Permits: None

Difficulty: Moderate

Route Name: Merry brook

Snow Level: 6000 ft

Elevation Gain: 4300 ft

Total Miles: 7.00 mi

Gear: Brought ice axe, traction, helmets for snow at top. Only used helmets due to snow level, but would advise the other two unless you go later this year.

From Trail Head to Summit: 6.0 hours
From Summit to Trail Head: 4.0 hours

Weather: Beautiful

A longer day than anticipated for 7 miles, but a full adventure.

Claire, Kayla and I went for Bedal peak after my sister climbed it a few weeks before. Armed with several trip reports talking about where to cross the cliff band and gpx tracks, we started our way up from the pullout on the side of the bumpy forest service road. The “trailhead” is marked with pink flagging.
The bottom two miles rise through a steep forest, winding around through downed trees and a few small boulder fields. Keep a lookout for small pieces of mostly pink tape that marks the majority of the route carefully. (If you go and have some pink tape, it might be good to bring some and retape a few spots that are getting worn.) There we’re lots of reports that got stuck at a cliff band for a while, but we found that following the tape a little higher helped to get above the challenging navigation spot and set us up directly in front of the steep ramp up the other main cliff band. From there, we followed the trail to the rocky boulder field that can be mostly snow covered at other times of the year. We picked our way across a few steep patches of snow and a lot of great granite as the true summit comes into view as well as views of Baker, Pugh, White Chuck and Glacier. Route finding through here can be straightforward with snow cover, or more strategy as you navigate areas of possible 3-4th glass rock.
Traverse below the true summit to the other ridge to gain the summit block. As you pop up onto the summit, Sloan becomes an impressive view, and on a good day like yesterday, we were able to see Rainier peak out in the distance.

We got to spend time with the resident Martin who was eyeing our lunch at the top, then picked our way back down, making sure to watch our track to get back onto the right trail for the cliffband.

Highly recommend having a few gpx tracks for this one, and watching yours on the way down if you ever feel like you get off trail.

Info

• Latitude: 48.06860
• Longitude: -121.35430
• Elevation: 6554ft
• PeakBagger Link