Firebird Peak – Sept. 13-14, 2025
This somewhat esoteric peak is often overlooked in favor of its taller neighbors — Middle Palisade and Norman Clyde Peak. However, its summit offers a truly incredible view of the southern Palisades that you can’t get from many other vantage points. I wanted to photograph sunrise at the summit, which meant lugging a heavy pack with overnight gear up nearly 5000 ft of elevation gain. I think this was more than on my trip to Mt. Davis and I suppose shows that my physical fitness is improving this year even if it doesn’t feel like it.
I headed out from the Big Pine Creek overnight parking at around 9AM. If you plan to go up the South Fork of Big Pine Creek for an overnight trip, I strongly recommend you just walk up the road from the overnight lot. If you take the usual use trail that heads towards the North Fork, you’ll end up needlessly gaining around 400 ft of elevation that you’ll have to descend in order to access the South Fork trail anyway. This was my first time going up the South Fork and I was met with incredible views of the Palisades right away.
The trail gains about 1000 ft of elevation over gentle, rolling slopes before reaching a seemingly-impenetrable headwall. A series of very-hard-to-see switchbacks gains another 1000 ft and is a seriously nifty bit of trail engineering. The views from the top of these switchbacks were pretty good and gave me ample motivation to continue on (at this point, I had only done 40% of the day’s elevation gain!). The next section of trail was easier on forested slopes. Eventually, I peeled off the main trail to find my way up to Finger Lake. This section was definitely the steepest but was over quickly. Once at Finger Lake, I ran into several parties returning from climbs of Middle Palisade.
It was getting late in the day and I had to make a decision on where to camp. I’m writing up this trip report a couple of months later and can’t remember if I brought a tent or bivy sack, but my major consideration at the time was minimizing the amount of water I would have to carry to camp. I would need almost a liter for cooking dinner and breakfast and then another just for the remaining ascent to the summit. I decided to filter three liters of water at the large tarn at ~11220 ft and then setup camp whenever I got too tired to continue on. That ended up being around the 11800-ft mark which gave me a decent view of Middle Pal and less than 800 ft below the summit of Firebird Peak.
This was also one of the last weekends to photograph the core of the Milky Way. Being so late in the season, the Milky Way was in position for the shot I wanted almost right after sunset. Unfortunately, I think the better foreground composition here was to take the photo from the summit of Firebird Peak, but overall I’m not too upset at the result. I forgot to take a blue hour photo of the foreground so I had to wait until near sunrise to do it. That left me with 45 minutes to scramble up to Firebird’s summit, a task much easy with just a day pack on.
Milky Way over Middle Pal and Norman Clyde.
I made it with a few minutes to spare and quickly setup my tripod. The wildfires on the west side of the crest were mostly suppressed at this point so sunrise was vibrant and phenomenal. I spent about an hour on the summit before heading down to break down camp and make the long hike back to the car. The light haze from trace amounts of lingering smoke even gave Finger Lake an ethereal look and I spent more time relaxing on its shores before leaving.
—Justin
