48°31′N 120°39′WWASHINGTON PASS QUADRANGLEELEV. 5,477 FTCONTOUR INTERVAL 40 FT
Climbing
Washington

Rock and mountain climbing in Washington State, mapped: the crags, the peaks and the record of who first climbed them.

Enchantments·Reference entry

Early Winters Spires at 5,477 Feet

Snow-covered slopes lead up to the jagged rock spires of Early Winters Spires
South Early Winter Spire, at 7,807 feet, is the highest of the four towers above the pass.
Photo: Early Winters Spires and Liberty Bell · Wikimedia Commons

The Four Towers Nobody Climbed in Order

The Early Winters Spires rise above Washington Pass on the North Cascades Highway, four granitic towers grouped so close to Liberty Bell Mountain that the highway pull-out frames them together in a single glance. Liberty Bell draws the eye first — it is the more dramatic silhouette — but the Spires stand immediately to its north, and their collective summit elevation of 5,477 feet by Forest Service survey places them squarely in the same cirque of high metamorphic and granitic terrain that defines this corner of the Cascades.

The first-ascent sequence across the group does not follow the order a roadside observer would guess. Liberty Bell was climbed by Fred Beckey and his party in 1946, a date that anchors the whole Washington Pass record. The Early Winters Spires, despite being equally visible and only marginally less imposing, were not fully accounted for in the first-ascent record until later seasons. The reason is structural rather than motivational: the Spires present routes that require committing approaches on the north-facing aspects, where the rock stays cold and the lines are less obvious from below than the clean south face of Liberty Bell.

Chronology

  1. 1946Liberty Bell Mountain first climbed by Beckey's party; Washington Pass record begins
  2. 1968North Cascades National Park Act formalizes access and documentation framework for the corridor
  3. Post-1968Early Winters Spires routes enter a more regularized first-ascent record
Mount Rainier from Paradise, the Muir snowfield with a line of climbers ascending toward Camp Muir
Camp Muir sits at 10,188 feet, roughly two-thirds of the way to a summit first reached in 1870.Photo: Paradise Glacier 8171 · Wikimedia Commons

The formation sits within North Cascades National Park jurisdiction and the broader Washington Pass corridor, a zone that the North Cascades National Park Act of 1968 ↗ brought under federal management. That administrative boundary matters to the first-ascent record because access and documentation practices shifted once the park service had formal authority over the terrain. Routes climbed before 1968 exist in a patchwork of club journals and Beckey's own notes; routes established after that date entered a more regularized system of record.

Fred Beckey's three-volume Cascade Alpine Guide, published through The Mountaineers Books, remains the primary documentary source for first ascents across the Washington Pass area, including the Early Winters Spires. Beckey's methodical cataloguing of the range ↗ gave the Spires their place in the record alongside Liberty Bell, even where the climbing history of individual towers arrived years apart.

What the highway pull-out cannot show is the sequence. Visibility from a road creates a natural assumption that the obvious peaks were climbed first, in order of prominence. At Washington Pass, as across much of the North Cascades, the actual record is more oblique — shaped by approach difficulty, aspect, and the priorities of the small parties who worked through the range tower by tower, season by season.

Leavenworth, the town at the mouth of the Icicle; Snow Creek Wall lies four miles up the canyon.Photo: Main street in Leavenworth, Washington · Wikimedia Commons
Snow Creek Wall seen across the Icicle Creek drainage, the wall's full height visible above the treeline

Key figures

  • Elevation of South Early Winter Spire — 7,807 feet
  • Liberty Bell first ascent — Fred Beckey, 1946
  • North Cascades National Park established — 1968
  • Primary documentary source — Beckey's Cascade Alpine Guide, The Mountaineers Books
Mount BakerMount BakerMount ShuksanMount ShuksanLiberty BellLiberty BellEarly Winter SpiresEarly Winter SpiresForbidden PeakForbidden PeakDarringtonDarringtonThree O'Clock RockThree O'Clock RockMount ErieMount ErieIndexIndexGlacier PeakGlacier PeakPrusik PeakPrusik PeakSnow Creek WallSnow Creek WallCastle RockCastle RockPeshastin PinnaclesPeshastin PinnaclesMount StuartMount StuartExit 38Exit 38Frenchman CouleeFrenchman CouleeRoyal ColumnsRoyal ColumnsMount RainierMount Rainier
Where it is
Terracotta marks the places carried in Enchantments; the triangle is this entry. Plotted from real coordinates.

The first-ascent sequence across the group does not follow the order a roadside observer would guess.

The Liberty Bell group from the Washington Pass overlook, the four towers in profile against a clear sky
Liberty Bell, Concord Tower, Lexington Tower and the Early Winter Spires, seen from the State Route 20 overlook that did not exist until 1972.Photo: Washington Pass Observation Site 04 - Liberty Bell Mountain · Wikimedia Commons
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