Trip report
Jul 27, 2025 — Middle Palisade is a prominent 14er in California’s Sierra Nevada, part of the rugged Palisades subrange. It’s best known for its standard route, which involves a sustained Class 3 crawl up the northeast face. The approach to Middle Palisade requires route-finding across talus fields, though much of the route follows the Big Pine Creek Trail and subsequent social trails.
We started at the Big Pine Creek Trailhead, and after an initial walk along an old dirt road, the trail eased us into the day with desert scrub and hot sun. I might be a bad influence on my friends since my lazy ass prefers late starts and somehow I’ve managed to get everyone on board with the idea.
Soon we entered the John Muir Wilderness. The trail wound up switchbacks, brush giving way to granite. Above Willow Lake the trail briefly flattened, and looming ahead we could see Middle Palisade. Knowing how much vertical gain still remained made the mountain’s visible closeness almost comical.
We dropped into a green basin that looked idyllic until we felt mosquitoes biting us. The trail pitched upward again toward Brainerd Lake, a destination that marked the end of the official trail. Finding the social trail toward Finger Lake above took a moment, but eventually we located it as it led up a steep rise through a boulder field and reached the turquoise waters of Finger Lake with Middle Palisade above.
We wrapped around Finger Lake and gained a broad moraine. Cairns helped up the boulder-strewn ascent, but mostly we just kept to the crest of the moraine. Looking back, we could trace our entire route all the way to the trailhead, which made the effort feel strangely minimized and a bit disheartening. We reached a viewpoint up toward Middle Palisade, an indicator that it was almost time to leave the humped moraine and traverse to Middle Palisade Glacier.
The glacier was in a sad state, but that also meant more rock and less snow travel, so we moved quickly to the mountain’s base. From afar it looked like a sheer wall with no climbable line, and only once we were right up against it did the route reveal itself. It begins from a point off the perimeter of the glacier and up a ramp of loose boulders. This ramp led to the base of a red chute. We plopped on our helmets and approached the sketchy-looking feature. I crawled upward cautiously, haunted by too many desert choss piles, testing every hold. Surprisingly, I had no issue whatsoever on the way back down later. The looseness and exposure had me claiming this section Class 3+. I clawed my way up into the sunlit granite above.
Now the real fun began. Above the red chute stretched one of the longest, most delightful Class 3 scrambles I’ve ever done, characterized by hundreds of feet of wonderful Sierra granite, all positive holds and endless options. We zig-zagged, choosing our own lines, regrouping every few moves. It’s probably safe to say that when in doubt, keep left. The exposure never disappeared, but the flow and joy of the movement made it easy to forget the nerves.
Near the top, the route funneled into a narrow chute. Instead of taking the sketchy direct line, we scrambled left onto a broken face and gained the base of the summit block. A direct move up the block goes at Class 5, but a friendlier option wraps around from the south. From the summit, the jagged Palisade Crest rose before us and the Sierra stretched endlessly in every direction.