2nd highest peak in Washington state with no technical difficulty
Mount Adams is popular enough that route finding is never an issue. The route is well marked by posts and you'll likely be accompanied by hundreds of other people on a good day. This is a climb commonly done in two days with a camp at Lunch Counter. Chutang and I chose to ski it, which fit nicely in a long day with a bivouac at the trailhead.
Chutang and I decided to do Adams over Memorial Day weekend, given the five-hour drive from Seattle. After a rough drive up the forest road, we arrived at the trailhead at 8:30 pm. Based on current conditions, any small SUV should be able to make it in, as the road was snow-free. There were still plenty of parking and camping spots left when we arrived. We pulled the truck into one of the spots and quickly fell asleep.
We set an alarm for 3:30 AM and after breaking down the tent and eating breakfast, were finally on the trail by 4:30 AM. That turned out to be on the late side, as we were nearly the last group to leave the trailhead. We hit continuous snow after 1.5 miles, stashed our trail runners, put on our skis, and started skinning. At some point we had to veer left to ascend a steep slope, so we strapped our skis to our packs and booted up, carrying them all the way to the summit. In hindsight, we should have continued skinning past that steep section, since there are long walking sections ahead.
We soon walked past Crescent Glacier (snowfield) and reached Lunch Counter. There were a lot of tents and people climbing far ahead of us, so it's clearly a popular camp option. The wind was crazy that day, though, and I'm not sure those tent campers slept well. If the wind is calm, I imagine they'd have a great time.
After passing Lunch Counter, we put on crampons and started up the 2,000 ft slope to the false summit. Snow conditions were good and the slope is mellow by alpine climbing standards. We walked the whole thing without touching our ice axes. We even got passed by a dog, which confirmed that this climb has no real technical difficulty and is more of a mental and physical game.
After 2 hours and 15 minutes we reached the false summit, only to find the true summit still waiting ahead, feeling impossibly far. We had no choice but to keep climbing. After one more hour, we were finally standing on the true summit! Woo hoo! It took roughly 9 hours to climb from car to summit.
After 30 minutes of rest, we transitioned to skis and started the descent at 2 pm. We hoped the sun would soften the chicken-head section between the true and false summits, but it hadn't. We had to survival-ski 700 ft of wind-created chicken-head ice down to the false summit, then transition back to crampons to cross an icy saddle, which added more time. If you ski the SW chute you probably skip that transition, but I'm not 100% sure.
Descending from the false summit is where the fun began. We skied 2,000 ft of corn and it was really fun! Further down, the snow turned super slushy and grippy. But that's the tradeoff for choosing a late start to catch the corn high up, since the snow lower down on the 6,000 ft route inevitably turns slushy.
We skied back to our trail runner stash and I again had a minor headache and nausea from the altitude. We rested for 30 minutes and uneventfully walked back to the car. The whole trip took 12 hours and 40 minutes and we were among the last to return to the car that day.
