I renamed it McTRAMP: McArthur Trail Run Across Mountains to Priest, in hopes of luring friends with a fun acronym. It worked. Drew Mahan, Chris Hoppe, Aaron Boatman, and Kyla Berendzen joined me at McArthur Lake for a 6AM depart. Aaron Mahan saw us off, he was going to crew for us.
We had a good warm up on the ~2.5 miles of pavement before we dove directly into our first bushwack up State land towards Dodge Peak. I decided to deviate from the previous two reports and skip White Peak straight for Dodge. I've hunted up the logging roads there and knew it would be pretty doable. Logging road, bushwack, logging road, bushwack was the sequence for the first quarter. Hit the false summit of Dodge then picked up the 4-wheel trail to cruise down to the Pack River drainage. Snacks and cold drinks in the shade at our Pack River crew stop.
Short bushwack followed by a half mile road section from there to the Fault Lake Trailhead before we hit the crux of the day: the McCormick creek crossing. I'd scouted it on Friday to make sure we could do it, but knew it would be sporty. I wouldn't have wanted the water any higher, it was puckering! Power hiked most of the Fault Lake trail, not hitting continuous snow until about where we needed to peel off for Hunt Pass. Fault Lake was still frozen over. We picked our way up to the pass mostly on rock and only had to ascend the last 30 yards or so on snow.
The path down to Hunt lake was completely snowed in still but the snow surface was perfect for hiking and glissading. The bushwack around the lake sucked; we took the east side. Maybe the west side is better?? Boatman nicely waited until the end of the day to gloat how his compression socks had saved his shins from all the scratches the rest of us had. There were 4 dudes camped at Hunt lake: they were a little stupified at where we had come from and that all of us went swimming (there was still ice on the far end of the lake). The trail out of there was slow on shot quads through the boulder fields, but soon enough we were at the trailhead. Met the sag-wagon where the road became drivable again by a mini van for some water. Then crushed the last 5 miles down with 2 short bushwacks to cut mileage. Celebration and creek dunking at the the East Shore Road!
The real award of the group goes to Tikka, Kyla's four legged companion, who easily crushed 10 extra miles over us.