I first glimpsed the Wallowas during a road trip with my parents back in July. From atop Mt Howard via the tourist tram, I saw Eagle Cap and Matterhorn peaks and knew I simply must return to climb them.

I returned from a work trip to California on the Friday morning before Labor Day weekend, and immediately unpacked and repacked to head to the Wallowas for a multi-day backpack with Goodness.  The trailhead at Wallowa Lake is a long drive from Portland, 6 hours long. We arrived after dark and slept in the car through a night of drizzle. It was still dripping when we hiked out Saturday morning, but felt confident the weather would clear up.  I had thrown together a pretty intense itinerary of miles and peak bagging – all easily adaptable to conditions, energy levels, and whims.

Since we didn’t want to be climbing peaks in the rain, we decided to reverse our intended route and headed up the East Fork of the Wallowa River. We passed the lovely Aneroid Lake and continued up the valley to Tenderfoot Pass where we dropped our packs for quick trip up Petes Point.  The 360 view from the summit was a perfect look at the terrain we’d be covering the next few days. We crossed Polaris Pass, with the most ridiculously gradual switchbacks I’ve ever hiked down.

 

 

The rain returned when we hit the valley floor and continued to camp at Frasier Lake.   In the morning, we headed up to Glacier Lake with the intent of an off trail route climbing Glacier Peak and Eagle Cap. The summits were socked in, so we opted to lounge around the lake for a couple hours and waited for things to clear up. We decided on a route up from Glacier Lake to Glacier Peak via its eastern arm. It turned out to be an excellent route up until the last 300′ or so. The east facing ridge was all loose scree that was steeper than I wanted to climb. So we tried going up the southern ridge, which looked less steep and more solid. Unfortunately, that turned out to be a pretty crumby route, with rotten rock crumbling beneath our feet and hands. With probably less than 100′ to the summit, we decided to let this one go and turned around.  From there we dropped some elevation and traversed across the bowl over to Eagle Cap – a fun bit of scrambling and route finding! On top of Eagle Cap, we found a crowd – this was Labor Day weekend on the wilderness’s namesake peak that has a perfectly nice trail leading to it. We took this real trail down, contemplating tomorrow’s options. Matterhorn was just begging to be climbed – a blindingly white mass of granite with a dramatic 4000′ drop from its western face to the Hurricane Creek valley below.

 

In the end, we decided to go for the original badass itinerary of bagging Sacajawea from the west then following the ridge south to Matterhorn and down the east side to Ice Lake – completing our loop and hitting the 2 highest peaks in the Wallowas. I’m glad we camped low in the valley because it was really cold the next morning. I hiked with my jacket on until 11am – most of that time uphill. We found the old and very steep trail up Thorp Creek, on the edge of a recent burn. Some trees were still smoldering.

 

We popped out in a meadow below Sacajawea Peak and found the route up the eastern ridge to the summit. It was steep and somewhat exposed. Goodness was terrified. After a short break on top, we followed the ridge south to a peak between us and Matterhorn, climbing around a bunch of gendarmes on the way. It was really really exposed. I was terrified. From the mid-peak, it was a cakewalk to Matterhorn, where we rejoiced in our avoidance of death and appearance of a boot path down the east side. We had already been climbing for over 9 hours, but being the badasses we now were certain we were, decided to hike the ~10 miles back to the car to finish our hike.

 

In summary, I highly recommend the Wallowas!