Early during the COVID-19 outbreak, before it was considered ill-advised to be in the backcountry, but we’d all been anxiously watching the news, Kelsey and I decided we would be well-served by a winter overnight in the beautiful North Cascades. We chose the Hidden Lake Peaks area knowing we’d get some great views and that we could choose our own adventure based on snow stability. If things looked really stable, we were prepared to head up The Triad.
We drove up from Seattle in the early afternoon on Saturday and were able to make it up to about 2,200 feet on the access road before parking the car, donning heavy overnight packs, and starting our journey into the alpine at 2:30pm. We only had to walk few hundred yards through patchy snow in our boots before the coverage was continuous and we settled into a comfortable skinning pace.
We cut through the trees on the climber’s left as we entered the large open area at 4,500 feet, worried a bit about wind slabs out in the open. This got us to the upper plateau where we did a long, rising traverse following the summer trail until 6,200 feet where we decided to set up camp in a sheltered nook nestled in the trees on the lee side of a rollover. We got there a little shy of 6:30pm—perfect timing to dig out a platform, set up shop, and watch the sunset over dinner. It was quite windy and cold, but we were as protected as possible.
It was colder than we had anticipated that night, but we eventually warmed up inside our tent. Not trusting the snow for an objective like The Triad, we decided to sleep in and wait for things to warm up. We emerged from our beds around 9am, clocking in a solid 12+ hours, though neither of us slept terribly well.
We headed up to the saddle below the Hidden Lake Lookout in the morning and decided to first ski down to Hidden Lake. A few turns were fun, but a breakable styrofoam wind layer made things tricky. Down at the lake, it was calm and warm, so we basked in the sun for a bit before skinning up all the way to the lookout for lunch. The views from up high were stellar.
Since the turns weren’t great, we just skied down from the lookout, did a brief skin up to the saddle, and then collected our stuff on the way out. We were back at the car by the early afternoon. It was really nice to be outside, especially now as I write this in late March on lockdown, looking forward to a time when I can be back outside.