This past Monday Tyler Smallwood and I set out to put a reasonably fast time up Jefferson via the SW ridge. We started a little past 7am from Pamelia lake trailhead.
The bushwhacking up to the ridge from the PCT actually wasn’t too bad, but we definitely benefitted from Tyler having done the route a few weeks prior and having the route finding pretty dialed.
Once on the ridge we managed to keep a reasonably consistent pace up, only stopping for a few minutes at a snow patch to shove some snow into our water bottles. I believe we made it up to the red saddle before the snow traverse in a little over 3 hours, give or take a few minutes.
The snow traverse had some nice steps kicked in which helped, although one of my lightweight aluminum style petzl crampons popped off my right foot which added some spice.
Beyond the traverse we were surprised to find somewhat wintry conditions. The weekend’s storm ended up leaving a couple of inches of dense snow that was still caked onto northerly aspects.
This made for some fun alpine terrain - the top of the mountain resembled a mini version of the hornli route on Matterhorn - but definitely slowed things down a bit. We kept crampons on until the ridge just below the summit. Future parties will be able to shave some time off with snow free conditions up high. We clocked in at the summit at 3:37.
The way down went much faster than I expected. Endless scree skiing is pretty much the name of the game on Jefferson. We dropped right off the ridge a bit earlier and took the next drainage over down (described as the alternate route on mountain project) so we could milk the last scree field to skiers right. This led to the worst bushwhacking of the day right before getting back on the PCT, but overall definitely worth the time savings and generally not that bad.
Once back at the trail we rallied and hammered sub 7s back to pamelia lake trailhead. The post run ice bath in the river at the TH felt phenomenal, highly recommend it.
I was surprised to see that Jefferson wasn’t on fkt given that it’s such a prominent and aesthetic peak. I was inspired when a friend sent me Tyler’s Strava of the route from a few weeks prior when he did it in 6:40ish (which I believe was the fkt before this). We connected and made plans to do this fkt burn on Jeff despite never having met or done anything like this together beforehand.
In my opinion the hype about the bushwhacking being terrible is pretty overblown, and the snow traverse/pinnacle scramble isn’t much worse than the standard route up north sister. More people should get after this! I’m happy with our time but I’m sure someone who’s motivated will come along and bring the time down quite a bit.