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| The Castle. |
We hit the campground just a bit after sunset. This was actually the first time I've ever stayed in an established pay-per-night campground, so I can't comment on how it compares to others. The people running the place were very nice, however, and when we told them our plans to climb the castle, they assigned us a spot near the trail that would also be away from all the partiers. We made camp at site #62 under the glare of my Subaru's headlights and bedded down to the hoots and hollers of the serious partying going on down by the lake.
Saturday morning we woke to see The Castle looking down at us in the early light of day. Although it was only about half a mile away as the crow flies, I knew the approach swung way around towards the far side and that we'd have a little bit of a hike ahead of us. We ate and were on the trail, with our day packs, shortly after 8:00am. To hit the trail from Camp 62, you just hike straight up the hill and it's only about 20-30 yards from the campsite.
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| The Castle in the morning sun from Camp 62. |
The trail is pretty well traveled and marked up to the waterfall. There is a somewhat confusing junction with The Scouts trail, but if you just stay heading straight you'll see another sign pointing you towards the waterfall and The Castle. The waterfall is very small, but cool in the way that it is slowly rubbing away at the large rock it flows over. Heading upstream from the falls will get you to the last sign you'll see marking the trail to The Castle.
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| Bridge at the waterfall. |
The trail is fairly easy to follow, with logs and sticks lining the sides, but there are a couple spots you might wander off of it. The Castle looms to your right hand side and the tendency to want to drift over towards it is strong. But, the trail meanders off to the left and up and over another ridge, to skirt around some steep rocks. Just remember that the correct approach, while longer, is better than bushwhacking up a boulder field. Plus you get some great views of the mountains and rocks on the other side. Towards the top of the mountain, at the base of the jutting rocks that make up the summit, the trail sort of peters out. If you keep circling around towards the back (west) side, you will see a couple cairns to help you along.
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| Looking out SW where the trail starts to dissolve. |
At this point you're looking at some pretty exposed class 4 scrambling, maybe even some low class 5 stuff. There's a cairn at the bottom of a promising crack to get up the first bit of scramble. It's definitely doable, and we played with it a bit, but ultimately deemed it a bit too reachy and bone crunchy for coming back down... At least for us. Pushing further around the side, we found another crack, that was still a bit of a stretch, but had a nice shrub to help us along and was a little less steep.
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| This is the marked access we decided not to use. |
Once up the first bit, there's a little traverse on a large slanting rock. It's not too steep, but it's a good drop off the edge if you tangle up your feet and tumble off it. Once around this it's a pretty straight forward scramble up some cracks, dodging some downed trees and around some dead ones that are still standing, to the base of the main rocks that make up the various summits. A sort of spire was on our right (the far southern edge of The Castle) with the main rock and true summit on our left.
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| Scramble up between the summit and the spire. |
There's a large crack leading up to the "spire" that's a pretty decent scramble. As I was debating it, Kellan was just going for it. I'd been trying to teach him the critical mountaineering principle about getting back down (especially since we had no rope), but he shimmied right up it, much to my horror. Of course I had to follow, and going up I knew descending would be sketchy. It's a nice flake, but it's also a death drop, exposed and some real reaches to get up. Once at the the top, I had butterflies in my stomach the whole time thinking about getting down and wishing I had brought my rope. We looked up at the top of the spire, but there was no way we were doing that without gear. The view from here was awesome. Coming down was as sketchy as I predicted, but we made it. Kellan scraped up his legs a bit as he straddled the flake coming down and I helped him on the stretchier spots.
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| From here, we followed the crack up and to the right to the spire. |
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| Spire exposure. A bit of a drop. |
Now we looked up to the left, seeing if we could find a less scary way to get to the summit. There's a couple good sized cracks, with relatively minor exposure and we hiked up them without difficulty. From there we traversed a little slab to another outcrop. This put us about 10-12' above where we were on the spire. We looked around and saw a way to maybe get a little higher, but we figured it wasn't worth it. We didn't think we could get to the summit that way and felt like we were already pressing our luck with our descent.
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| The summit, as seen from the spire. |
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| The spire, as seen from as high as we got on the summit side. We were right where the 2 flat rocks on the bottom left of the frame are, in our spire summit bid |
On the scramble back down, we had a little trouble following our ascent line, but picked it out after a few minutes. Had a bit of a stretch to reach the base, but no major issues. Following the trail down was pretty straight forward, but there is one part where a water runoff meets the trail and follows it for a bit. The trail turns and if you're not paying attention it's easy to keep following the runoff path down. We missed it and had to back track a bit. We put up a cairn that will hopefully help others avoid our mistake, but who knows if it will last the crazy weather we've had since.
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| Large piece of quartz on the trail. |
There and back was just about 3.5 miles and took us about 4 hours, with stops and wanderings here and there. Being after Labor Day, we didn't see anyone else on the trail the whole day. We were back in plenty of time to go for a swim in the lake and do a little bouldering around the camp. You could easily head up on a Saturday morning, knock out this trip and be back in town before dark if you wanted to. My only regret is that I didn't bring a rope. With just a 20-30 meter rope and some basic gear, we could've pushed for the true summit and not had to worry so much about getting down safely.
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| Future project. |
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