Winchester Mountain, as seen from Twin Lakes
The weekend weather forcast was looking good for a hike. Winchester mountain was reputed to have great views via an easy, well-maintained trail (Steve was only OK'd for established trail hiking by his doctors), so we settled on Winchester as our objective. We planned on a leisurely day, arriving at the Tomyhoi trailhead at 11:20 AM. We decided to take the Saturn and park at this lower trailhead, rather than use the gas-guzzling Jeep to make it all the way to the Twin Lakes trailhead. This added 4 miles and 1600' elevation gain to the hike and made an otherwise very short hike, worth the drive. The walk up the road went quickly and we arrived at the Twin Lakes trailhead at 5200'. The road around the lakes was still covered in snow. We passed a number of campers and parties fishing as we made our way to the Winchester Mountain trail located between the lakes.
We debated about stopping for lunch, but decided it would be fun to have lunch at the summit and immediately started up the trail. About half way up, we encounted a large swath of snow across a section of trail. Simple for a person with two good legs, but a slip here for Steve would not have been good and we didn't bring crampons or an ice ax. We debated going off trail to get around the snow, but in the end Steve decided to give it try since I could kick steps across the snow patch (Note: kicking steps into snow in sneakers kind of sucks). Up higher we ran into an even larger snow patch that neither or us wanted to cross, but in this case we just backtracked and followed the bypass trail. We reached the summit at about 1:45 PM. We took a quick peek into the well-maintained little lookout station and then found a nice spot near the flagpole for lunch. The views of Shuksan and Baker were very nice. After lunch we went over to check out some of the other views of American Border Peak, Larabee, and Tomyhoi. We knew we had a long drive back to Seattle, so we started back down at 2:30 PM and reached the car at about 4:45 PM. The elevation gain was 2900' and the RT distance was 8 miles.
Winchester Mountain, as seen from Twin Lakes
Twin Lakes, as seen from high up on Winchester Mountain
Mount Shuksan, as seen from the summit of Winchester Mountain
Mount Baker, as seen from the summit of Winchester Mountain
Steve & Elain on the summit of Winchester Mountain. In the
background, the thimble-shaped peak on the left is
American Border Peak. The large peak in the middle is Mount Larrabee,
and
part of the Pleaides can be seen on the right.
Mount Baker Wilderness sign near the trailhead