Martin is a choss-pile east of Bonanza, with little to recommend it other than its being easy to find on a cloudy, rainy, snowy day. I had intended for it to be a “bonus” peak after Bonanza, but it became my main peak thanks to uncooperative weather.
After waking up early in the long, vague northern dawn, I warmed up with some morning glop, packed my pack, and headed up the trail toward Holden Lake under partly-cloudy skies.
Applying the previous day’s experience, I removed my pant-legs so only my shoes and socks would be completely soaked by the underbrush lining the trail. Thankful for the well-maintained and -used trail, I climbed out of Railroad Creek’s broad U-shaped valley, then reattached my pant-legs where the pine forest suppressed the bushes.
I encountered intermittent snow below the lake, and solid snowpack around the lake itself, which was surprisingly ice-free. It was drizzling by this point, and everything more than a few hundred feet above the lake was obscured by clouds.
The snow covering the talus, softened by the rain, was perfect for kicking steps. Above, a bit of tunneling up a stream through alders led to some falls, passed on the right via some wet 4th class rock, and, at last, the snowfield and glacier. Thoroughly soaked but not particularly cold, I sort of enjoyed the bushwhack; consciously treating it as another kind of climbing problem rather than a frustrating waste of time helps.
I found no register or cairn but, after seeing nothing higher in some brief thinnings in the clouds, decided I was at either the summit or the highest thing I would find, and returned to the glacier. In retrospect, I was actually at point 8598, a small knob at the end of Bonanza’s southeast ridge.
Reaching Martin’s summit, I found an 1930s register cylinder, and could actually see most of the surrounding terrain. Finding a descent east to an attractive snowfield and the Hildgard Pass trail blocked by walls of vertical choss, I returned partway down the ridge, then slid down a gully directly to Holden Lake. I jogged back to camp, found my “drying” clothes still damp, and curled back up in my tarp to figure out what to do next.
Hearing something coming along the trail, I expected more deer, and instead met an older Austrian (?) woman from Holden. She was both energetic and friendly, sitting down cross-legged in the leaves to talk about Holden and the surrounding area. I mentioned that I was thinking of trying to head cross-country up Big Creek to get to Fernow without crossing the construction zone, and she replied that Big Creek was a good ski tour, but probably a rough bushwhack. Seeing my grimly, blandly utilitarian camp and cuisine, she mentioned that meals in the Holden dining hall was reasonably-priced and open to campers. As I was to learn, this woman was not just a friendly passer-by, but something like Our Lady of the Dirtbags. After her departure, I read in my damp tarp-cave until it got acceptably dark, hoping for better weather on the next day’s trip to Fernow.