Given its distance from Seattle, Mount Jefferson had sat on my list for a while and so I was excited when I dropped a line to my friend Adam in advance of Memorial Day weekend to hear that he and his friend Eric were planning to climb its South Ridge. We left Seattle early on Saturday morning and arrived at Pamelia Lake Trailhead around 11:30am. After debating the merits of various forms of protection and gear (we went in heavy with a tent per person), we started hiking in trail runners with overnight, ski, glacier, and steep snow gear on our backs.
About a mile after reaching the PCT, we started to hit snow, but it was too patchy to make sense to switch to our boots and skins. By the time the snow was clearly continuous enough, we were nearing Shale Lake and our camp for the night and it didn’t make sense to transition. It took a little over 4 hours to make it those 8 miles from the car. We set up our luxurious array of tents and took a nap before dinner—one of my all-time mountain adventure favorite activities.
With temperatures around freezing overnight and a relatively cool day expected, we weren’t in a big rush in the morning. We were up at 5am and moving by 6am after scraping the frost off our skis. The ascent went very smoothly from camp at 5,900 feet to the point where the ridge steepened at 9,500 feet in about 3 hours. We left our skis here and switched to crampons, ascending the ridge and then steep snow just to the East of it until we reached the red saddle at about 10,250 feet roughly an hour later.
The steep snow traverse was intimidating from this vantage point, especially given a series of deep runnels cutting through it. We had a snack, got our two tools out, made sure our crampons weren’t going to skate around on us, and then I set off, offering my toes to the foothold gods. It would have been difficult to protect this section well without a lot of pickets and patience. While it was steep, the pick placements and feet were good enough that we each soloed across. The runnels were quite a 3-D challenge to get good footholds and sticks to step in and then back out, but we figured it out. It took about 45 minutes to painstakingly crab walk across this section to reach the ridge and slightly lower-angle terrain on the other side.
We continued to corkscrew around, eventually reaching a rime-covered ramp toward the summit requiring quite a bit of front pointing and high daggering. I got to a point just a few feet below the top where pulling on the final steep rime mushroom feature didn’t seem worth the risk to poke my head just over the top and so I called it good here and down-climbed. Eric and Adam had made similar decisions a bit earlier. We regrouped at the beginning of the traverse back across and were much faster on the way back with the face warming up considerably in the sun and our footsteps already being cut.
A quick romp plunge-stepping down the snow next to the ridge got us to our skis. It was about 2:30pm at this point but the snow was still in prime spring conditions and we whooped our way down the mountain, reaching our tents in about 40 minutes, savoring it and taking our time.
We decided that it would be worth beating Memorial Day traffic and not hiking out on frozen snow, so we packed up camp, skied out as much as we could, cut one switchback on snow, and then hoofed it out, aided by pain-killing whiskey in about 3.5 hours from camp to the car around 8:30pm. That made for a very late arrival home in Seattle, but it was worth having a whole holiday at home as well.
Especially in the rimed-up spring conditions we encountered, the last 1,000 feet of this route were appreciably more technical than the normal routes on other Cascade volcanoes. I was glad to have a bunch of steep snow experience before tackling this one.