To climb this mountain, you gotta start at the South Fork Eagle River Trail:
https://www.yelp.com/biz/south-fork-eagle-river-trail-anchorage
Once you get to the lakes, you go climber's left and skirt the south flanks of Eagle Lake. This takes you into a peaceful valley area with multiple small streams criss-crossing over riverbed pebbles. You keep riding this valley up and trending left till you reach the south face of Eagle Peak, then the climbing begins.
I chose to do this peak in non-ideal weather because I'm tired of all the rain and overcast weather in Anchorage...instead of putzing around online being butthurt that it wasn't "climbing weather", I decided to just go.
Eagle Peak is about 22ish miles R/T. Most of it is pretty flat until the very end.
Trailhead is at 2,000 ft.
Summit is at ~6,900 ft.
The mileage is what really makes doing it in a single day a doozy.
It's a class 2/3 hike (a "scramble") in the summer, allegedly. That's not how I would've characterized it on Sunday (5/20). The south face was a mess of wet crusty, ball-busting snow and frosted, verglass-glazed rocks. I roughly followed the beta from summitpost and peakbagger, making my own adjustments for the wintery conditions. Despite it being cloudy and windy, snow/rain was only occasionally falling down. And temps were pretty warm for the most part. I never even had to get out my belay jacket.
My feet though, were soaked. Even with gaiters, the wet snow was building up in and around them, and in my boots. I did something I never do anymore: I took a second pair of socks because I heard the approach can get wet (thanks to low flow on the streams and snow bridges, it wasn't!) I ended up using them anyway because my mountaineering boots were filled with water.
I took a small iceaxe (the old, short hammer-design of the Petzl Sum'tec) and a whipper. I used the whippet for 99% of the ascent. I got the axe out for a short, very steep constriction that was filled with some water ice. However, the water ice was too rotten to trust (at least for someone of my risk tolerance), so I ended up down-climbing and finding another way around, and up. I took aluminum crampons because of all the mileage, they worked fine.
Even with tons of clouds, gusts of wind, and scattered rain/snow showers...the summit was a sight to behold! Well worth the effort. I'm glad I got to scale it while it still has a snowy coat! read more