Trip Report
Basic Glacier Climb - Mount Anderson/Eel Glacier
Climbed Mount Anderson via Eel Glacier over the Memorial Day Weekend! We had a solid crew and checked many boxes on this climb: biking 6 miles with a heavy pack, fording knee-deep creek, and climbing a prominent peak in a remote part of the Olympic NP. We also ran into a cute black bear on our hike out.
Ambrose Zhi
- Sat, May 24, 2025 — Mon, May 26, 2025
- Basic Glacier Climb - Mount Anderson/Eel Glacier
- Mount Anderson/Eel Glacier
- Climbing
- Successful
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- Road suitable for all vehicles
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Parking at TH was packed when we arrived at 8:50AM on Saturday.
We didn't encounter many bugs throughout the trip.
Trail in good condition, was snow free until Honeymoon Meadows CG. There is a compost toilet and several bear wires to hang bear sacks. One fourth of the camp was covered in snow, but we were able to find dry spots to pitch our tents (there were three other parties camping at Honeymoon Meadows).
On our summit attempt day, we had to ford the creek near Honeymoon Meadows CG before quickly re-joining the trail. Only one spot was knee-deep, and everyone crossed the creek in trail runners.
After the creek crossing, we had consistent snow coverage for rest of the climb. Snow level was at ~3,600'. Eel glacier was well covered with no sightings of bergshrund or crevasses. Easy climb with good snow up until snow turned into mashed potato around 1-ish in the afternoon.
As we were descending Flypaper Pass, we had a D1 wet loose avalanche (triggered by a rock fall from Echo Rock) happening on an adjacent slope, and I have filed a near-miss report to document the incident and share lessons learned
The area highlighted in red shows the wet loose avalanche that occurred at Flypaper Pass. The blue line represents our descent route off Flypaper Pass while the green line marks our ascent route in the morning. We should have gone down the ascent route to minimize our overhead hazards
The Recreation.gov booking system would not allow you to book Honeymoon Meadows campsite directly, since it has a distance restriction to prevent over-ambitious beginner backpackers from booking extremely long days. You aren't able to book a site more than 15 miles from the trailhead, or two sites more than 15 miles apart. In this case, the best way is to call Olympic NP's Wilderness Information Center a few days (3 days at a minimum) before your trip departure to set up the permits, or to email them with your request and a good call back number. I called the Wilderness Information Center on Wednesday and took care of the camping reservations for Honeymoon Meadows.
12:40PM - Returned to TH. We stopped by Quilbilly's Restaurant and Taproom for food in Quilcene. Highly recommend (Their huckleberry milkshake was pretty good)
Other Important Trip Information:
We biked the road, and that was a good decision. Half of us biked with >35lb packs, but it was awesome on the way down :) You would get away with a gravel bike, but I would highly recommend mountain bikes or gravel bikes with a front suspension to smooth out high-frequency vibrations. E-bikes would be tough to ride on certain sections of the road (steep, narrow, and screes). We took the standard bypass trail at the washout section, and I know Krystian Walec's 2019 trip report mentioned their use of an alternate bypass trail that we didn't bother to check out.
Hiking to Honeymoon Meadows camp was on well-maintained trail except for the last 0.3 mile. All the stream crossings had constructed foot logs.
Like mentioned earlier, Campground had bear wires in decent shape, flat camping spots not covered in snow, and a nice compost toilet. It's also right next to the stream for easy water access. For the creek crossing, we all did it with trail runners and then left them to dry in the sun while we attempted the summit.
Once we reached Anderson Glacier moraine (5,200 ft), we could see Flypaper Pass, and the chute going up to the pass looked really steep from a distance. However, once we got to the bottom of it, it was less steep than we expected. Also, we saw fours tents at the moraine.
We roped at Flypaper Pass before dropping down to Eel Glacier. Eel Glacier was well filled in, so the glacier travel portion here was mellow and short. Here are some pictures for references:
We all plunger-stepped to go down Flypaper Pass .
Overall a fun but demanding summit day, and we got a really strong and fun crew. Looking back, I would have pushed the start time from 5AM to 4AM given how warm the weekend turned out to be. One more thing about the hike out on Day 3, the flowers were blooming
