Tatoosh Range Traverse

Trip Date: 8/2/2014
Elapsed Time: 12 1/2 hours
Elevation gain/loss: 5000/7000
Miles: 10
Participants: 6

We left 1 car at Longmire and drove the other 2 cars to Reflection Lakes. We quickly made it up to the Pinnacle saddle, and to the top of Pinnacle, then down and over to Plummer, then Denman. We went over to Lane and were just about to put on our helmets and scramble the gully when a thunderstorm moved in and forced us to retreat a few hundred feet. We waited about an hour for it to pass. It rained a little, but not enough to get the rock wet, so we headed back up for our second attempt. Need to be very careful of rockfall in the gully.

From Lane we descended sw to some unnamed tarns at ~5100' shown on the map, which thankfully still had water. We filtered here and then did a rising traverse to the saddle south east of Wahpenayo at 5900' and the unnamed sattelite summit. It looks much more prominent and appears to be the summit but is not. Just aim for any spot in between the 2. We continued westerly below the summit until we found a gully we could scramble to the summit.

After Wahpenayo, we descended back the way we came, then down the NW ridge to the Chutla/Wahpenayo saddle, where we traversed at 5200' until we hit the Eagle trail. At this point the delay with the thunderstorms came back to haunt us as we decided 5 peaks was enough of a day already.

Bugs were the worst I have seen in a while.

For future trips I recommend starting as early as possible - we hit the trail at 6:45am and probably could have done all 7 w/o the storm delay. There is water at a few places, but the most likely spot you'll need it is in between Lane and Wahpenayo. There is currently plenty of water in the tarns, but they are drying quickly. There was also running water just before the saddle to Wahpenayo.