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Basic Alpine Climb - Sloan Peak/Corkscrew Route

We attempted Sloan/Corkscrew from Bedal creek side, missed the turn without knowing it and ended up in the wrong saddle, hence the turn around.

Bing Gao Bing Gao
June 29, 2016
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June 29, 2016
  • Road rough but passable

  • Peter from our climb did an excellent job on Father's day to clean up the trail and made our approach very pleasant. No more high deep bushes  for the first 2 miles or so just before the first major creek crossing. 

Trip Date: 6/25/2016
Elapsed Time: ~7 hours
Elevation gain: 3000
Miles: 9
Participants: 6 

John and I decided to do an early Sloan attempt, given this weekend is the only mutual free weekend we have in months! Most of the listed mountaineer trips for this route go from the Cougar Creek side after mid-July to avoid high river crossing issues. We didn't find much report from the Bedal Creek side though, and by checking the route, I thought it would be interesting to find out the condition and maybe why people seldom try this approach.

We started from the trailhead at 6:30am, and followed the newly maintained Bedal Creek trail(thanks to Peter again) till we crossed two side creek to the toe of a rock slide debri at about 4200'. At this point we have already missed the turn, which should be right before/after the first creek crossing at about 3600', where you head up the trees and targeting the saddle between Bedal Peak and Sloan Peak. But with the heavy fog that day, we couldn't really see any peak and ended up to the ridge  5700' running west from the southern part of Sloan. I believe this is the standard route for the SW face approach.

We started decending the ridge following a goat trail hoping to get to the right saddle between Bedal and Sloan, till it got bushy and we realized we were already at the south side of Sloan and decided to give up the summit. Hoping we might be able to check out the right approach and reach the right saddle. But by the time we got back to the creek, we couldn't see any obvious path leading up the forest, and decided to call it a day and headed to Oso General store for a nice BBQ on a now sunny day.

Although we didn't summit, everyone kept a high spirit and that's my first mentored lead, many lessons learned indeed!