Heather Creek, Deception-Royal Basins Loop (Fricaba Traverse)

After much anticipation, last weekend I finally got to do the Heather Creek, Deception and Royal Basins Traverse that Ancient Ambler wrote about in this trip report a few years back. I went with my friend Doug from the Peninsula Wilderness Club and we made a loop out of it. We left Silverdale around 8:30AM on Friday the 13th and took our time getting out to the trailhead.
The trail is in much better condition than when AA wrote his report, and a new bridge has been installed over Heather Creek replacing the damaged one. We camped at the the sole camp spot at the end of the Heather Creek trail. After setting up camp we headed up the avalanche slope that AA describes in his report to do a little scouting out of the terrain we would experience the next day. The terrain was pretty steep and full of marmot holes, but probably the best route up as others have also mentioned (only found one mountain strawberry on the way up). After scouting the route, we headed back down to camp and crawled in the tent early to escape the ravenous mosquitoes.

The next morning after breaking camp, we headed back up the slope. I would say the first 5 or 6 hundred feet of elevation is the hardest. After this, the route up to Fricaba Basin and Pass is fairly straight-forward with only a few steepish scramble areas. Fricaba Basin was very pretty and looked mostly untouched. Really nice place. At Fricaba Pass, we had lunch and scouted the way ahead through Deception Basin. As noted in another trip report, Deception Pass is just to the right and slightly higher than the low spot on the ridge that you would expect to be Deception Pass. This was good info to have since I had never been through here before. We didn't drop all the way into the lower basin, nor did we climb any peaks, this was strictly a traverse. We decided to try to keep as high as we could and sidehill around to Deception Pass. This worked for a while but cliff bands impeded our progress in a few spots so we still had to drop down. We hiked across some of the upper Deception Basin which was still covered in several feet of snow. Deception Basin is a really desolate place with the exception of the lower basin that is a verdant green with a stream ambling throught it. Looks like a nice little place to camp. Eventually we made our way to the base of the climb going up to Deception Pass. This portion of the trip was easily the steepest with the exception of the avalanche slope near the beginning of the day by Heather Creek. We made our way to the pass and stopped for a break and a snack. We weighed our options, hike out or stay another night. We had a permit good for Saturday night at Royal Lake but the skeeters were sure to be hungry and possibly worse than at Heather Creek. One of us said something about cheeseburgers and that was all it took for us to decide to hike out. We left Deception Pass around 4:00 and arrived at the car right at 7:00PM. We were really craving a greasy cheeseburger so we hustled to Sequim to get to Tootsie's drive-thru burger joint before they (possibly) closed at 8:00 PM. We got our burgers!