Alpine Scramble - Dog Mountain

The drive out past North Bend on the North Fork Snoqualmie Road is long and bumpy. Allow an hour for the 23 miles or so from North Bend to the trailhead. There are some confusing intersections, so study a map and don't rely completely on Google Maps to navigate for you. It led us astray and we added 6 miles to our drive.

From the end of the driveable road, shortly past the Bare Mountain Trailhead, walk the abandoned road. Old Lennox Creek road is in fairly good shape, not as brushy and overgrown as I thought it might be. Followed the old road for ~2 miles (45 minutes or so) before it ended and we transitioned to trail.

Trail is definitely unmaintained and primitive. Have to pay attention to find it at times. We were fortunate to do this during a period of dry weather, so there wasn't as much mud and streams as some might encounter.

Starting hitting snow around 4000' and didn't take long for it to become continuous. The group took turns kicking steps and doing the route-finding and did an excellent job. We ascended from almost due north of the summit, traveling almost due south. This was OK but had some steep slopes of 40+ degrees. 

The summit is roomy enough for a large group, no cornices to worry about. Enjoyed great views from the top.

On descent, we avoided going down the steep route that we had come up. Instead of descending straight north, we went down on more of a NNE bearing, which was not as steep. We dropped to around 4500 feet and were able to traverse back over to our up route. Some of these snow slopes were quite open and sun-exposed and were really slushy and loose on this particular day, so we were carefully not to create any loose surface snow avalanches. There was a lot of post-holing coming down, but nothing of any great concern.

Total trip time for our group of 9 (with 6 people doing their first snow scramble) was around 9 hours or so. A smaller, more experienced group would probably cut quite a bit of time off this.