We climbed Washington State’s 2783m Mount Shuksan over 3 days in early July, 2017, via the Fisher Chimneys and Southeast Rib. The climb was particularly fun, one of the most enjoyable I’ve recently undertaken.
Mount Shuksan
We began with a false start ‘warmup’ hike in/out of Lake Ann due to a bad stove nozzle, which resulted in a full bottle of gas being wasted. The approach was very much snow covered, and route finding was a little bit tricky – having a GPS track was useful. After making the approach once, our subsequent gas-retrieval and exit hikes were easy enough!
After doubling down on the approach hike, we counted ‘the first day’ as our third hike to Lake Ann, where we camped overnight. On the second day we climbed to the summit from Lake Ann, via the Fischer Chimneys route. The chimneys involved loads of cool class 3 scrambling, the glacier above the chimneys offered easy but beautiful snow slopes, and the southeast rib of the summit pyramid presented us with four pitches of interesting, low class 5 rock which was straightforward enough to securely solo (I climbed the rib in my beater Koflach shells) in its entirety. We made ~6 rappels on the way down, several in the summit pyramid gully to avoid downclimbing on snow covered rock, and two in the chimneys for a greater sense of security. It took us about 6:45 to climb from our tent to the top, without rushing. On the final day we hiked out to the car. Below are images from the climb.
The Cloud Ocean 