Pawnee East Ridge

Biking the last three miles of the Brainard Lake Road.

Plan A was to climb Superstar Couloir on James Peak. This was deemed too dicey given the spate of warm weather and the unknown nature of the approach. Plan B was to climb Dreamweaver on Mt. Meeker, a nice, stable, north-facing couloir with an all-too-well-known approach that is also, unfortunately, 5 miles long and would involve getting up at midnight. Plan C was to climb Pacific Peak's West Ridge, but this was two hours away and we'd still need to get up at 3 or something. We finally settled on Plan D; climbing the rugged east ridge of Pawnee Peak in the nearby Indian Peaks Wilderness. The East Ridge divides the equally spectacular Blue Lake and Isabelle drainages and we would be treated to the best of both sets of scenery.

Much like the plans, the dramatis personae went through several iterations finally settling on Chris, Peter, Nathan, and myself. At 6:30 we arrived at the still-closed closure gait on the Brainard Lake Road. Fortunately, we'd come prepared with mountain bikes for the last three miles up the paved road to the "summer" trailhead.

The day was fine and spirits were high as we finally set off on foot past Long Lake. After a mile or so, we arbitrarily left the trail and headed uphill through brush and occasional snow. The going became steep and brushy, but we eventually broke through onto the gentle eastern end of the ridge and we ambled up gentle tundra toward the summit of Little Pawnee.

Strolling up the gentle, scenic East Ridge before the scrambling began.

From near the summit of Little Pawnee (itself a highpoint along the ridge to the much more imposing Pawnee Peak), the going became rough. There were stretches of 3rd class scrambling along knife-edge interspersed with steep drops into notches. One notch required a committing, exposed move. Another required descending dicey slabs to a steep snowfield, traversing across, and walking delicately on a grassy ramp.

The nature of the East Ridge changes abruptly from broad tundra meadow to sharp scrambling ridge.

The first class-4 crux coming down from the summit of Little Pawnee.

The farther we got, the rougher the ridge got. Mostly, the going was easiest if we dropped from the crest to the right (north) side and traversed on ledges. Nathan typically advocated sticking to the ridge crest itself, but even he admitted that dropping right made sense a lot of the time.

Looking west at the ridge with Pawnee and Mt. Toll in the distance.

Peter and Chris traverse the short section of true knife-edge on the ridge.

Peter traverses on the northern face.

After a couple hours of scrambling, the weather was starting to look ominous. Why does this always happen to me on Pawnee? We were nearly at the end of the ridge and the final summit cone of Pawnee, a gentle slope of talus, was in view. My GPS said the summit was no more than a quarter mile away. We scrambled up loose scree to the ridge and saw lightning moving in from the southwest. After a hurried conference, we decided to abandon ship down the first available snowfield. This turned out to be a steep snow tongue near the Pawnee-Toll saddle which dropped us straight to Blue Lake.

Run away! Peter descends talus to the top of our escape chute (photo by CG).

Peter and Nathan took off and soon appeared probably 500' below on the snowfields above Blue Lake. Chris and I followed in their track and were surprised at how fast a glissade it turned out to be. What a ride! We regrouped and continued the descent to Blue Lake with a series of shorter glissades. Finally, just as the storm ramped up to full-force with stinging rain and thunder echoing from the cirque on all sides, we took shelter under a small overhang and waited it out.

The storm moved on and it became calm and sunny. Out of danger, we relaxed and dried out in our nook, chatting and eating. We finally departed and hiked the three miles of trail back to the road. Along the way, another, bigger storm came in complete with zero-delay thunder and a significant amount of large hail. I got separated from the other three while trying to find the trail in the snowed-in woods and arrived at the bikes sometime after them.

It was a fairly casual and mellow trip. While we didn't make the summit, we did complete the East Ridge and got to do a nice glissade. The bike approach is definitely the way to go when the Brainard Lake Road is closed (which is most of the time) and would otherwise turn 8 miles of casual hiking into a 14 mile trudgefest on asphalt.

The Wilderness Journal

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