Mt. Goode is a high and very remote peak in the North Cascades of Washington. It is high and wild, set among other Cascade giants like Storm King, Logan with its four major summits, and other peaks of the Park Creek and Cascade Pass areas. It cannot be seen from any road. If you have climbed in the Liberty Bell group, however, you have seen Goode from the East, with its Northeast Butress rising steeply and directly to its summit. With 3000 feet of rock climbing and a glacier and arduous approach tossed into the works, Goode is a big, big climb.
This was not our first choice for Labor Day weekend. In fact, the idea of climbing Goode only solidified 2 days before we were on the trail. Originally we were out to climb some late season alpine ice, something like the North Face of Buckner, North Face of Maude, or the Lyman Glacier on Chiwawa. But The Cascade River road was closed due to a fire near Marblemount, so that ruled out Buckner. The Lyman Glacier looked pretty boring to me, and Maude was in the Entiat River valley, a place we had not been but the approach sounded long.
Goode was something to really work for, though. So we decided to try it. At the last minute we decided to try to bike the trail as much as possible with our mountain bikes, saving as much time as we could on the approach from Rainy Pass. I should note that bikes are not allowed on the trail, and that we made a conscious decision to break the rules, but also to be as courteous and polite as possible to other trail users, especially horse-people. I personally think horses should not be allowed on these trails, and that bikes should - bikes dont shit all over the trial and arguably cause less trail erosion - but that argument is best left for another forum. So bikes it was...
We left from Rainy Pass late, after 9:30 am. We were able to bike down the PCT with very few encouters with other people and horses. The horse people we met were very nice and happy that we dismounted and walked behind them for a time until they had a place to let us safely pass. Only one backpacker said "hey, thats illeagal!" the entire trip. We ignored him.
We made it to North Fork trail in good time and ditched the bikes. The next 4 miles were hot and dry. Finally we made it about a mile past Grizzly Creek to where the bushwack approach to Goode Basecamp starts. This ia a bushwack/scramble 2200 vertical feet directly up the North basin below Goode from Bridge Creek. We found the climbers trail just before the trees ended, forded Bridge Creek, bushwacked 15 minutes through alder, and got to the scree below the left hand cliff. Then up to a waterfall, 3rd class-ing to the right of the falls and some more bushwacking, some 4th-class moves, more bushwacking, streambed...you get the picture.
Despite the seriousness of this approach, the trail is generally recognizable as a trail and is pretty easy to follow (if you think like a climber, I guess). Finally, after marching up steep heather slopes for 30 minutes, you reach a bivy large enough for 4 people just below the Goode Glacier. It was here that we got our first really good look at Goode Glacier.
It was 6 pm and the glacier was a nightmare. Jumbled serac walls and steep ice made this thing look far far more serious than we had anticipated. We had cloth lightweight hikers, strap-on crampons, and only one tool each, but this glacier looked like some ice pro might come in handy. Our motivation went from "all we need is good positioning and we can tick this thing" to "Holy Shit!" in about 10 seconds. I was stunned. I have seen some ugly looking glaciers, but this one looked pretty un-navigable. I didn't know what to say or do: we had just put in a huge day, pulling out all the stops to go as light and fast as possible, and I was ready to go home. We set up camp, made some food, and went to sleep, prepared to head out the next day.
In the morning we were feeling pretty bad. After all, we hadn't really tried very hard to get to the route. Were we just being wusses, getting too old to try hard? We left camp at 7:30 am with climbing gear, jackets, and a renewed mental commitment to the route. The weather was good, a forced night out wasnt going to be so bad. We had a map and had seen that maybe you could traverse from Goode-Storm King Col onto the North side of Storm King. In the event of an epic decent, we would try that and rap, leaving gear and slings and downclimbing if we could.
We did an approach up a gully to the snout of the glacier. Over to the right a little was a low(er) angle ramp that looked like it might go. We got there, and as the entire glacier groaned and creaked, I mono-tooled up 65 degree ice to lower angle ice above. It was hard. My partner made it, barely, but was thoughroughly freaked out and immediately wanted to rope up, which I didn't want to do. It would have done no good if one of us had pinged, as this was not self-arrestable. We made our way along the glacier, weaving in and out, climbing some steeper sections above serious fall-potential, and generally making good progress. I was gaining some motivation back. All we had to do was reach the rock, and I knew we could fire the rock portion in a matter of hours, simulclimbing. My thoughts had been good when suddenly I reached a dead-end ramp on the glacier. There was no other way around, and after some careful scouting, I knew we were done. We probably could have reached the rock, but it would have been very dangerous mono-tooling on steep ice, and by now we were wasting precious time.
We turned around 100 feet shy of the rock butress. So close you could spit and hit the route. We got back down the steeper sections to the initial steep pitch. I knew I could not downclimb this section without some serious step and hold chopping, and my partner was unwilling to consider downclimbing it. So we chopped a Bollard, which took about 30 minutes, and rapped off it. No problem. We were back to camp at 11 am.
We broke camp and headed down. It was already quite hot out and the going was dry. We were already wasted, and we had a long long way out, potentially pushing bikes. The decent took only an hour an 15 minutes to Bridge Creek. We forded the creek and went back, across Grizzly Creek, through Walker Park, past the junction with the PCT, and back up toward Rainy Pass to where we stashed the bikes. Got to the bikes and a little farther cooked some food to replenish our very low energy reserves. We made Hideaway by 8pm, and decided we were too fatigued to push for the road by headlamp. We camped another night and made the road by 9am the next morning.
