Mount Glass DPS From The East

April 12th, 2015
[Pics] [Map]

Saturdays climb of Mount Dubois had been a little rough.

We'd planned to climb O'Harrel Canyon on a friends recommendation but instead settled for the DPS route which promised to be a bit shorter and put us in a position to possibly hit one of the hot springs in the are once we were done.

Unfortunately we picked the side of the mountain with an obnoxious amount of snow.

We spent the night along the road to Dubois at a rather nice camp with a sign calling it Baby Shoe Camp.  Since we arrived after midnight we sadly didn't take advantage of the nice side firepit but it was a nice location right by running water.


We had a few hours of driving heading through Benton Hot Spring before turning on well graded dirt roads.  Passenger cars would have had no problem here (unlike Dubois)


The old DPS trailhead is actually blocked off by a rather large log but it only ads about .2 miles from where you park at the side of the road.


There's a clear trail that climbs quickly through scattered fields of obsidian.

Once things leveled off about halfway to the summit plateau we started to see a bit of snow.



Which quickly became unavoidable and obnoxious.  Jen and I were both in light boots so postholing up to our thighs was even less fun than usual.


We lost the trail and kept traversing until we reached clear dirt climbing up from there.  Jen entertained herself by picking up butterflies that had landed in the snow and were dying.  After holding them for a few minutes they'd start flapping their wings and take off much to her delight.


Things level out near the top and we headed for the GPS waypoint I had for Glass Mountain.


There's an installation up there and a benchmark but no sign of a register.


Aaaand that's when we realized the actual highpoint was the other bump across the way.  So we headed over there.


It was the better summit.  It looked like the trail we'd lost below would have taken us there.  We didn't take it down since we really didn't want to go through the snow again.


Instead we swung a bit to the north and found a nice scree slope to drop down.  We made excellent time and rejoined the trail below the snow line and were back at the car in no time.

We were doing good good time-wise and decided we really wanted to try and hit a hot spring rather than get home at a decent time.  What good is sleep after all?

So off we went.