Sky Mountain via Skyline Lake

Carla and I parked in the Stevens Pass parking lot on the north side of Highway 2 and hiked up the road to Skyline Lake. A snow cat had recently driven up the road to the radio tower at 5,200' (above the one marked on USGS), which made travel easy. We took one of half a dozen paths beaten into the snow leading from the road to Skyline Lake.

Skyline Lake was frozen over and it looks like some people had skied over it during the cold weather last week. We skirted the lake on the south side and ascended NW to the top of the ridge. We soon found ourselves in a beautiful field of granite boulders leading to the 5,440'+ high point on Skyline Ridge.

Here we made the mistake of scrambling up the east side of the 5,440'+ high point, which involved a bit of semi-exposed scrambling on icy rock, probably easy when dry but challenging in these conditions. On the way back we bypassed this section by traversing below it to the south.

After 5,440'+ we dropped south for a short distance to bypass some rock, after that the trip was a stroll on the ridge leading to the top of Sky Mountain. Occasional openings in the clouds revealed good views in all directions (including a birds eye view of Highway 2) as we snowshoed up the ridge to Sky Mountain.

Snow turned to rain as we summited and we headed straight back, stopping once to take shelter underneath a leaning granite boulder west of the lake for a quick lunch.

Date:

2005/12/22

Elevation gain:

1,450 feet

Trip type:

scramble

USGS quad:

Labyrinth Mountain

In:

Highway 2 Corridor

Car-to-car:

4 hours 48 minutes

56 minutes ascending from Stevens Pass parking lot to Skyline Lake
1 hour 43 minutes ascending from Skyline Lake to summit of Sky Mountain
2 hours 9 minutes descending from summit of Sky Mountain to Stevens Pass parking lot

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