Del Campo Peak - Aug. 9, 2018
I’ve got a bit of a rocky relationship with this mountain. In 2015, I tried to climb it with no prior scrambling experience (I did have a helmet, though!) which ended in failure. I remember looking up the north face of the peak and thinking I surely wasn’t meant to climb up that steep rock. Fast forward to 2017 and I successfully made the summit, albeit without any photos because a child almost stole my DSLR (more on this later). In 2018, I decided to go back up for sunset with my friend Lucas.
We had planned to do this the day before (on August 8th). I even picked up Lucas in Seattle and we were on the road already when he told me he forgot his hiking boots at home. It was about 90 degrees outside and I wasn’t really feeling it so we decided to call it and try again the next day. Also, side note: I never drive to the trailhead in my hiking shoes so actually forgetting them at home is a big fear of mine; hasn’t happened yet, but I fear my days are numbered. The next day, we hit the trail at around 3pm. It was still extremely hot and I remember feeling pretty nauseous for a good portion of the hike up to Gothic Basin.
Lucas swam in one of the larger tarns and Foggy Lake while I took photos, and then we headed up to the peak. There was mostly avoidable snow on the boulder field which only had to be crossed at the base of the scramble. It was at this spot in 2017 that I accidentally left my camera. My friend Bryce and I were rearranging the contents of our packs and I must have forgotten the camera in the scuffle. When we got back, it was gone. We began asking all of the campers on our way back to Gothic Basin if they had seen it, and some boy with a summer camp group said he found it buried in the snow and assumed it had been left there the year before. Sure…our groups had crossed paths at the base of the scramble and there’s no way he hadn’t seen me holding the camera at that point.
Anyway, Lucas and I made good time up to the summit and spent a solid hour taking photos and watching the sunset. It was a little smoky, which usually annoys me, but the layers of mountains were really brought out by the smoke so I’m not complaining. We descended mostly in the dark. I remember navigating back onto the snow field by headlamp. The basin itself was also confusing in the dark. We stumbled through a group of women’s campsite and they said they were having fun watching us descend the mountain in the dark. Ha ha.
Once we were back on the trail, it was easygoing back to the car. I was worried that my windows would be smashed in since it was a weekday at the Barlow Pass trailhead is notorious for car break-ins, but all was good. We came across a man with a dog who told us he was searching for Sam Sayers (the woman who went missing on nearby Vesper Peak a couple of weeks prior). I don’t know his qualifications but he said he was planning to search around the Foggy Pass area. We wished him luck and continued on our way.
I’ve climbed this peak twice now and would definitely climb it again. It feels like a mini alpine experience – rugged trail up to Gothic Basin, hopping over talus to get to the base of the climb, and then steep scrambling over very solid rock to the summit. Oh, and it’s only an hour and a half from Seattle, which is another reason why I just keep coming back here.
