Cha-paa-qn Peak - May 13, 2023

Trip Leader: Susanna Girolamo Phillips
Participants: Candy Hartman, Stephanie

We started the day with little information on the condition of the road or trail. The road to trail 707 was mostly dry but a bit bumpy the last portion and it was fortunate we had a high clearance vehicle that could withstand some brush scraping it.

We started at the trailhead, around 5700’ on dry trails and at about the 1 mile mark we started to hit patchy snow. The snow was deep enough that we were punching through so we switched to our ski boots and hiked a bit further before putting the skis on. We had a couple of points that we had to step on grass to get to the next patch of snow but it was mostly good skinning to the junction with the Reservation Divide trail at about 7200’. That is the point the trail opened up and from there we made our way up
the slope and angling east until we ran out of snow approximately 300’ from the summit.

We stashed the skis at that point and made our way up the large rocks to the summit. We were greeted with clear views of the surrounding area and only had light breezes compared to the winds that were in the forecast. We followed the east ridge a short ways for the descent then angled back to the west to find our skin track. The snow was definitely not optimal, it was very heavy for skiing yet without skis one would sink to upper thigh level. We had to remove the skis several times to get across the boulder fields but eventually made our way to the trail junction and back down the hiking trail. The lower trail had several trees we had to get over or under, we found it was much easier while headed uphill than it was on the way back.