Easy Treadmill @ 4%

Evening Rock Climb

Morning Run

AeT Test @ 1% Grade

Evening Weight Training

“My body is broken” ~ Theoden 
w/ Rakia, Anda, and Rudy the DOG
16/100! Not sure why there’s a handful of GPS pings that are way off.

Trip Report:
With a good amount of precip predicted in the western sections of the north cascades, I suggested we pivot to Abernathy-Gardner-North Gardner as a backup plan. I had a CalTopo map from a few months before that compared a few car to car variations of this route, one of which being a thru hike from Scatter Creek TH to Wolf Creek TH. Anda had already bagged the Gardners, and so it fell together that we would drive two cars out Friday night, sleep at the Wolf Creek TH, shuttle to Scatter Creek TH early Saturday morning. Anda (& Rudy) would tag Abernathy and descend back to Scatter Creek, while we would press on. We ended up following through with this plan, though we shifted it by a day since I ended up with food poisoning on Friday.

Saturday evening we grabbed dinner in Winthrop and drove the short distance to the Wolf Creek TH. The TH was very nice, and nearly empty. Plenty of open flat ground for setting up a tent. The bathrooms had also been recently painted and cleaned, so we assumed this trail would be in good condition on our way out the next day. As we went to sleep, there was light rain that continued for a few hours.

Sunday morning we drove the hour to Scatter Creek TH, which was much smaller and also empty. Starting at about 4AM, we headed up the trail and were immediately drenched in water. The first section of the trail was very brushy, and the rain the night before had us serving as drying rags for the plants. Immediately we regretted not bringing extra socks, as we do on almost all other trips. Lesson #1 learned.

After a couple of miles, the trail opens up and there are little obstacles up to the summit of Abernathy. There was a faint climbers path that we followed straight up the slopes. Once at the summit, we took some photos and Anda began her descent. 

The N ridge of Abernathy leading down from the summit looked spicy given the wet, lichen-covered rock, and we radio’d to Anda that we would scout some routes but would most likely return with her. I scrambled down the ridge a short ways, but couldn’t see further than 20-30 feet through the clouds, and my trail runners had no traction on the rock. After nearly turning around, Rakia found a faint path that dropped onto the western slope scree and allowed us to bypass the initial exposure and technical sections. After a short while, we committed and traversed the ridge down. The route we took was class 2-3 the entire way. Eventually, we found an old mining site along the ridge and equipment leftover. We descending scree and snow slopes down to Nasty Pond, and began our descent to Gardner Meadows. At this point, the clouds began to clear and the sun came out.

We did not have much luck finding the abandoned mining trail shown on the forest service maps, so we picked and chose our route as we went. The terrain was not technical, but a mix of talus fields and burned down forest created some obstacles that slowed our progress. After a couple of hours we crossed the creeks and took a lunch break on a boulder in Gardner Meadows. 

Our socks and shoes were still soaked, so we wrung them out and tried to let them dry in the sun. After the short break, we headed up directly towards Gardner Mountain. We didn’t find much of a trail where we started, but there were dirt section along the meadow that made the terrain was very easy to travel. Once higher up, we intersected the climber paths and ascended scree to the summit, encountering a few short Class 3 sections. We didn’t find a register at the top, and wondered if it may have blown away given the limited number of spots to stash the container. 

Scoping out the ridge, we saw that we would only need to traverse a few sections of snow along the ridge to Point 8492 and up to North Gardner. For those sections, we used microspikes and a lightweight axe. 

The traverse as a whole felt like a “choose your own adventure”, with multiple options for how to proceed. Many times, avoiding exposure could be traded for losing elevation and descending onto steep scree. We passed the first gendarme on the south side, encountering a few class 3 moves and continued along the ridge. The traverse we took Point 8497 was Class 2-3, including a few moves that were somewhat technical but were not exposed. 

The ridge to North Gardner from here was slightly trickier, particularly for the first section. It seemed there was a path along the eastern side of the first tricky section, but a bit exposed over steep snow slopes. Instead, we chose to drop down on the west side onto scree and encountered a mix of class 2-3+. We did some “step-around” moves that did require careful footwork and hand placement, but the exposure was manageable. From there, the ridge was fairly straightforward and following it was not very exposed. A few sections had steep snow slopes to bypass, in which we often followed the moat across. This summit did have a register, and we were thrilled to be done with our elevation for the day.

Heading back down the ridge was a bit easier going (as it typically is), but it still took us a bit of time to bypass the first obstacle. From there, we followed the standard path out. Scree slopes, down through the meadows, and out to Wolf Creek TH. The trail was excruciatingly long, and I had recorded more miles than we expected on the map. A few sections were pretty overgrown, but all of the creek crossings were simple, and we got back to the cars at 11PM before our long drive back to Seattle.

Overall, this was an amazing trip and by far the biggest (not longest) day out in the mountains either of us have had!

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Dan Patterson

C2C Abernathy & The Gardners

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