our ability to say we had been to the "true summit", so we went for Five Fingers instead.
And what a sight it was. Everything was absolutely caked in rime ice, with almost no rocks exposed. It felt exactly like a nice day on Mount Washington in NH: 50mph winds, 28 degrees, ice and snow all over the place, and one spectacular view. We could see snow-covered mountains in every direction: west to the Cascades, north to BC and Vancouver Island. The mountains were absolutely saturated with snow. I tell you, even if the mountains got another ten feet I bet they wouldn't have looked a bit different. Those mountains had more snow than they knew what to do with. Every tall geographic feature as far as the eye could see was smothered by a smooth, massive blanket of white. We looked far to the NNE and could even see some skyscrapers. That must have been Vancouver--almost a hundred miles away!
We kept snapping pictures left and right. Every direction we looked there was the perfect photo-op. Once we had eaten our fill of the scenery we carefully headed back down to our packs at the summit saddle and dug a little snow cave for a shelter (mostly just to vindicate hauling the shovel up). We were hoping that the steep slope we had cautiously ascended would become the perfect glissading hill on the way down, but alas, it was too warm and the snow was far too soft. This was our cue to get off the mountain. We made it down Snow Dome and off the glacier without a hitch at about 2pm, and saluted goodbye to Olympus from one of our most spectacular campsites.
For a little change of scenery we decided to spend the night at the Glacier Meadows camp. From the huge mound of snow that had built up on the roof, we discovered the location of one shelter and decided to shovel it out. We carved a magnificent staircase leading down into the cozy 4-bunk abode, and called it "the fridge" since it actually felt colder in the shelter than outside. With that work completed, we had to find something else to do, so we set out to accomplish one of the most important tasks of all: excavating the privy. On our way up the first way we identified that we were at a campground was by theone foot of exposed privy sticking up out of the snow. Since there was not a single patch of exposed ground anywhere in sight we had to use the privy to be LNT. As such, we took turns digging out the sacred throne from the seven feet of snow and finally reached the bottom after a solid hour of digging. We were so proud of our accomplishment: we knew that if anyone else visited Glacier Meadows in the early season they could also exercise Leave-No-Trace principles thanks to our diligent work.
March 30: We awoke early the next morning and faced one of the most formidable obstacles of all: the Elk Lake--Glacier Meadows trek. Once again following mountain goat tracks we traversed the 45 degree snowfields safely and at last we reached solid ground by lunch time. At this point we were faced with two options: we could try to go back the same way that we came (Sol Duc trailhead--see map), or we could hike down the Hoh river to the Hoh trailhead. Each route had its benefits and its risks: by going back the way we came, we knew exactly what to expect, we would have to cross sharp, corniced ridges and slog through snow fluffier than any pillow, while adding thousands of extra vertical feet to the trip to avoid avalanche slopes. On the other hand, we had left some gear at the trailhead (suitcases and shoes) and this would be the most direct way to get them back.
We were much less certain about the Hoh route. There had been severe flooding in the Hoh River valley in November, washing out the road to the extremely-popular Hoh visitor center. We read a report that there were "hundreds of trees down within the first few miles of the trailhead," and in fact nobody had fully surveyed the full extent of the damage along the entire 13 mi of trail along the river. So we had no idea what to expect along that trail. Plus, once we made it to the trailhead we would not be out of the woods yet--we would have to walk five miles down the road (whose condition we did not know) before even getting a chance to hitchhike. Then we would have to find a way to get from Forks to Port Angeles (60 mi away), while finding a way to travel 14mi up Sol Duc road and back to get our gear in less than 4 hours. But the Hoh trail presented several advantages: over 13 miles the trail descends only about 500ft, make it essentially level. Plus, there wouldn't be any snow to deal with, just a couple of trees, right? As we contemplated the options, we pictured ourselves going back on the same trail, once again struggling through the deep snow with our monster packs and exerting tremendous effort to travel just a couple miles. We didn't like that picture. So we went for the gamble and decided on the Hoh trail. The next two days would reveal whether or not that was the right choice.
With our decision made, we were now at the mercy of the trees rather than the snow. We had no idea how many trees we would confront; we looked nervously around every bend in the trail see what awaited us. We felt like we were explorers in a new land, not sure of what we would find. And we had good reason to be nervous, for we were now in the Hoh rainforest, with gigantic trees everywhere. It was as if the tremendous rainfall acted like steroids, pumping every plant up to gigantic proportions; there were 3ft long moss-cicles dripping from the trees and the greenest, lushest vegetation I've ever seen. It was absolutely spectacular, and we patted ourselves on the back for deciding to explore this vastly different scenery instead. But nevertheless, we remained wary of the trees that lay ahead of us on the trail. No, we're not talking little twigs and branches over the trail, we're talking massive, 200ft long, 5+ ft wide Sitka Spruces in our path that are more formidable than a barbed wire fence at keeping you out. We crossed several in the first couple miles before Lewis Meadows, and I tell you each tree presented a whole new challenge. It would be hard enough to bushwhack around a gargantuan tree without a pack, but when you've got to struggle through the tangles of the rainforest and nimbly jump over and under branches with 70+ lbs on your back you feel like an elephant hopping one one leg through an obstacle course. Sometimes we'd get to the other side of the tree and the trail would just disappear. The trees were just so huge that they would completely erase any sign that the trail ever existed. In addition, in some places where the trail skirted the river we basically confronted with a big crater where the trail used to be. Often we crossed fallen trees over streams where bridges had once been. Since last November the only signs of the trail had been washed away and by now were probably reaching the Pacific Ocean. These obstacles were especially difficult to navigate.
But eventually we grew more agile with our packs and gained a better sense for the behavior of the trail, maintaining a 2mph pace. Believe it or not, our greatest help along the trail soon became elk tracks, and no longer the map. The Hoh River valley has quite a large herd of elk and, confined between steep mountains on either side of the valley, they move up and down the river in search of food. They normally use the real trail, but since it was washed out last year they had reigned as the valley's the trail crew for the last five months, trampling down new trails to get around obstacles. So, whenever we were in doubt about the trail, we just asked "where'd the elk go?" and by following their tracks we always found the trail again. In fact, we eventually caught up with some of the elk themselves; we tipped our hats to them, snapped a few pics, and continued on our way.
Over the entire 13mi of trail, we crossed probably 10 tress that we would classify as "monsters", and an uncountable number of smaller trees and branches that required a 3ft long leg to step over. Seeing the elk was the extent of our social interaction for the week, and the only other things of interest that we saw were a bear print in the mud and an elk skeleton under a fallen tree. We later reported our findings in earnest to the rangers.
After enjoying sunny weather basically the whole week, we knew that we were due for a good rainstorm. The weather radio confirmed our suspicions, so we picked up the pace and high-tailed it to the Hoh visitor center before supper. Unfortunately the visitors center was closed since the roads washed out in November, so we had to camp in the woods nearby. The rainforest was such a unusual place; we felt like we were in Jurassic Park with the tree frogs chirping all night, antlered-elk looming like triceratops in the woods, the massive trees dripping with moss and huge ferns, and this Visitor Center that looked like it was ready for action, but needed a couple of months before it opened. We went to bed ready for a velociraptor to jump out of the bushes...
March 31: But we saw no dinosaurs, only some more elk in the morning during our five mile hike down the Hoh road. Today was going to be another big day. Here's what we had to do: hike 5 miles down the road to where it's open, then hopefully get a ride into Forks, WA (30mi). Catch the bus from Forks to Port Angeles bus at 2:45, and get dropped off halfway at the Sol Duc road. Get a ride 14mi up the Sol Duc road to our gear, then get another ride back to the road by 7:15, when we could catch the last Forks-Port Angeles bus, putting us in Port Angeles at 8pm, and hopefully find a hostel before it gets too late. Wheh. Very complicated, but we mostly succeeded.
That day, we did a total of about 18mi of road 'walking' (10mi w/pack, 4mi walking, 4mi sprinting w/suitcase); caught two buses; and hitchhiked three times. Our hitchhiking record was pretty consistent: we got a ride on about the 15th-20th car that passed by. We met new people every time: a mechanical engineer from KY, a couple from Williams College, and a mountain unicycling family from Maui. If any of them ever read this, we thank them so much for their help. We made it to Port Angeles after dark, and rushed to the China First buffet for some 'hen haochi de cai'. After I screwed up directions twice and made us walk about 10 times father than necessary, we finally arrived at the Thor hostel by 10pm.
April 1: Even though our bus left Port Angeles at 1pm, we decided to go for the gold for this trip and top it off with a trip to Vancouver Island in the morning. Hey, Washington is state #47 on our list, why not start on the provinces? The ferry took 90mins, so we had enough time for a 15min run in Victoria to take some pictures. Now our big adventure was nearing its end; almost all the pieces of the travel puzzle had fallen in place. With another bus ride and ferry trip, the last step was to take the flight that would put us 2000 miles away in a totally different place. As we sat in the airport we agreed that despite all the travel hassles involved this trip was absolutely worth it. We made it to the top of Mount Olympus and back.