Black Peak, Wing Lake — Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022

Easy going up until the boulder fields from the turnoff from the Heather Lake/Maple pass trail. We aimed too high on our way over and ended up rock hopping on some unstable rocks with our backpacking packs which wasn't fun. On our way back we basically hugged as low as we saw cairns and had a much better time through the boulder fields.

Wing lake had maybe five other groups camping besides us, and about half the spots were full. We camped further up on top of one of the ridges. Bugs weren't the worst.

We started heading up towards Black Peak around 6:30 PM. We were expecting almost no snow, but there is still snow covering the trail from the lake to about 200 feet under the ridge. By 7PM when we were on it it was starting to ice out, and when we were walking on it in the morning it was completely iced out and spikes would have been nice. In the middle of the day though it would be slushy enough you would be fine on it without any traction. Most of the glissade shoots end up in holes, so if you want to glissade you'll need a good way to arrest. We went up the snow until about 200 feet below the ridge where we transitioned to the scree. The scree was very slippery and especially near the top had almost no traction. If you stay right there's a path that sort of resembles switchbacks but it basically gives up by the top. We made it to the ledge by 7:40 and decided we would turn around because we didn't want to go down the scree in the dark. Going down was awful, I ended up downclimbing a slide of loose rocks because it was more stable than the dirt but there were just no good options. We also had a couple cantaloupe sized rocks break off of the ledge above and - while they missed us - we were glad to have helmets.

Coming down the snow was a bit sketch as it was more iced out than when we went up and so it was a little hard to make bootprints. More annoyingly though my shoes got wet from some of the slushier snow.

Overnight at Wing Lake was great, the lake was frozen when we woke up, although it was also very warm when we woke up (probably already 75+ in the sun). We saw a bear climb up from about halfway up the path to the ridge all the way up the snow field and over the top of the ridge.

Overall, the views from the ridge were good enough and the overnight made it worth it, so we'll be back earlier in the day sometime to finish off the peak.