Alpine Scramble - Iron & Teanaway Peaks

Road to the trailhead in good condition, just the occasional pothole which is of course fair game for a forest road. We left the trailhead around 8am and made fast progress towards Eldorado saddle. Snow started around 5,200ft and was very firm. We put on microspikes (or crampons) once we could no longer evade it on the trail. The ice axes came out shortly after reaching the saddle and turning towards Teanaway. There was a very short snow section that had poor runout and with the firm snow it was safer to have everyone self-belay for a few steps (on the way down the snow was soft enough to just walk through this).

Route-finding was non-trivial. The use trail that we could spot from the saddle quickly vanished under the snow cover. I had two tracks for the ascent, one gaining the ridge proper and another one sidehilling which in the current conditions would have involved a lengthy snowfield traverse, again with questionable runout. Given the firmness of the snow I was not eager to take students through the snowfield but acknowledge that an hour or two later with snow softening this would have been a much better choice.

Thus we dillydallied a bit on some rock-snow transitions and made our way slowly up the ridge crest. The rock here is surprisingly brittle and there is a decent amount of scree and loose rock all over the place that you can catapult towards the person below you with little effort...

We scrambled close to each other in groups of 5 and with some trial and error found a reasonable way upward. At some point we had a small dip in the ridge with a neat cornice visible on the other side. That notch had some air on both sides and no obvious handholds which would make the return trip in particular, what over people might call "spicy". It was definitely way above T2 rating (my guess would be T4 at minimum) and I decided to turn the group of mostly scramble students around at that point. On the plus side we experienced enough T3 (?) rock here to make this count as a snow AND rock scramble.

We slowly downscrambled and then headed over to Iron Peak which was just a walk-up but Peakbagger credits earned regardless. Couple of shorter glissades on the way down! Back at the cars at 15:45. Post-trip meal at Commonwealth at Snoqualmie Pass for some of us.