Devils Club Peak (7240'), Mountaineers' Peak (7265')
by Willy Hersman, Scree 9/89

Last of the Firsts - Western Chugach.  Hunter Creek...the 56th Way.  This is the trail that got left out of the guidebook.  You won't find it on any map, but it's there.  Just drive up the Knik road, cross Hunter Creek, note the school bus turnaround on the left and then look carefully on the right for the trailhead.  Now that you've found the trail, see if you can keep it.  That's part of the challenge of a trip up to Hunter Creek sucler.  In addition, there is deep mud, a real fun stream crossing, interesting brush-beating, lovely canopies of Devil's Club with wasps nesting nearby, great crevasse-jumping, sparse campsites and of course the rocks that make Chugach famous, the kind that Moses would have loved to write on and then smash.

Jim Sayler and I and Jeff McCarthy (from Maine) headed up the trail on July 25th bound for the glacier and whatever climbs we might be able to do, and even though it was my fourth time I still managed to loose the trail in places.  We locked arms across the creek after the trail ran out, looking somewhat comical when our feet went numb.  We looked even more comical beating a path up the brush headwall to the right of the creek; three hours to do aquarter-mile.  A gravel campsite was the best we could do, a windy place at the foot of the ice where four years ago the wind had broken five out of eight VE 24 poles.  The next day we crossed the glacier and climbed a bank of steep dirt to reach a moraine and a small glacier sitting below Big Timber Peak (6745') and our objective, Peak 7240 (Devils Club Peak?).

From this glacier we crossed a bergschrund and kicked steps up a steep snow slope to reach the west ridge at 6000 feet. The ridge went easily up to a step at about 7000 feet where Jim and I contoured north across rotten slabs and Jeff remained true to the ridge. Eventually we met on the summit in perfect sunshine to find, as we had expected, no evidence of a previous ascent. We built a cairn, dropped in a register and set up a short rappel to get off the summit block. As we descended we found a nice scree gully on the south side of the ridge and used it to exit back to Hunter Creek Glacier and camp. We named the mountain Devil's Club Peak, because the Satanic Salad is, more than anything, responsible for keeping it virgin for so long.  Twelve hours round-trip.

Hunter Creek Glacier doesn't get a lot of visitors.  Of the larger drainages in the Western Chugach, Hunter Creek is most remote, and being outside the present-day boundary of Chugach State Park doesn't help advertise it much.  State Parks has its eye on the area as a logical addition to the Park, but for now it is in Native hands, and on two of my trips up there a fence has been across the trail.

In 1970 there was a short burst of climbing activity at the beginning of October of a competetive nature, I guess.  Steve Hackett had planned a trip to go up there with his brother, Jim.  They would come in from East Fork Eklutna River, taking a rather rigorous route over several high ridges to reach the glacier, do some exploring and continue out Hunter Creek.  Grace Hoeman, angry that she hadn't been invited and worried that they might grab a peak she intended to climb, decided to do a little speed-bagging.  On the day after the Hacketts left she flew into Lake George with a pilot of a supercub and proceeded to climb Mt. Palmer while he went hunting.  She bagged her summit, I assume he bagged whatever he after (regulations don't allow hunting the same day as flying), and they flew at the end of the day.  A very energetic day for Grace.

It might have been more amusing if Steve had actually climbed Palmer right afterwards, but