A few days ago Stu and I had made plans to "do" Mt Willet on Thursday. This double peaked mountain is one of the "Big 3" in this area and all 3 are over 9000 ft elevation. Two other fellows we know well decided to join us for the day's excursion and so, accordingly, we all met at 6 am to make the drive to the trailhead.Mt Willet is across and up the Lake so the drive takes one north and around the end of the Lake and past the small settlement of Argenta and from there up another logging road (Salisbury FSR?) for 11 km. We were at the trailhead and ready to hike just before 8 am.
The trail goes through woods and up a narrow valley, steeply up and over another ridge and through still another valley to the SE ridge of Willet.
Alpine flowers were excellent and numerous stops were made to take pictures and debate what floral specimen we were looking at. Numerous nice camping sports as well presented themselves along the way. If only the approach wasn't so steep, I'd be more inclined to go there and camp for a few days...
We were 2 hours to the foot of the ascent ridge and another 1.5 hrs to the summit. Unfortunately, the forecasted sunny, clear day was cloudy and smoky with a cool breeze from the north. We thought the smoke was from fires in the Cariboo, way off to the NW. Consequently, views weren't very good and pictures of those views were even worse. Conditions didn't encourage us to lounge around on the summit, so after inhaling some food, we headed down, taking a detour to Heart Lake (more uphill and downhill) before heading back to the vehicle.
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