Walking Through NW Wilderness: Middle Sister Climb

Total mileage: 18 miles (5 miles from Camp lake)
Elevation gain: 6K feet
Starting trailhead: Pole Creek trailhead
Route: SE Ridge via Camp Lake

This was somewhat impromptu decision. One of my friend ended up posting this on Facebook that it would be cool to summit the Middle Sister. We ended up chatting a bit on the topic and decide, let's go do it.

After researching about the climbing routes, two most obviously taken routes were on the table. North route, which goes along the Hayden Glacier to the saddle between North and Middle sister and Southeast (SE) ridge route - which starts from Camp Lake and follows the SE ridge up to the summit. Considering I don't have any glacier skills, we decided that we shall do the SE ridge route.

We stated from Pole Creek TH. Camp lake is about 7.5 miles from the trailhead. Trail doesn't get steep at any point and we had a leisurely hike in. We got to the camp in the afternoon, after setting up the camp and finishing the camp chores, it was time for dinner. We talked to few climbers that went up on the day and they said, the route was easy to follow, but there was lot of snow and postholing on the way.

Everyone got up at teh crack of dawn and started our hike upto the summit. After gaining the plataue above the lake, we followed a bootpath south. We soon realized that we have gone far too south and SE ridge was behind us. We decided to boulder straight upto gain the ridge. between Saturday and Sunday, considerable amount of snow had melted, so we weren't postholing too much, but shaded patches of snow were far too icy to walk on.