Sourdough Mountain

I went up Sourdough Mountain this weekend, roughly 6000 feet above Diablo and Ross Lake in the North Cascades National Park. It’s a bit more than 5 miles to the summit, but it’s a really tough climb, and not particularly runnable. It’s a screamer coming down—sort of sketchy with roots and cliffs, and I’m sure my quads will feel it tomorrow.
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The views from the top were amazing, jawbreakers, and I landed a really good day to be high in the sky, with all the cloud cover burning off by the time I got up there. Panoramic, the American Alps, Ross Lake, Jack Mountain, Mount Baker, and views all the way up into Canada. Wildflowers 101. I’m still looking at maps and field guides, trying to figure out everything I was looking at. There was heavy snowpack at the top, which was sort of fun—people probably haven’t been up there much this year. I was by far the first of the day, after leaving MV at 6 AM.
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It is possible to make a 20 mile loop out of this one, but I had difficulty finding the backside of the loop down to Ross---find the cairn!--and so I kept it safe and went back the way I came, from Diablo, after kicking around for an hour or more up top.
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Sourdough is a famous fire lookout. It is one of the very first of its type, and Gary Snyder, award winning poet, spent summers in the ‘50s doing the fire lookout thing, as did Philip Whalen. I know Snyder, not Whalen. Their experiences and old pictures of the lookout are available in a book published a few years ago, "Poets On Peaks." My father actually worked at Diablo in the early 1960s, while attending the UW, so I’m looking forward to telling him about this one. It’s good country.
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Here’s the National Park Service writeup:
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http://www.nps.gov/noca/planyourvisit/sourdough-mountain-trail.htm
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Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout

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Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
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I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
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Gary Snyder