Luna Peak - Sept. 1-3, 2017

I recently trawled through several old hard drives and an old laptop to find the RAW files of the photos I took over Labor Day weekend in 2017. This trip was rather special to me since it was my first and only trip to the Picket Range in the North Cascades. I climbed Luna Peak with my friend Tobin — in fact, this was our very first hike together, and what a hike it was! I could have sworn I’d already written about this trip on here, but sure enough when I checked my previous posts it was nowhere to be found. Figures it was an unpublished draft in which I got no further than the title.

I flew into Seattle via American Airlines. The original flight was delayed so the gate agent automatically booked me to an earlier flight and assured me that my bags would get transferred onto the new plane. Not so…I got the dreaded notification after landing at SeaTac that my bags would be arriving in the morning. Our hopes of getting an early start the next day were dashed when my bags didn’t arrive at the airport until around 10am. We drove up to the ranger station in Marblemount, got our permits, made a reservation for the Ross Lake boat shuttle, and were finally on the trail at the early hour of 3pm.

We camped at Luna Camp and began the next morning around 5am. I don’t remember too much about this next section honestly except that it wasn’t as bad as we were expecting. We left the trail, pushed through the brush, forded Big Beaver Creek, almost got swept off my feet in the creek (downstream was gentle terrain and it wouldn’t have been a huge deal aside from the soaking). The bushwacking up Access Creek was fairly mild. The only “bad” sections were around the 3600 ft mark where we had to cross a few steep ravines which were overgrown with Devil’s club and slide alder. The loose talus underfoot was just a bonus. Otherwise, most of this part of the ascent was through low brush. Closer to 4000 ft the brush began to open up and the going got easier. The worst part for me by far was fording Access Creek; it was only ankle deep but the alder on both sides was impenetrably thick. We forced our way through with much effort. The reward? Our first view of the impressive east face of Luna.

Me standing on the false summit of Luna Peak. Photo courtesy of Sam Davis.

We (or rather, I) had a long lunch break and watched a group of eight people work their way up towards the notch overlooking the southern Pickets. Bafflingly, they chose the right-most fan-like gully which looked very loose (don’t go up this way!). We were occasionally treated to the sounds of loose rocks as they ascended. To us, the left-most gulley (which looked more like a dried up stream from early season) seemed much more stable and indeed, once we got started it was easy going until the last 500 vertical feet. At that point, the group of eight decided to turn around. Two of them sent a computer-sized rock careening down the gully with not so much as a warning. We looked up and saw it whizzing towards towards us. It felt like a close call that we were able to scoot out of the way in such steep terrain. The rock kickers’s friends berated them for bad hiking etiquette so we kept our mouths shut. They said they were “just looking for a fun hike to do over the holiday".” I’m not sure how they settled on Luna Peak or whether I would agree it fits the bill as “fun.”

(Just a side note here: when scrambling or hiking on any terrain which has the potential for rockfall, it’s standard etiquette to alert people below you if you dislodge any loose rocks. If you’re in a group, it can often, depending on terrain, make sense to spread out so no one is in another’s fall line. This gully wasn’t the widest so it was difficult to hike away from the run off of the other party.)

Once at the notch, we traversed over steep slopes and made an ascending arc towards Luna Col. I was pretty tired at this point and lagging behind Tobin. We ran into my friend Sam at the col and all spent some time on the false summit together. Even five years later, I can’t understate how phenomenal the view of the Pickets was. We couldn’t stay for sunset since we had set up camp in the basin at the top of Access Creek, but we got to enjoy a solid hour of golden light. We made it back to the notch before total darkness and even got to see the eerie glow of the Diamond Creek Wildfire burning several ridgelines over.

Up through summit day, we had been very fortunate to avoid wildfire smoke despite several large fires burning in the North Cascades. On our last day though, temperatures were high and the air was hazy and stagnant with smoke. We hiked from the the headwaters of Access Creek all the way down to the shores of Ross Lake in an oppressive, miserable heat. Somehow, we’d managed to sneak in this trip between some really unfavorable wildfire conditions.

I think, while writing this with the hindsight that five years provides me, I’d be interested in going back here, if only to camp at Luna Col this time. It kills me a little inside that I never got the opportunity to watch a proper sunrise up here.