Over Labor Day weekend, I took a gamble and booked a flight back out to Seattle for some prime time in the North Cascades. The past few weeks had been hot and smokey, but I had three blissfully clear – if cold – nights in the mountains with my friend Holly when I thought my summer was already over. The plan was to scramble up Fisher Peak and potentially Mount Arriva as well. With three days, it would be a fairly leisurely trip. Or so we thought.

The summer is approaching its end for me and the work is beginning to pile up. I had originally planned to get out to the North Cascades to climb Black Peak last week, but plans changed, my hiking partner had to cancel, and I had relegated the trip to next summer's list. Fortunately, Lucas mentioned that he and a friend would be attempting a car-to-car (i.e. day hike) of Black Peak on Sunday and had invited me to join.

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.

Earlier this summer, I took one of those no good, very bad trips into the backcountry. The kind where it seems like everything that could possibly go wrong does. Where you forget to pack multiple essential items and all of the factors out of your control decide not to cooperate at the same time.

My friend Holly and I decided on a leisurely three-day trip to La Bohn Lakes with a trip up Mt. Hinman which I had failed to successfully summit the year before.

I made a last minute decision to head up Dip Top Peak in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. I had been up to the peak last summer as a day trip, but knew I wanted to summit again with sunset and sunrise lighting, so it was an easy choice.

After an internship in the bay area, I ended up spending four days in the Ansel Adams Wilderness with my friend Nicole. We got walk-up permits to camp at Ediza and Iceberg Lakes, and I wanted to checked out Volcanic Ridge too. Props to the rangers in Mammoth Lakes for helping us organize our itinerary and making all of the different permit zones make sense to us.

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.

This was my second scramble in Washington on the heels of Kaleetan. The entire scramble from the lake below Vesper Peak was snow-covered so it was fairly easy going. At just 6214 ft, Vesper Peak offers some of the most rugged views of the Cascades in the area considering its relatively low elevation. It sits between Mountain Loop Highway and Highway 2, and you can definitely tell from the terrain that you’re beginning to transition away from the Central Cascades and into the North Cascades.

I’m currently writing up trip reports for several older trips from before I made this website. Kaleetan Peak will always always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first scramble…ever. The route features a steep climber’s trail in the forest, open traversing over talus fields, and an easy, solid class 3 scramble up to the summit. It’s very doable as a day hike but I decided to do it over two days so I could enjoy evening light on the mountain.

This was my first backpacking trip in the North Cascades National Park and only my second hike in the area (the first being a trip to Hidden Lake Lookout in 2015). I remember seeing a photo of the campsites at the toe of the Sahale Glacier with organized rock piles built to block out the wind and thinking to myself that I had to go there, too. As much as people like to knock on social media, it was a great way for me to learn about the popular trailed hikes when I was first starting out.