Trail to the saddle
From Emerald Lake there are two possible routes to the summit. One can turn south and climb up the bed of the glacier to the south saddle, or one can turn northwest and skirt Pica Cirque to a lower saddle. I climbed the glacier the first few times I made it to the summit. It's a hard climb with no good trail. The northwest route is much easier to follow. So today I bend my steps northward around the base of the peak and head for the lower saddle.
Emerald Lake meadow and its sister Pica Cirque are high alpine meadows full of bushes and wildflowers. But above them nothing much grows on the mountain but patches of green-grey and rust-red lichen. The landscape is a tumbled wilderness of sharp-edged boulders.