Scratchy Scratchy

• Date: 31 January, 2025
• Peaks: Mt. Helen, Father Dyer Peak, Crystal Peak
• Route: East Slopes, Helen-Father Dyer-Crystal Traverse, Northeast Ridge
• Mileage: 8.5 mi
• Vertical: 3900 ft
• Time: 10 hrs
• Partners: Owen

Yup, it's that time of year again. Owen and I have so far every year decided to make ourselves miserable and climb some alpine rock and snow in the dead of winter. After the arctic cold snap (and my most miserable days ski patrolling), it was nice to have a solid weather window. We drove up from Silverthorne and were at the trailhead at 6:30.

Owen and I neglected to bring flotation for the route, since we were planning on a lot of mixed climbing and didn't want skis or snowshoes strapped to our backs. The avalanche conditions didn't exactly permit a ski off of Crystal either, so we ended up deciding to boot the whole thing. Since CR 800 was well packed in from the traffic to Francie's Cabin, it was easy going to the summer TH.

Quickly after the split in the road north we saw a skintrack headed up Helen. Without flotation, we postholed up to our waists within seconds of leaving the road. Deciding that this was a little too miserable for our taste, we backtracked to the road and headed up a bit more north, to the Wheeler Trail junction. There was another skintrack here headed the direction we wanted, so we decided to take it. It was still postholey, but more manageable.

There was still quite a bit of wallowing, passing the old mine on the way up. Following the skintrack, we eventually made it to treeline, where the snow was a lot more hard packed and bootable. Now feeling like spring conditions, we put on our crampons and headed straight up the casual East Slope.

The East Slope seemed to go on forever, and the perspective was hard to grasp. The slope seemed to go on forever in a straight plane, and it was impossible to even conceive of where the summit was until we were practically right on it.

We opted to keep our crampons on for the grassy slopes above. We mostly just didn't feel like transitioning them off our boots, since we knew we'd be keeping them on for the mixed Class 4 ridge to Father Dyer. It started to get a bit more breezy towards the summit of Helen, which was a welcome change from the hot spring conditions thus far. Making the summit, we could see the route ahead.

From here, we followed the ridge down to the saddle, which was snowy Class 2. Pretty quickly after the saddle, the difficulty ramped up to Class 3, and then Class 4. There was a steep drop off into the Crystal Creek drainage on the climber's right side, but the south side of the ridge made it easy to bypass anything we didn't want to climb.

There were two or three real cruxes to the ridge: one Class 4 headwall, then one Class 4 wraparound under a boulder in a notch, and a Class 4 downclimb from one of the high points on the ridge. All in all, the difficulty was mostly in routefinding and exposure. The climbing wasn't ridiculously hard, if you picked a good line. The final crux downclimb from a high point took us a minute to pick out, as it seemed that no matter where we went it was going to be Class 5. Luckily for us, ridge proper didn't seem to be the wrong choice until just after this difficulty, where a large headwall lay looming with a snow gully on the climber's left side.

Back on top of the ridge now, we could see the remainder up to Father Dyer Pk. There was quite a bit of ridgetop Class 3 left, and then a snowy ridge walk up to the next summit. We had brought a rope and a light rack of pitons and nuts, but we didn't end up taking any of it out of our packs. For those less inclined to exposure, there was opportunity to rope up along what we had already done.

At the next summit now, we weren't exactly thrilled at how far away Crystal appeared to be. The remaining ridge would be Class 2, but our energy was dwindling from the hard ridge before. We set off at a slower pace to reach our high point of the day.

We were pretty pooped by the time we made it up Crystal, but at least the day was nearly over. Of course, we still had about half the mileage left to go, but at least it was all downhill. We took a minute on top before heading down the NE ridge to the Wheeler Trail. We saw a mountain goat at the saddle with Peak 10, which conveniently was right where the Wheeler Trail started to bring us back down into the Crystal Creek drainage.

Along the trail down, there were spots where the snow was so hard that booting across it was somewhat dangerous. We pulled our ice axes back out, but without crampons it was desperate. This happened three times on our way down to Crystal Creek. We glissaded the final portion down to the lake, and followed an old snowshoe trail across the flats to Francie's Cabin. From here, we went right up to the cabin (sorry to the folks that were living there at the time, no solitude for you), and followed the main approach trail out. We took CR 803 back to the TH, since it was packed down and easy to follow, lessening our mileage for the day by not going back to the summer TH.

The day was over for us at 17:00. An easy drive back to Silverthorne and a cool route completed.