Chair Peak (sort of)
October 10, 2004

On Sunday Roanne and I decided to go try and climb Chair Peak, an attractive peak in Snoqualmie pass, and the highest of the Denny Mountain group.  We planned to do either the Class 4 Northeast Buttress route, or the 5.5 East Face route.  It had rained all day Saturday, but Sunday dawned clear in Seattle, and we left the house around 7:30 am.  As we drove east on I-90 we encountered some rain, and arrived at the Alpental parking lot in thick fog.  We started hiking, hoping that it would clear by the time we got to the peak.  We cut off the snow lake trail earlier than we should have, but it ended up being a short cut (we think), and we arrived at the footstool without too many problems.  Shown below is Cam on the summit of the footstool, the first peak of the day:





Contrary to our hopes, it had not cleared at all, and from the footstool where we should have been able to see Chair Peak and our  intended route, this is what we saw:



Not too encouraging, since neither of us had done the approach before.  Also, everything was wet, so by this time we had given up on the idea of doing the East Face route, but decided to try to find the start of the fourth class route in the fog.  We started heading up the talus basin in the fog, thinking it couldn't be too hard to find a large mountain.  After going up for a while, we realized we were at the top of the basin and had gone too far, so we back tracked to where we thought the route started, and headed up a gully as (we thought) was described in the guide book.  The fog was very thick, and we couldn't see the top of what we were heading up, or very much around us.  Here is a shot of Roanne part way up the gully:



After heading up the gully for a while we traversed left to a clump of trees (as described in the guidebook, we thought), then around the back of the summit, and headed up an exposed knife edge ridge to the summit.  This was the only section we roped up for, and it was the worst quality rock I have ever seen.  Everything was loose, you couldn't even sling rocks protruding from the ridge since they all moved.  You don't like the placement of a particular handhold?  No problem!  Just move it to your preferred location!  We finally both arrived on top, and when we had sat there for a few minutes the fog started clearing, and we saw a higher peak off to one side.  At first I tried to convince Roanne that it was a trick of our eyes, and we were really on the highest peak, but then we realized that we had inadvertantly climbed another summit, and were not actually on top of Chair Peak as we had thought.  This was sort of funny, since up until we were about to go down we were totally convinced that we had summitted Chair Peak.  So, we headed back down, and by now the fog had cleared a lot and we were treated to some good views.  Also, we saw people on top of nearby Kaleetan Peak, probably the group from the climbing club.  We did a few rappels to get down the gully:



And then walked down the talus and back to the car, getting back just before 6:00.  As we walked out, from the footstool we could see that we had intended to climb, and what we had actually climbed:



The green line is what we meant to do, and the red line is what we ended up doing.  The snowfield in this picture is the same one in the second picture above, so you can see the difference in visibility on the way in and out.  So, we may not have climbed Chair Peak, but we still had a fun day of scrambling in the mountains, and now we could do the approach to Chair Peak in the fog, so next time we should have better luck.