See photos from the outing.
June 19, 2004
Ken Kruger
Rod Jacobson met me at my house at 3am Saturday, June 19th and we headed down Hwy 97 toward Klamath Falls shortly thereafter. Three miles past Lake of the Woods we took a right onto FR3650 and drove another three miles to the trailhead where we hit the trail a little before 6am. The weather was perfect, windless and pretty warm for 6am. But one thing I did not pack which I won’t forget again was bug juice – the mosquitoes were hungry!
About 2.5 miles in we left bare ground and the beaten path and started to bushwhack cross country. Route finding was easy on the way up because the mountain was pretty much due west and we could catch occasional glimpses of it through the trees. We were a bit concerned however about the hike out. Although the guide books said the trail got steep that seemed to me to be a bit of an understatement, but after two hours of bushwhacking we finally got up above tree line and found ourselves well up on the southeast ridge. From there the mountain falls away to the northeast, dropping about 1,000 ft. to the bowl below. We left the lower snowfields and began the 1,500 foot climb up the bare rock upper portions of the ridge where the rock was stable, firm and dependable – nothing like the southeast spur of North Sister which I had just experienced three weeks before.
The rock ran out about 250 vertical feet from the top and we had only a moderate angle snow slope to tackle before we hit the summit. Of course the run out was pretty significant in the event of a fall and failure to self arrest, but we made it to the top without incident in a little less than four hours.
The views were great; Shasta to the south seemed to float amongst the clouds and the caldera of Crater Lake was very clear with Mt. Scott still mostly covered with snow. Diamond Peak and Thielsen could also be seen. There was absolutely no wind and the temperature was perfect. There used to be an observation platform on the summit of McLoughlin so we took our requisite summit photos lounging on its remains. Then we headed down.
After an hour or so we lost our footprints and had to divert back to the compass. The nice thing about the climbers trail is that it runs pretty much east to west and is intersected by the PCT which runs north and south, as does the road into Four Mile Lake. So by heading due east we were bound to cross something sooner or later. It would have been nice to have along a GPS so we could have marked where we left the climbers trail on the way up. Another hour of bushwhacking and we did hit the PCT. We made it back to the car having gone up and down in a little under seven hours.
All that was left was the 2 ˝ hour drive home, which wasn’t that bad…for the passenger