While it's true that this is another summer backpacking trip report, this one does indeed have some ancillary skiing content, so if that's your thing, read on. You'll see. Lots and lots of pics in this report.
Dale had Friday off, and wanted to get out of the hot Salt Lake Valley this weekend. He proposed an overnight backpacking trip. The rest of us had to work, so we picked a destination close to home to head out to after work on Friday.
Originally we had a party of six. Skidog loaded his pack and tried it on, but his recovery from shoulder surgery wasn't quite where it needed to be yet. Todd backed out mid-afternoon, saying that he had too much to do and hadn't yet accomplished enough. That left Dale, Tele Jon, Stephan and yours truly.
We headed for Mill B South in Big Cottonwood Canyon. It's nothing short of remarkable to me that the trailhead to this federally protected wilderness, the Twin Peaks Wilderness Area, is a mere 12 minutes from my front door and about 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. Our plan was to hike in to Lake Blanche to camp, then continue on to the summit of Mt. Superior with daypacks in the morning. We'd return to Lake Blanche after summiting Superior, break camp and return to the car.
All but Stephan hit the trail right after work. Dale and Jon had a rather hardcore MTB session in the morning, but they were still going strong plodding up the trail. That's no easy feat, for the Lake Blanche trail rises over 2,700 vertical feet in a mere 2.7 miles. It's relentless. Nothing ridiculously steep, but there's absolutely no rest for the weary.
As you approach Lake Blanche, it's fascinating to look at the smooth, scarred bedrock, with the scrapes all heading in one direction -- the direction that the receding glaciers scarred them in. How's this for a campsite view?
As might be expected at a destination so close to the city, we were hardly alone at the trio of lakes -- Blanche, Lillian and Florence -- but there's enough room that we felt alone enough. We pitched camp near Lake Blanche (el. 8,911 ft.) at a spot with views both of the lake and Sundial Peak and of the Salt Lake Valley below, and when Stephan arrived we ate dinner while watching the sun go down over the Great Salt Lake.
After sunset we could see a fireworks show going off above Saltaire, some 25 miles distant. Shortly thereafter a full moon rose over Sundial Peak and eliminated the need for headlamps. I never did get to fish, although we learned the next morning that the brook trout were hitting rather heavily. We still didn't hit the sack until midnight.
The next morning we cooked breakfast and prepared to hit the trail. Dale, however, was dying from a full day on Friday and opted out of the Superior expedition. The remaining three of us left camp and headed up. Dale would stick around the lake for a few more hours before heading down.
The route to Superior (el. 11,132 ft.) from Lake Blanche is, to put it mildly, brutal. It rises 2,211 feet in 3 miles, but none of that is on an established trail. We started out at the far end of the lake near the inlet and ascended through a stand of aspen trees before finding ourselves thick in the growth of wildflowers and tall weeds that have taken advantage of our inordinately wet spring. We fought hard to bushwhack through the thicket to a pair of rock ribs nearby, then ascended the ribs to clear them.
We were heading for what we understood to be a herd path that would lead us above the black cliffs ahead to a hanging valley below the final cirque. The herd path was barely visible at times, and rose relentlessly along the wall of upper Mill B South to gain sufficient altitude to clear the cliffs. Compared to Friday night, however, we were traveling light and making good time. You simply can't make the same time bushwhacking that you can on an established and maintained trail, however.
Eventually we reached the hanging valley, with some mine ruins directly below -- remains of a rock foundation with an old metal bedframe in it, and a collapsed tunnel nearby -- and a spring-fed pond below that. A 200-foot scramble across the ridgeline behind us would have led to the Regulator Johnson Mine. It's ironic to me that even though it's near to Snowbird, home to the ski run of the same name, the mine isn't on Snowbird property, nor is it even in the same canyon -- it's in Mineral Fork which drains into Big Cottonwood Canyon, not Little Cottonwood.
From here the going got tougher. We crested a small bedrock knob before crossing some positively brutal glacial moraines, balancing ourselves upon the boulders in the field. At the end we reached the cirque at the head of the east branch of Mill B South and had nowhere to go but up. We looked around and concluded that the best route would be up to Cardiff Pass then along the Inca Highway, a narrow knife-edge ridge leading to the summits of Superior and Monte Cristo.
In retrospect, that turned out to be a mistake. First up was the scramble up the hillside to Cardiff Pass. The soil was loose and unconsolidated, and buried by scree that refused to hold our weight. We climbed gingerly, often on all fours, and still slid back down the hill a bit on multiple occasions. Despite the miserable footing, we made Cardiff Pass, but then we saw what was ahead.
This was a full-on scramble up steep, loose rock along the ridgeline. We held on for all we were worth. A fall here would have likely been fatal, sweeping you down across cheese-grater cliffs some 20-30 feet high. All three of us agreed that if we made it up, there was no way in hell we were going back down the same way.
We did, of course, make it and basked in the glory of lunch atop Mount Superior. Snowbird's terrain sat directly across the canyon,
with Alta just up the road.
Although the picture doesn't do it justice, a peek down the southwest face was positively vertigo-inducing -- it felt like if you slipped you'd tumble right onto the Little Cottonwood Canyon road below.
The view north was across the glacial moraines that we had just ascended, with virtually all of the Great Salt Lake visible and buildings of the Salt Lake Valley from Murray to the airport identifiable. On top of everything else, we never saw a cloud all weekend.
Our plan to descend was to follow the Inca Highway further west toward Monte Cristo, then descend the headwall itself onto a snowfield below. This was a good call, and while steep and loose it was nothing like the ridgeline from Cardiff Pass had been. We pseudo-glissaded down the snowfields, crossed the moraines once again and returned largely the way we came, departing from our approach route only when we neared Lake Blanche.
We broke camp, loaded up and headed down. By the time we neared the car I was hitting the wall. Some 11.75 miles and 4,620 feet of climbing after we started, we were back at the car 24 hours later.
Glorious!
For anyone considering this trip, or just wanting to learn more, here's our GPS track with the photos geocoded for Google Earth. Note that the straight sections of track near the car were due to GPS issues and do not reflect our actual route:
View attachment Lake Blanche-Mt Superior.kmz
Dale had Friday off, and wanted to get out of the hot Salt Lake Valley this weekend. He proposed an overnight backpacking trip. The rest of us had to work, so we picked a destination close to home to head out to after work on Friday.
Originally we had a party of six. Skidog loaded his pack and tried it on, but his recovery from shoulder surgery wasn't quite where it needed to be yet. Todd backed out mid-afternoon, saying that he had too much to do and hadn't yet accomplished enough. That left Dale, Tele Jon, Stephan and yours truly.
We headed for Mill B South in Big Cottonwood Canyon. It's nothing short of remarkable to me that the trailhead to this federally protected wilderness, the Twin Peaks Wilderness Area, is a mere 12 minutes from my front door and about 20 miles from downtown Salt Lake City. Our plan was to hike in to Lake Blanche to camp, then continue on to the summit of Mt. Superior with daypacks in the morning. We'd return to Lake Blanche after summiting Superior, break camp and return to the car.
All but Stephan hit the trail right after work. Dale and Jon had a rather hardcore MTB session in the morning, but they were still going strong plodding up the trail. That's no easy feat, for the Lake Blanche trail rises over 2,700 vertical feet in a mere 2.7 miles. It's relentless. Nothing ridiculously steep, but there's absolutely no rest for the weary.
As you approach Lake Blanche, it's fascinating to look at the smooth, scarred bedrock, with the scrapes all heading in one direction -- the direction that the receding glaciers scarred them in. How's this for a campsite view?
As might be expected at a destination so close to the city, we were hardly alone at the trio of lakes -- Blanche, Lillian and Florence -- but there's enough room that we felt alone enough. We pitched camp near Lake Blanche (el. 8,911 ft.) at a spot with views both of the lake and Sundial Peak and of the Salt Lake Valley below, and when Stephan arrived we ate dinner while watching the sun go down over the Great Salt Lake.
After sunset we could see a fireworks show going off above Saltaire, some 25 miles distant. Shortly thereafter a full moon rose over Sundial Peak and eliminated the need for headlamps. I never did get to fish, although we learned the next morning that the brook trout were hitting rather heavily. We still didn't hit the sack until midnight.
The next morning we cooked breakfast and prepared to hit the trail. Dale, however, was dying from a full day on Friday and opted out of the Superior expedition. The remaining three of us left camp and headed up. Dale would stick around the lake for a few more hours before heading down.
The route to Superior (el. 11,132 ft.) from Lake Blanche is, to put it mildly, brutal. It rises 2,211 feet in 3 miles, but none of that is on an established trail. We started out at the far end of the lake near the inlet and ascended through a stand of aspen trees before finding ourselves thick in the growth of wildflowers and tall weeds that have taken advantage of our inordinately wet spring. We fought hard to bushwhack through the thicket to a pair of rock ribs nearby, then ascended the ribs to clear them.
We were heading for what we understood to be a herd path that would lead us above the black cliffs ahead to a hanging valley below the final cirque. The herd path was barely visible at times, and rose relentlessly along the wall of upper Mill B South to gain sufficient altitude to clear the cliffs. Compared to Friday night, however, we were traveling light and making good time. You simply can't make the same time bushwhacking that you can on an established and maintained trail, however.
Eventually we reached the hanging valley, with some mine ruins directly below -- remains of a rock foundation with an old metal bedframe in it, and a collapsed tunnel nearby -- and a spring-fed pond below that. A 200-foot scramble across the ridgeline behind us would have led to the Regulator Johnson Mine. It's ironic to me that even though it's near to Snowbird, home to the ski run of the same name, the mine isn't on Snowbird property, nor is it even in the same canyon -- it's in Mineral Fork which drains into Big Cottonwood Canyon, not Little Cottonwood.
From here the going got tougher. We crested a small bedrock knob before crossing some positively brutal glacial moraines, balancing ourselves upon the boulders in the field. At the end we reached the cirque at the head of the east branch of Mill B South and had nowhere to go but up. We looked around and concluded that the best route would be up to Cardiff Pass then along the Inca Highway, a narrow knife-edge ridge leading to the summits of Superior and Monte Cristo.
In retrospect, that turned out to be a mistake. First up was the scramble up the hillside to Cardiff Pass. The soil was loose and unconsolidated, and buried by scree that refused to hold our weight. We climbed gingerly, often on all fours, and still slid back down the hill a bit on multiple occasions. Despite the miserable footing, we made Cardiff Pass, but then we saw what was ahead.
This was a full-on scramble up steep, loose rock along the ridgeline. We held on for all we were worth. A fall here would have likely been fatal, sweeping you down across cheese-grater cliffs some 20-30 feet high. All three of us agreed that if we made it up, there was no way in hell we were going back down the same way.
We did, of course, make it and basked in the glory of lunch atop Mount Superior. Snowbird's terrain sat directly across the canyon,
with Alta just up the road.
Although the picture doesn't do it justice, a peek down the southwest face was positively vertigo-inducing -- it felt like if you slipped you'd tumble right onto the Little Cottonwood Canyon road below.
The view north was across the glacial moraines that we had just ascended, with virtually all of the Great Salt Lake visible and buildings of the Salt Lake Valley from Murray to the airport identifiable. On top of everything else, we never saw a cloud all weekend.
Our plan to descend was to follow the Inca Highway further west toward Monte Cristo, then descend the headwall itself onto a snowfield below. This was a good call, and while steep and loose it was nothing like the ridgeline from Cardiff Pass had been. We pseudo-glissaded down the snowfields, crossed the moraines once again and returned largely the way we came, departing from our approach route only when we neared Lake Blanche.
We broke camp, loaded up and headed down. By the time we neared the car I was hitting the wall. Some 11.75 miles and 4,620 feet of climbing after we started, we were back at the car 24 hours later.
Glorious!
For anyone considering this trip, or just wanting to learn more, here's our GPS track with the photos geocoded for Google Earth. Note that the straight sections of track near the car were due to GPS issues and do not reflect our actual route:
View attachment Lake Blanche-Mt Superior.kmz
I have a feeling I'd be the clumsy one...
