2 WA athletes trekked more than 120 miles of the North Cascades in less than a week

When Kaytlyn Gerbin starts scheming an adventure, it usually includes a lot of miles and a lot of vertical gain in a short amount of time. 

Gerbin, 33, of Issaquah, is no stranger to ultra-endurance feats. In 2019, she and Alex Borsuk became the first women to complete the Infinity Loop on Mount Rainier (two summits and a loop around the Wonderland Trail). In 2020, she won and set the course record on the 126-kilometer (about 78 miles) Transgrancanaria in Spain’s Canary Islands, and later that summer she smashed the women’s fastest known time (FKT) on Mount Rainier’s Wonderland Trail. This past August, she placed third in the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc, a 171-kilometer (106 miles) race in the French Alps.

After the Infinity Loop, Gerbin became smitten with the idea of mountain adventures that blend ultrarunning and endurance with technical skills. She started toying around with a “pie in the sky idea”: a North Cascades high route traverse.

The result, completed with fellow adventurer Jenny Abegg, was an epic adventure and an FKT earned over more than 120 miles and nearly 60,000 feet of elevation gain in less than a week hoofing it through the rugged North Cascades.

Gerbin envisioned linking up the previously established North Cascade high routes — the Redoubt-Whatcom High Route, North and South Pickets, Isolation Traverse, and Ptarmigan Traverse — to create a unique traverse of the North Cascades. 

“There are established high routes that people go after for FKTs in other parts of the country, but there wasn’t really anything like that in Washington or even in the PNW,” Gerbin said. “So I started looking at a map and wondered what the version of that could be here.”

Though a handful of teams had pieced these sections together on skis, there was not a known on-foot account of a continuous, uninterrupted push of this route since 2001.

In 1990, Don and Natala Goodman, now of Bellingham, traveled from Depot Creek in Canada to Downey Creek outside of Darrington, bagging 19 peaks in 28 days, in what they called the North Cascades Grand Tour. In August 2001, Gil Laas and Steve Wojnicki, both also of Bellingham, followed the Goodman route, finishing in a similar time. 

Skilled mountaineers can complete each individual traverse in about a week. Gerbin thought she could do the whole thing in seven days.

After Gerbin’s athlete sponsor, The North Face, accepted her project, all that was left to do was find the right partner.

As Gerbin researched the route, she realized she needed someone who shared her same enthusiasm for 100-mile-plus endurance efforts and also had “a good alpine head with an alpine and rock-climbing background.”

Abegg, 37, a skilled climber from Leavenworth, Chelan County, kept popping onto the radar. Abegg grew up backpacking with her family and discovered mountaineering in her mid-20s as a guide at a British Columbia-based summer camp. Later in her 20s, she got into rock climbing, and since 2019, she’s claimed 14 FKTs, most of which require navigational and climbing skills. 

Though the women had never met previously, Gerbin knew Abegg was the perfect fit when they realized they had narrowly missed one another in Patagonia in February 2022. They had both planned to attempt the FKT on La Vuelta al Hielo, a technical glacier traverse circling Argentina’s famed Fitz Roy Mountain, a miniature version of the North Cascades route. 

Gerbin joined North Face teammate Fernanda Maciel of Portugal to secure the female, supported FKT of the “U” point-to-point route, completing the traverse in just over 13 hours. When Abegg completed the full loop in 15 and a half, taking the solo female FKT, it was a clear sign that Abegg was The One. Gerbin made it her mission to get her on board with the North Cascades High Route.

“I was in from the get-go, though,” Abegg said. “We both agreed that it was important that we meet up first before committing to the adventure together. But I knew enough about Kaytlyn to know we’d be a good fit for each other and the idea she was proposing to me was so inspiring and exciting.”

In April 2022, they set up a “blind adventure date.” Hitting it off immediately, they committed to the traverse and spent the next several months planning and scouting.

As with just about any multiday endurance feat, there were setbacks. 

Late season’s snowpack pushed what was supposed to be a June effort to the end of July, encroaching precariously close to Gerbin’s peak training period for UTMB. 

Meanwhile, Abegg caught COVID-19 at the end of June, which took her out for three weeks. Her first activity back after being sick was the North Cascades High Route.

North Cascades National Park is one of the least-visited national parks in the country. Few roads cross through the mountainous terrain, leaving it widely inaccessible. As a result, the terrain is rugged and remote. The route Gerbin and Abegg would eventually follow began with the Ross Lake boat shuttle and ended off the Pacific Crest Trail near Stehekin, Chelan County, planned intentionally for aesthetically pleasing boat trips to start and finish.

Of the 124 miles the women would traverse, some 100 were off-trail alpine navigation over rough ground. The first four days featured very limited access points and the entire route required the “North Cascades’ finest bushwhacking,” glacier travel, snowfields, scree, boulder and talus fields, and scrambling. 

“Those first four days were just the two of us,” Gerbin said. “We didn’t see any signs of human life anywhere. We had no resupply and it was the most intense terrain of the whole thing, so we were really focused.

“There was no time where we could really relax. There were no bail options, so the only option was to keep moving.” 

The women quickly fell in sync, relying on each other’s strengths and meeting in the middle when they faced a climber/trail runner dilemma, as they navigated through long days over intense terrain. 

“You have to shift your mindset that even though you’re in your own backyard, you’re in such a spot where rescue might take awhile and to bring somebody out you might have to send somebody in,” Don Goodman said of the route he and his partner completed decades ago.

When Abegg and Gerbin met their support crew and photographer at Sourdough Trailhead off Highway 20 on Day 4, it felt like a “celebration.” Joined by their friends and film crew, the remainder of the route would become progressively easier, allowing them to relax on the easier terrain. Plus, there were baked goods to be had at the finish from the Stehekin Pastry Company. 

From sunup to sundown, over six days, 19 hours and 38 minutes, Gerbin and Abegg covered 123.6 miles and climbed 58,850 feet, becoming the first people on record to traverse the North Cascades High Route in this manner in so little time.

“We were both pretty floored that that amount of terrain could be covered that quickly,” Goodman said of the feat. “It’s definitely a different style, approach and mindset. It’s all about what you’re interested in. I wouldn’t be capable of even thinking about it.”

Uncertain which mode to set their watches at the start — this wasn’t exactly running nor mountaineering — the adventurers ultimately decided on “trail running,” though they ultimately ran infrequently. Gerbin and Abegg landed on calling this “ultraneering,” a cross between ultrarunning and mountaineering.

The feat may seem extreme, but in Washington, there’s always another adventurer looking to test that FKT.

“We’ve had multiple people contact us telling us that they’re interested in doing [this route], so it felt really validating to finish it,” Gerbin said. “In the moment, a lot of people don’t really understand, but I’m encouraged by the fact that there’s so much interest in people repeating it.”