Two Bit Mountain

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We left the red inflatables head high in the shrubs next to shore. I've never had a bear mess with them but I always feel better if they are off the ground. It would be a long cold swim back to the boat if they got ripped up. I try to separate them in case a bear finds one they won't immediately get them both. Bears walk around with their noses to the ground and they seem to love chewing on the plastic buoys that wash up on beaches.

After the narrow strip of spruce and hemlocks behind the beach we got into easy walking in open muskeg. But at the top of the muskeg we looked the sheer rock cliffs above us and couldn't decide which way to go. I'd loaded a GPS route, but in my haste I loaded the planning route from our last attempt, not the actual route. The route ended were we stood. We decided to head to the base of the cliffs, go left and up the first viable slope. Then came the kind of hiking that is the most difficult here, steep up with drop-offs, thick tangles of shrubs and small trees everywhere. The trees and shrubs give necessary hand holds but they often form a lattice work barrier that you must weave through. It was slow going until we reached the open alpine.

There is a limestone 'dike' across the ridge in the alpine. A linear seam of limestone sandwiched between hard metamorphic/igneous bedrock. It is a sliver of karst-like topography with an irregular surface and pits with fluted walls. Even some calcium loving plants - maidenhair fern and what I call Christmas fern. Maybe it is not a true geologic dike, I always think of dikes as being igneous rock but it sure looked like a dike. I'm checking with some geologist friends, we'll see what they say.

We call it Two Bit Mountain - our name for it - most peaks here don't have official names. There are two peaks at the summit, one is dark rock, almost black from a distance, the other very light, almost white. We'd tried to get to the top a couple years ago but heavy wind and cold turned us back. This time the weather held, we reach the base of the 'white bit' that evening and topped the 'black bit' the next day.

The views included the Fairweather Range and the Brady Glacier. Blue sky and not a drop of rain!

We followed the GPS track down. It is often tempting to try a new route, do a loop - but we've learned, it's usually faster and safer to take the known route. Nothing like working your way down a super steep slope covered with trees and thick shrubs only to find you are about to steep off a sheer 30 foot drop.

The cliffy areas in the forest are often broken by narrow chutes that have a far amount of vegetation covering the rock. They are a bit less steep and often provide a through route. Turns out the route we'd previously taken went 'around' the cliff on the right side. But it had one particularly steep section where we'd had to boost the backpacks up and climb a short sketchy section free style. So we were glad to have found a new route that avoided that section.

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