Bonanza Peak 9/2/18

When I saw Chris had mentioned Bonanza Peak over the Labor Day weekend….I thought Yikes!, sounds like a suffer-fest to me…but after a tiny bit of research, it didn’t sound THAT bad. No other takers so it was just Chris and I.

The adventure started just getting through Portland traffic Friday after work. Picked up Chris and headed north. We Lodged in Cashmere, and was at the Chelan Ferry Saturday morning for a two hour ride to Lucerne. Then the 40-minute old school bus ride up the canyon to Holden Village, where we were greeted by a crowd of happy waving and clapping people…which is another story. Google “Holden Village” for an interesting story.

Our ground approach starts at Holden Village and ends at Holden Pass…a 6.5 miles x 3100’ gain huff, that took about 4-hours. The hike was on trail to Holden Lake, but after the lake it turned in to a typical climbers trail disappearing then re-appearing…eventually getting to the pass.

Summit day started at 5:50am. There’s a nice climbers trail leaving camp up for a ways…then it ends at the boulder fields. We knew the general direction, so we looked to the path of least resistance. Finally we arrived at the north edge of the Mary Green Glacier where we put on our crampons and roped up for glacier travel. The lower crevasses are all wide-open so we had to carefully navigate around them. Once on the top west edge of the glacier it was a long stretch of easy travel with awesome views all around. The glacier travel ended with a wrap around and up steep slopes and traversing above a wide open crevasse…a bit unnerving. Luckily the infamous snow-finger was still touching the rock and gave us an easy ramp off the glacier to the rock. We dropped all our glacier gear and started the 4^th class scramble climb to the summit. Wow, some say this climb is easy…and they are right, but what they don’t say…is this climb is stressful. The climb from the glacier to the summit is sustained 4^th class on pretty solid rock with a lot of loose rocks just waiting for you to bump so they can tumble down on others. We had two others above us who knocked off rocks on two occasions which one of them nearly took Chris out. No fault of theirs, it’s just the nature of this type of climb. We arrived at the summit 5-hours after leaving camp. Met two others, Eric and Gerry… The last entry in the summit register was from 2-weeks prior. We still had a big job ahead of us in getting off this peak, so we didn’t spend much time at the summit. On the way up we noticed many rap anchors…which made the descent much less stressful than if we had to down climb. Big sigh of relief when we got back to the glacier. On the glacier descent our tracks from the morning were gone so descending the lower portion we a bit dicey, but we were able to navigate around the crevasses with no issues. With one more rappel and a lot of boulder hopping we were back at camp 5.75-hours after leaving the summit.

Got a little rain over night but it moved on as we rose the next morning. A 2.5 hour hike back to Holden Village, just in time for the lunch buffet. A bit disappointed there was no ice cream, but it was nice to fill our bellies with fresh salads. A bus ride back to Lucerne, then the ferry ride back to Fields Point Landing…and the long-ass drive back to Portland put me in bed at midnight…ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Oh, and forgot the camera…the following pics are phone pics…

At the Fields Point Landing dock waiting for the Lake Chelan Ferry to take us to the small town of Lucerne…