Dirtyface Peak

Dirtyface Mountain 6223' (Middle Summit)
Trip Date 05-31-2014
This strenuous scramble requires a well-rounded arsenal of scramble skills: navigation, route finding, snow travel, and rock scrambling. Significant off-trail travel was required to reach a summit block that has many ups and downs along the way, making it a much more engaging and involved scramble that might first appear.
We met in Monroe at 6 AM and departed from the TH at 8:15 AM. Lots of blowdowns, mosquitoes, and wildflowers on the trail. Trail was under snow at about elevation 5,000. We skipped going to the lookout at point 5989' by departing from the snow-covered trail at about 5400' where there's some flagging and some trees have been cleared. From here we dropped down into the basin northeast of point 5989 and continued in a westerly direction to the 5600' saddle. From this saddle we descended north on moderate slopes to about elevation 5100'. We initially tried to keep to skiers left while descending but this sends you into cliff bands. We gained the last ridge before Dirtyface Peak 6223' (the middle summit) through the low point in the rock on the left. From the 5700' saddle SE of the middle summit, we traversed at about 5700' on large talus around the SW side of the middle summit . The traverse to the SW side of the middle summit took about 30 minutes. At this point it was 1:30 PM and Dirtyface Peak 6240+ was finally in view. Since not everyone was up for even more elevation gain, we elected to summit Dirtyface Mountain, point 6223,' instead. The middle summit is actually quite small and airy: the 5 of us just fit. Found a USGS marker but no summit register. We departed from the middle summit at 3:30 PM, retraced our route, and were back at the cars at 7:45 PM. Trip stats: ~ 11 miles and 5900' total elevation gain.