Basic Glacier Climb - Sloan Peak/Corkscrew Route

Trip Report

the Approach

We had heard a lot about how bad the road to Bedal Creek TH is (some say 4WD needed, and the brush will scratch up your car), so we took the Cougar Creek approach.

The trail from Cougar Creek is quite overgrown with lots of blow-downs...

a ton of stream crossings...

and a really cool waterfall (which makes for a great lunch spot).

The blowdowns and stream crossings slowed us down quite a bit, with us often having to take our shoes off. Some of us chose to just walk through the streams and hike with wet boots. Also, some of the crossings require walking on downed trees above fairly deep water. So overall, I would recommend the Bedal approach especially easy season if you have vehicles that can make it. I recently read more reports that clarified that a vehicle like a Subaru Forester or equivalent can make it to the Bedal Creek TH.

Consistent snow started at 4800 ft, and we ascended a snow slope using crampons and ice axes before arriving at our campsite at 5800 ft on the northeast ridge just before the glacier. There was one dry site we came across which was large enough to pitch four tents (one of us camped on the snow).

 We started the approach hike at 10:30 am, and it ended up taking us 9 hours to arrive at our campsite at 5800 ft - significantly longer than we had anticipated.

the climb

Given our slower pace the previous day, and wanting to get off the glacier before the snow became too sloppy, we decided on an early 4:30 am start. The glacier was in great shape and easily navigable, with just a couple crevasses visible.

We took almost two hours to traverse the glacier, at which point, we started the traverse over to the start of the scramble. The initial part of the traverse was snow-covered (about 20 ft), so we used a running belay for protection.

After this, we unroped for the traverse / scramble. The rest of the trail to the scramble was covered by snow in a few locations, so we hiked around those sections on the heather benches below. The photo below is looking back at the traverse. 

The scramble is pretty straightforward, fairly clean and very fun. Mostly Class II, Class III towards the top. 

We arrived at the summit at 8:30 am, and enjoyed the phenomenal panoramic views all around us.

We all regrouped back at the glacier at 10:45 am, arrived at camp at 12:15 pm. We started the hike out at 1:30 pm, and arrived back at the cars at 7:30 pm.

Map