Castle Peak & First Mother Mountain

Our fun ridge running day first took us to Castle Peak, then First Mother, then Fay Peak.

The "100 peaks" route seemed to indicate you could go over the top of the bump on the way out to Castle. We went up to explore that and found 40' cliffs that inconveniently did not show up on the USGS map. We went back to the saddle then traversed to Castle staying to the right of the first bump.

We also scramble up the "Zero Mother" bump on the way from the Castle/Mother saddle south to First Mother.
From First Mother we continued south to Knapsack Pass and then up to Fay Peak. From there we went down the south west ridge on a climber's path that circled around to the right where it joined the Mowich/Knapsack Pass trail.

Our original plan was to also visit Pleasant and Hessong, but thick clouds came in, so we decided 3 peaks and 2 bumps was enough for one day.
Total time was about 7 hours. This has become such a popular route that there were climber's paths most of the way. But there was still some true scrambling and some serious exposure.