Morrell Mountain and Lookout

Yarrow wildflowers on the ridgeline

Coming down to our car

The route and peak

Katie on top

This was one of those "check-off" the list things for Katie.

She's doing 20 mountains in 2020 and this looked like an easy one in an area (Seeley Lake) that she likes and frequents.

There's not much to it.  It's about 500 feet in elevation gain from the parking area below Morrell Mountain Lookout cabin, and about 1.5 miles one-way to its 8,169 feet top.

I have to say that the climb was easy, and that the drive to the parking area up an 8-mile, mostly one-lane road that gained over 3,000 feet was more heart-thumping.  I was a wreck when we got out of the car and remained that way thinking about the trip down and whether we might encounter any traffic coming up the road.  The small turnouts with precipitous drops offered me little consolation.

In fact, we did encounter a Jeep coming up, but luckily it was on a wide switchback.

Unfortunately, we had a fire-haze day that obscured vistas from the top, but the glaciated and snow-dappled Mission Mountains to the west and the town of Seeley Lake far below were exciting views.  We were on the Swan Crest and followed an unofficial climber's trail to the top of Morrell Peak and got good views of the Swans and across the Bob Marshall and Scapegoat wilderness areas.

I was particularly excited to see Red Mountain I had climbed early in the week and the Scapegoat to Flint mountains plateau clearly from on top.  It was fun to walk along the narrow ridge and see the maroon cliff bands on that ridge and to ponder the fire-scarred and ghost-trees from a fairly recent forest fire in the area below us.  I don't know how Morrell Lookout cabin survived this.

We didn't visit the lookout because a gate and sign warned us not to because of the Covid pandemic.  But, we had nice views of it from the ridge.

I had to think how crazy it was that a lookout was perched so high and about the masterful job of engineering the road to it.