Trip report
Sep 13, 2017 — You can park at the standard McCullough Gulch Trail, but I parked further down because I car camped there. The McCullough Gulch Trailhead is at the spot the gravel road forks. Going left is the start of that trail and is still a road, but closed to vehicles.
Head up a grassy bowl past an old mine from the bend in the road, where I parked my car. Once out of the bowl, follow a fun Class 2/3 ridgeline with a mini knife-edge until a route off the ridge to the summit of Pacific Peak becomes visible and obvious. From the Pacific Peak summit, continue along its south ridge to Atlantic Peak (Class 2). From here, decide if you want to commit to Fletcher Peak's Class 4 ridge, which can easily be made into Class 5 if you're into that sort of craziness. If you decide the weather is going to hold out (it looked like it would for me, but oops), the going is loose and fun until you get to a pinnacle that has no easy way around it. From here, I headed to the east off the ridge for a hundred feet before scoping out a gully to return to the ridge, just past the Class 5 pinnacle. After gaining the ridge again with a Class 4 move or two, the ridge stays pretty consistently Class 3+/4 until you get past the final pinnacle and you can see the Class 2 summit ridge, a slope covered in terrible scree that eventually turns into a fun talus scramble. From Fletcher Peak's summit, head down its southeast ridge toward the lowest spot before the ridge starts to gain elevation again toward Quandary Peak. Though you could do Quandary Peak via its West Ridge, I already had, so I found a terrible dirty Class 2 gully that leads into McCullough Gulch. I scoped better gullies, but none seemed to look quite as reasonable. Once in the Gulch, I made a few detours to look at all the lakes before following a ridge down the center that avoided all of the swamps completely. At the end of this ridge, a nice grassy Class 2 slope leads down to the official McCullough Gulch Trail, which is pleasant but fairly crowded.