Pioneer Peak, August 5th, 2020

A week after my successful loop on the peaks north of Eagle River, I decided to take on another mountain I've been meaning to: Pioneer Peak. This behemoth rises 6000ft out of the Matsu Valley, and is a dominant feature of the Western Chugach as seen from the Valley, and I had been wanting to climb it for months. So I woke up around 4am, drove over, and started up from the trailhead just barely above sea level. God it was beautiful, and the hike up to the ridge around 5000ft was pretty and pretty uneventful. Once on the ridge, I got to do some of the best scrambling I'd done in Alaska, and got some delightful class 3 moves in toward the south summit. It was there where I stopped, however, as I knew I would need to do at least a class 4 for the north summit, and I judged it too much for my skill levels at the time. For some reason, I decided to run down from the ridge and in the process caused a foot injury that almost fucked up my plans to backpack in the Adirondacks later that month, but taking it nice and easy allowed me to recover enough to do that. There's a lesson here: if you're gonna start trailrunning, don't start in the middle of one of the hardest hikes you've ever done :P