After our successful climb of Challenger at the beginning of Goran’s trip, we looked for an objective with less walking and more time on rock. We were also both not yet back to our pre-pandemic selves on difficult rock and so a long scramble across the Twin Sisters sounded like a good target to round out his trip.
We left Seattle a little after 5am with my mountain and gravel bikes in the back and started pedaling up at about 7:30am. We packed pretty light but didn’t want to get trapped anywhere and weren’t sure what the glacier would be like, so we had aluminum crampons, ultralight axes, a 30m x 6mm static line, and a few nuts. I cursed a bit on the ride up as the backpack made my lower back angry, remembering last spring when I’d come up way too early in the year for the South Twin to finish off the peaks in the area. Thankfully, the gearing on both bikes was low enough that we were able to ride all of it.
We stashed our bikes after 1:10 of riding at the base of the trail up to North Twin and fast-hiked the approach to South. It took us about 1:15 to gain the ridge where we put our brain buckets on and started scrambling. Unfortunately, there was a thick marine layer which made for dramatic views down low and then became a milk bottle whiteout as we climbed higher.
The West Ridge of South Twin was similar to my experience on the West Ridge of North Twin, perhaps a little less sustained and a little more loose. The whiteout made things feel a bit more serious, otherwise it would have just been an easy romp. We crossed the snowfield to the East at about 6,600 feet and then found our way up to the top 3 hours after we left our bikes at the North Twin trail. Everything was still socked in, but we could see the Northeast Ridge enough to feel confident heading down it after a quick lunch.
Whenever the Northeast Ridge steepened up, there was a magical ladder of blocky rock to bring us down. We quickly made our way to the saddle at 6,400 feet in about 30 minutes. There was a small moat here which we over-dramatically each jumped over to gain the Sisters Glacier, doing our best Vertical Limit impressions. The glacier was mellow enough that we didn’t need the rope or crampons and in less than 15 minutes, we were scrambling up the Southeast ridge of North Twin.
This ridge included some of the steeper and more exposed scrambling of the traverse, but it was never concerning and we never felt the need to break out the rope. From the false summit, we descended down a dirty couloir to the South slightly before traversing over to the notch between the summits and then ascending what looked to be pretty steep terrain up to the true summit and turned out to be very reasonable. This ridge took us about 45 minutes.
After another snack, this time on top of North, we headed down our fourth ridge of the day. It took a little under 2 hours to scramble down to the trail and amble down the switchbacks to the main road and our bikes. We then floated down the road, marveling at the invention of the wheel and comparing the impact on our bodies to the miles we’d walked for Challenger a couple days earlier.