Mt. Shuksan day trip via the Sulphide Glacier route

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Yet another weekend of warm, sunny weather in the North Cascades, so Becky and I were off to climb Mt.Shuksan. It had been about fifteen years since I’d climbed Shuksan and Becky had been up there before to ski the Sulphide Glacier, but hadn’t climbed the summit pinnacle before. 

Mt.Shuksan is in the North Cascades National Park and given the weather, and popularity of the easiest route up it, the Sulphide Glacier route, we didn’t even try to get a camping permit knowing that they were probably long gone before the weekend started.   

Since we’d easily done Sahale in a day (14 miles, 5,100ft of gain) a couple weeks earlier, we figured the stats for Shuksan (16 miles, 6,600ft) made it reasonable for us as a day trip.

We got to the trailhead and met a fellow who’d turned back on a Shuksan day trip earlier when he couldn’t keep up with the rest of his climbing partners. He’d said they’d started at midnight, yet at 8pm his friends were nowhere to be seen. We decided to move up our wake-up time to midnight just to make sure we didn’t get benighted on the hike out. We barely slept a wink, as around 10pm, his buddies started arriving…loud music, air mattresses being blown up by air compressors, angry bickering amongst their party…sounded like they’d had quite the epic. At midnight, Becky and I finally got out of our Subaru bivy-mobile and as the other party was winding down from their 23 hour day, we grabbed our gear and without a word to them we started up the trail. 

A full moon, warm weather, and a fairly easy to follow trail got us to the toe of the Sulphide glacier before dawn and we were halfway up the glacier before we turned our headlamps off. We felt we were making good time and both were a little groggy, so we tossed on the down jackets and took a 15-minute power nap shortly before arriving at the summit scramble - about 500ft of 3^rd class climbing with maybe a 4^th class move mixed in. When we got to the summit gully at 7:45, there were quite a few parties already moving up and down the route, but everyone seemed to be moving well and was courteous not to knock any loose rocks down.   

We got to the top at 8:45 and actually had it all to ourselves for a few minutes. As a party of four was getting ready to start rappelling down, we weighed our options of whether to do some short rappels using our single strand of 30m or just down-climb it. Fortunately, the friendly guys that were getting ready to rappel had a great idea - they’d send their first couple guys down with our rope, they’d set up the next rap station and rap on our 30m rope as a single strand, and the rest of us would follow on their ropes.  It worked out really well having two rappelling stations running at the same time. They got down faster because they had our rope to use, and we had the ease of rappelling instead of down-climbing.  

The whole round trip on the summit pinnacle took longer than expected…three hours total, and it was nearly 11am before we were trudging back down the glacier. Even though the glacier was a sun-cupped, lumpy mess, we were both wishing we’d had our skis to turn the two hour hike into a fifteen minute slide.  

On the way down, we picked up a single crampon lying in the boot-pack….maybe we’d find the owner later in the day. We were also passed by a single climber moving quite fast, only to see him again about twenty minutes later coming back up. He’d ascended the Fischer Chimneys route that morning and had failed to realize he missed the turn and was now 1500ft down the Sulphide Glacier on the wrong side of the mountain.  

Finally off the glacier, we refilled our water bottles, stowed our gear, and found the owner of the orphaned crampon. The rest of the hike was sunny and warm. Occasionally we’d pass by a particularly lovely patch of wildflowers or a patch of huckleberries to eat

Eventually we hit treeline, and then just tried to pound out the miles and ignore the various hot spots on our feet.

Back the car at 4:00…earlier than we expected and we were happy to do the drive home in daylight.  As usual, the discussion on the drive home centered around dinner. After considering many options, we decided that cheeseburgers and onion rings from Red Mill was an appropriate treat for our thirteen hour day trip.