Nick Bratton enticed a few folks out to Ingalls Pass trailhead one weekend with tales of fat ice just off the parking lot. I set my alarm for 5am, dreaming of icicles and clear weather. At 7am, I woke up and realized that I had missed my ride by an hour. Gnashing my teeth and mauling my pillow, I cursed my snooze-bar habit and gazed out the window at patchy clouds. The weather will suck, the ice is probably melted, and will I even find Nick and his friends? A lenticular cloud hovered over Mt. Rainier, but I could see Rainier, so the forecast was anyone's guess. Finally, I decided that it would be better to at least get out of bed and go hiking, even if I didn't find Nick and his "fat ice".

As soon as I hit the road and got Outkast going in my CD player, I knew I had made the right decision. Freshly-washed sky gave way to drizzle and finally to cool, breezy, broken cloudiness as I rolled into Cle Elum to gas up. I tested my Volvo station wagon's dirt rally abilities (not great) on the road to the trailhead. No snow, two cars, and not a hint of ice at the parking lot. Nick had said "above the parking lot" and had been coming down from Ingalls Peak when he spotted the ice, so I figured they must have already started hiking up the Ingalls Way Trail. I took my time, savoring a cup of tea and pulling on my stiff mountain boots for the hike, still hopeful for ice.

A few minutes up the trail, I spotted tracks: one set of huge footprints far apart, another average-looking set, and the smaller tracks of a woman. This must be them... but then the tracks went left at the Esmerelda Basin/Ingalls Way fork. Hm. No tracks in the fresh snow to the right, towards Ingalls Pass, but what do I know? I plodded up the pleasant snow-covered track toward Esmerelda Basin.

Almost at the head of the creek, I found them: Nick, Jule, and Andy. Nick admitted that they had missed the fork in the trail, the ice he had seen above the parking lot was long gone, and they hadn't spotted anything climbable in the basin. This was all fine with me, since the hike up to meet them was flat, quiet, and very pleasant. Jule, Andy, and I decided to scramble up one of the nearby peaks while Nick retreated to his truck to rest, feeling sick from some bad food.

We dropped to the floor of the valley and scoped out the big peak we wanted to scramble. After considering the time, we lowered our expectations and headed for a smaller peak just north of the broad one (the northern Esmerelda Peaks? Beckey is vague about this area.) Up a steep snow gully, slipping on the greenish rock underneath, we reached a notch and climbed ledges on snow and rotten rock on the west side of the short ridge to the top. I was wearing fancy borrowed ice climbing crampons, which balled up instantly, so I took them off for the descent. We considered setting up a toprope and testing our mixed climbing skills on the steeper faces, but the choss and thin ice weren't appealing enough for us to spend the time.

Back to the car in a jiffy, we found Nick recovered from his stomach ailment. On the drive back, I discovered that Modest Mouse's album Building Nothing Out of Something lasts exactly long enough to get you from the end of the dirt road to Exit 31 on I-90. We stopped at a party in an apartment complex in North Bend whose suburban character brought a little slice of Bellevue to the fast-disappearing small town nearby. I ate ravenously of the party spread and left with Jule after a short stay, since neither of us knew the assembled guests, mostly Nick and Andy's rafting pals.

An excellent outing with good folks, despite the lack of ice!

See the Topozone map of the area. We scrambled up the northernmost peak in the chain trending NW from what's marked "Esmerelda Peaks".