Elevation Gain: 1,051m
Distance: 12.43km
Total Time: 5 hours 54 minutes
Date: November 3rd, 2024
Green Mountain is a small summit located at the Northern end of the Hurley River valley where it feeds into the Bridge River. It’s not a particularly notable summit, especially among the giants around Gold Bridge. However, it’s an excellent shoulder season objective with great views of Sloan. Logging roads run most of the way to the summit and then a small OHV trail will take you to the final summit ridge. Andrea and I were in the area after a failed attempt up Shulaps Peak and what we thought was the summit of Brig Peak. Now on our second day we wanted to get one successful summit in to the make the drive worthwhile.
We woke up early from our go to spot at Gun Creek and made the 30ish minute drive up the Hurley. It was thankfully snow free and we even made it a short ways down the spur road up Green Mountain. Andrea found a small spot to park off the road and we set off on foot towards the summit. The first half of the day was easy road walking, zig zagging our way up to the summit ridge. That changed, unexpectedly around 1800m as we left the forest and reached the base of a large alpine bowl. Here the trail breaking turned from nominal amounts of powder to deep 30cm tracks.
From the base of the bowl to the ridge it was quite unrelenting, but the depth eased off a bit when we hit the more sun affected ridge. Andrea took the lead on the ridge and hit some unexpected whumpfing. We assessed the terrain and continued on after seeing a reasonable route and no further evidence of wide spread instabilities. The remainder of our route was uneventful, but certainly a slog. When we reached the summit, the long anticipated views of Mount Sloan came to the forefront. Sloan looked straight out of the Himalayas, with countless steep sharp ridges cascading off the pointed summit; covered in a thin veneer of snow. I pondered for awhile about possible lines, but none that looked in my wheel house revealed themselves.
On our return, the deep snow was quite enjoyable to descend and we had our existing tracks where we needed them. We took a minor deviation above the alpine bowl and headed down the north side directly through the steeper snow. This avoided a more circuitous line back around the ridge. Once we linked back up with the road the days practically over and we had fast return back to the car.