Gothic & Del Campo Peaks

With our bigger plans dashed due to questionable weather we settled on a day trip up to Gothic Basin to tag Gothic & Del Campo Peaks. They've been on my list for some time and I had been thinking about an overnight up there, but I'm glad we did it in a day since it was a bit of a zoo up there. So many people. I suppose there were some more secluded spots to camp but with the rain the night before I'm not bummed about not spending the night out. It was drizzling and gloomy for much of the day until we were on the summit of Del Campo.

Gothic Peak

We started up the trail at 8:45 and reached Gothic Basin in about 2 hours. After a wrong turn (towards the smaller lakes at the beginning of the basin) we did some cross country travel towards the SE ridge of Gothic. We stayed pretty close to the ridge crest on the way towards the summit block. Some fun slabby scrambling to be had on the way. Didn't do much research on the route but found it to be incredibly simple — just head straight towards the summit. A short section of class 3 popped us out on top much more quickly than I had anticipated (2:40 from car to summit).

Gothic to Del Campo

We stopped and took a few pics on the summit before I went to scope the SE side of Del Campo. My Washington Scrambles book by Peggy Goldman has a vague description of a route on this side of the mountain: "A variation for reaching the rock of the upper south face of Del Campo is to climb from Foggy pass at 5480 feet, bearing over onto the face." While scoping the route my partner suggested that the NE ridge of Gothic looked like it might go. I scrambled down a ways and agreed that it looked promising. We grabbed our packs from the summit and headed down into the unknown.

There were a few class 4 moves, some heather slopes and some loose choss on the way down but the route wasn't terrible. We stayed on the ridge crest for the top section and then moved to the NW side (loose) when that looked too difficult. We arrived at a notch between Gothic's main summit and Cast Rocks. From the notch we had to descend a gully (4th) which brought us into a moat in what remains of last year's snow pack. Following the moat to the left we ended up on a boulder field that provided easy enough travel towards Foggy Pass.

Del Campo via South Face

From Foggy Pass we ascended what ended up being low 5th class and requiring crawling under some bushes/using the branches as handholds. Definitely wouldn't recommend trying to go down that way and going up wasn't great either. After getting back I saw a report from Steph Abegg which had her ascending a line further to the right — that is the route I would recommend from Foggy Pass.

Once we passed the brush we found ourselves on the boulder field below Del Campo's south face. We traversed right towards the standard route and took that all the way to the summit. One short stretch of snow crossed en route.

It took us a bit under 5 hours to get from car to Gothic to Del Campo via this route. We hung out on the summit for some time as a couple other groups arrived. The sun actually started coming out at some point and caused us to think about jumping in the lake far below. It is quite a spectacular view of Vesper, Morning Star, Sperry & Big Four from atop Del Campo.

The Descent & Lake

On the way down we wandered a bit skier's right of where we should have and got cliffed out. Nothing a simple leftward traverse couldn't fix though.

By the time we reached the lake the sun was out in full force and we found a sweet rock to jump off (~10 ft) into the lake. Boy was it frigid, but quite refreshing. I jumped twice.

On the way out I took note of how many people were in the basin, many of them overnight campers. One picture I took of one of the smaller lakes has at least 12 tents in it. Suits me that this was a day trip.

Stats

~12 miles, ~5,000 ft gain, 8hr 40min with ~1.5 hours of lounging. Nice to be able to jump in a cold lake after tagging a few peaks.