Went hiking with Howie again. Decided to bag a peak before I went to california, and he went to italy. So we headed up to Ferguson canyon and reached the trailhead at about 8:15 AM. I had heard that the river was over flowing, so I thought "Hey, I'll wear Chacos". Indeed the river was over flowing, and when the river was over taking the trail, and at crossings the chacos came in very handy. However, overall it was a bad idea. My feet hurt for days afterward. No blisters, but the straps rubbed my foot raw on the top of my left foot by my big toe. Anyway, We got kindaoff route near the halway mark. I still don't know how we thought it was the right way, but we ended up going up some scree covered granite slabs on the south side of the canyon. There was a trail after so we were confused when it up and ended. I pulled out my map to see that we were supposed to be on the other side of the river... and canyon. So, we decided to bushwack it down the slopes untill we reached the river. After decending a good ways, we reached a good cliff. A good test of route finding skills as I was able to lead us down a class 3 scramble with minimum exposure. That dropped us right by the river. After walking up stream a few hundred feet, we looked across the river and saw the trail.. with a sturdy log to cross on. Perfect. Went across and continued up the trail. It went steeply and rockily through the canyon, but after a while we reached the upper meadow. From here the trail completely dissapeered. We decided to go up the west ridge scramble and so we made our way toward the ridge. The meadow was heavily forested so we couldn't really see where to get on the ridge. we guessed and went for it. After a short scramble we topped out on a false summit (it didn't feel right anyway). After a few more false summits and a half hour more class 3-4 scrambling we topped out (12:00 PM). We sat on the summit, looked in the geocache, signed the log, ate lunch, and headed back down. We had a water shortage so we made haste trying to find any stream we could tap. We found it a third of a mile back down. After getting water we stopped only breifly a few times, and mostly just ran down the trail. We reached the car at around 2:45.
