I've had Mt. Adams on my list of wanna climbs for awhile, but it had never fit in the schedule. This year with the late opening it worked out that we would take a go at it. Since I was travelling back from work on Friday, we decided to split the climb up between Saturday and Sunday. Steve did some route investigating and found a potential alternative to the main route where it would likely be quite crowded. Instead we opted to go up the Mazama glacier and hit the headwall just before the false summit. Since the parking lot on that side wasn’t yet open, it did require some traversing from the main trail over. We weren’t sure if we could get through higher, or if there were cornices, so we chose a path that would stay fairly low around the mountain. However, as we were crossing ridges we ended up climbing up until we decided it was better to continue up and look for a way across rather than go back down. We ended up crossing on the Gotchen glacier to get across to the Mazama glacier. Topo shows in red the route we went, yellow the route we should have went, and green the route back down. We left the parking lot about 5:30, and arrived at camp at about 8,000 ft on the left side of the glacier at about 9:00 – spent some time route finding. We found a great bivy spot with some rocks blocking the wind and some nice flat snow.

Headed up in the early morning on the Mazama glacier. The route was straight-forward, pretty much just point uphill along the most obvious line. There were a couple of crevasses open, but they were easy to see and avoidable. We roped up, but the snow felt really solid and the snow bridges were good. Right before the false summit we decided to veer right and do a bit of the steep headwall. Since we were already roped up, we set a couple pickets, mostly to stop a slide into the bergshrund below, but I think otherwise we both would have been uncomfortable unroped. We could have gone further right for a longer headwall pitch – but my legs were already feeling it, so I pushed to head on up.


Traversing the just past the Gotchen Glacier below the Lunch Counter

From there we followed the main route to the summit, and some fabulous glissade trails all the way back down the mountain. All in all a fun trip – and pretty isolated!


Mazama Glacier with Lunch Counter at upper left

Below the few crevasses on the lower Mazama Glacier

Party of 5 on the uper Mazama Glacier

Close to the junction of the Mazama Glacier route and the South Spur

Mazama Glacier Headwall showing bergshrund

Top left of Mazama Glacier Headwall with bergshrund below


Hordes of people on the South Spur route