Mt Eklutna & Ridge

 Hiked the Mt Eklutna Trail with the Valley Wanderers today. Just 4 of us went, Jane, Erin, Kim and me. We had an interesting plan. From the top of the mountain you can see that the trail continues along the ridge. Looking on the map there is a peak labeled 4009/1222, which is simply the elevation in feet/meters. It's about one mile past the Mt Eklutna summit. Our goal was to reach that peak. As we were climbing, the clouds started to gather near the summit and we wondered if we would even see the view from the top. Once we reached the saddle before the final ascent, we were completely fogged in. But occasionally the clouds would lift and we could get a glimpse of the view below. We continued on past the Eklutna summit, in and out of the fog. The trail is vague in places and involves some minor rock climbing to negotiate some large rocky cliffs. But we had no trouble getting around them. The farther we hiked, the worse the clouds situation became. We stopped and had lunch on a point where another ridge descends and eventually joins the trail we had climbed from below. We had decided to take that route down, for variety and to avoid the steep loose scree section that we had climbed from the saddle to the Mt Eklutna summit. Our goal peak of 4009 showed its face now and then through the clouds, but mostly stayed hidden. The cloud layer was thickening rather than lifting. The ridge had a deep drop before it climbs to that distant peak and we started having serious reservations about trying to negotiate that route if we couldn't see the route ahead. We also knew we would not be able to see the view if we did manage to get there. We waited a little while to see if the cloud cover got better to take the alternative route down. There is no trail on that route, making it sketchy if we didn't have visibility. But conditions just continued to worsen. So we turned back and descended along our original route, leaving peak 4009/1222 for another day. It was still a lovely 8 mile cloudy adventure.